WASHINGTON - As Iraq's 12,000-page weapons declaration arrived at United Nations headquarters yesterday, the U.S. government scrambled to negotiate full access to it while trying to make sure that some members of the Security Council receive a censored version, U.S. and U.N. officials said.
By late yesterday, a compromise had been reached that would allow the five permanent members of the Security Council - the United States, Britain, Russia, China and France, all of which have nuclear weapons - to receive unedited copies of the declaration, administration and Security Council officials said.
But before handing the report over to the 10 elected members of the Security Council, officials will expunge details that they fear could help other countries make nuclear, chemical or biological weapons and ballistic missiles, sources said.
The diplomatic dance over who will be permitted to analyze Iraq's complete documentation seemed to foreshadow struggles between the Bush administration and its uneasy partners on the Security Council.
Among the tensions pointed out by experts yesterday was whether the United States and Britain can share intelligence that could help inspectors find evidence contrary to Iraq's documentation without fear that the information would be leaked and blow the cover of intelligence sources.
On Saturday, one day before the U.N. deadline, Iraq handed over a dossier of 11,807 pages, 352 pages of supplements and a stack of computer disks. A U.N. official carried the material to Cyprus, the base for the U.N. weapons inspectors, and then to Vienna, headquarters of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
The nuclear documents will be analyzed in Vienna, while the rest of Iraq's declaration will be scrutinized at U.N. headquarters in New York, where they arrived last night.
But there was confusion about how the most sensitive disclosures, if any, were to be handled and by whom.
A U.N. official said that the head of the atomic agency, Mohammed ElBaradei, had come under pressure from a number of Security Council members, including the United States, that wanted copies of the nuclear documents. But he resisted making them available because of concerns that details could be leaked and serve as a primer for other nations, the official said.
"Of course he's under pressure," the U.N. official said. "Every day there's been contact. The last we heard officially was that IAEA would sanitize the nuclear declaration, which would then go to the Security Council."
In Washington, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell spent much of the weekend on the telephone, speaking with diplomats about how the sensitive documents would be handled. Still, as of midday yesterday, a senior administration official said, "It's not decided yet who will get it when and in what edition."
Meanwhile, at a news conference in Baghdad yesterday, Amar Saadi, who identified himself as a British-educated chemist and one of many advisers to President Saddam Hussein, bristled at American descriptions of the declarations as "a telephone book" designed to bury the truth in paperwork.
He said the documentation was extensive because the U.N. resolution required Iraq to identify all dual-use technologies and facilities. That means Iraq had to list every factory and facility that could be used to make nuclear, chemical or biological weapons, Saadi said.
Saadi appeared to confirm Western assessments that Iraq was close to making an atomic bomb in 1990.
"We have the complete documentations, from design to all the other things," he said. "We haven't reached the final assembly of a bomb nor tested it. It's for the IAEA to judge how close we were."
Saadi said the declaration was "comprehensive and truthful," and he demanded that the Bush administration produce any evidence to the contrary.
U.S. and U.N. officials and former weapons inspectors said it could take days or weeks to analyze the contents of the declaration. The documents will be examined for inconsistencies and omissions and checked against a list of unresolved issues left by the U.N. inspection team that left Iraq in 1998.
Sonni Efron, Maggie Farley and Alissa J. Rubin are reporters for the Los Angeles Times, a Tribune Publishing newspaper.