A former U-2 pilot believes the restarted reconnaissance flights over Iraq could provide convincing evidence of violations of United Nations resolutions despite Baghdad’s requirement that it be alerted 48 hours ahead of any takeoff.
U-2 flights in the 1990s, operating under similar restrictions, found “smoking gun” evidence that Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction in violation of U.N. Resolution 687, said Cholene Espinoza by telephone from Amman, Jordan, where she is traveling as a military correspondent for the Talk Radio News Service.
 U-2 reconnaissance plane |
“I have the utmost confidence in the U-2,” she told WorldNetDaily. “It found the missiles in Cuba, it found the mass gravesites that justified military action in the Bosnian conflict, and it’s found weapons of mass destruction before in Iraq. I think it can do it again.”
Iraq had objected to the flights, which began Monday, insisting that it could not guarantee the plane’s safety if it flew at the same time the U.S. and British conducted air patrols in the “no-fly zones” of northern and southern Iraq. The Iraqi officials claimed the reconnaissance craft could be mistakenly targeted by anti-aircraft fire unless the warplanes were grounded.
Espinoza asserts that this contention is “bogus” for two reasons.
“One is the U-2 is at 70,000+ feet, and those [warplanes] are at half that altitude, if even that,” she said. “Two is that they are over an entirely different part of the country; they are not in the same airspace.”
Espinoza, who flew Iraq missions for the U.N. from 1993 to 1995, was only the second woman, out of three, to pilot the U-2. She logged more than 200 hours of flight time over Iraq and Bosnia and now is a pilot for United Airlines and a captain in the Air Force Reserves.
She has a copy of a letter sent 10 years ago by Hans Blix’s predecessor as chief weapons inspector, Rolf Ekeus, thanking then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell for use of the U-2s, which had found the “smoking gun” evidence.
The former reconnaissance pilot emphasized, however, that her contacts at the Pentagon have told her that the kind of incontrovertible evidence found during the Cuban missile crisis should not be expected.
 Aerial reconnaissance photo |
“But it’s my hope that we can at least get some solid evidence that the rest of the world buys before any military action is taken,” she said.
In fact, the task of UNMOVIC, the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, is not to hunt for weapons, but to verify what Iraq declares and then to provide monitoring based on that declaration.
Last week, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Iraq’s willingness to allow the flights and other proposed measures that seemed to suggest increased cooperation were not worth “getting excited about.”
The most recent U.N. resolution, 1441, “didn’t ask Iraq to make steps; the resolution asked Iraq for full, immediate and active cooperation. We know what that looks like; we’ve seen it elsewhere,” said Boucher, in apparent reference to disarmament by South Africa and Ukraine.
Flexible flyer
Espinoza said the U-2’s flexibility, its ability to “wait for something to happen,” gives it an advantage over satellite reconnaissance.
“It can loiter, it can change course, it can go back and hit another target of opportunity again, whereas the satellite – it’s one pass, and that’s it,” she said.
Photos presented by Colin Powell to the U.N. Security Council earlier this month as evidence of a chemical weapons site, illustrate the limitations of satellite imagery, she said.
“Hans Blix gets up a few days later and says, ‘Well, this could have been just regular routine cleaning up of the area,’ or whatever,” she said. “If it had been the U-2, you would have had a collection of photos over that site for a period of time.”
She noted that on one mission in the 1990s, she spent the entire day over Baghdad.
The U-2 has an edge over drones as well, Espinoza said. The unmanned craft are not as reliable and have been shot down or have crashed over Iraq.
“If [Saddam] were to shoot down a U-2, as he has attempted to do in the past, even the most reluctant members of Security Council would have to give a yes vote to the military solution,” she said.
Nevertheless, the threat remains of “either Saddam Hussein losing command and control and someone getting trigger-happy, or actually ordering an attack,” she said. During her two-years of missions the danger came “in ebbs and flows.”
“Saddam Hussein typically would behave himself right up until sanction review, and then inevitably the sanction review wouldn’t go his way, and he would threaten to shoot down the U-2,” she said. “So occasionally you would delay a mission, or cancel a mission, based on a threat.”
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