Scott Ritter

William Scott Ritter Jr. (born July 15, 1961) is an American former United States Marine Corps intelligence officer, former United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) weapons inspector, author, and commentator.

Ritter was a junior military analyst during Operation Desert Storm. He served as a member of UNSCOM overseeing the disarmament of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq from 1991 to 1998, from which he resigned in protest. Later he became a critic of the Iraq War and United States foreign policy in the Middle East. In recent years, he has been a regular contributor to Russian state media outlets RT and Sputnik. He has visited Russia in support of Russia since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In June 2024, Ritter claimed that US authorities seized his passport and prevented him from visiting Russia.

In 2011, Ritter was convicted of several criminal offenses after engaging in sexually explicit online activity with a police officer who was posing as a 15-year-old girl.

Early and personal life

The son of an Air Force officer and a military nurse, Ritter was born into a military family in 1961 in Gainesville, Florida. He graduated from Kaiserslautern American High School in Kaiserslautern west of Mannheim, Germany in 1979. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He studied the history of the Soviet Union there and received departmental honors. The couple married in 1991

Arrests and conviction for sex offenses

Ritter was the subject of two law enforcement sting operations in 2001. He was charged in June 2001 with trying to set up a meeting with an undercover police officer posing as a 16-year-old girl. He was charged with a misdemeanor crime of "attempted endangerment of the welfare of a child". The charge was dismissed and the record was sealed after he completed six months of pre-trial probation.

Ritter was arrested again in November 2009 over communications with a police decoy he met on an Internet chat site. Police said that he exposed himself, via a web camera, after the officer repeatedly identified himself as a 15-year-old girl. Ritter rejected a plea bargain and was found guilty of all but the criminal attempt count in county court in Rochester, New York on April 14, 2011. In October 2011, he was sentenced to one and a half to five and a half years in prison. He was sent to Laurel Highlands state prison in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, in March 2012 and paroled in September 2014.

Passport seizure

In June 2024, US authorities seized Ritter's passport and prevented him from visiting Russia. Vladimir Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that "details" about the situation were not clear. Peskov also said that restricting the travel of former intelligence agents "is practiced in almost all countries in relation to former intelligence officers" and that if Ritter was removed from the flight to stop him from speaking in Russia, then it was part of a "frenzied campaign to prevent U.S. citizens from establishing at least some contacts with Russia".

Career

Military background

In 1980, Ritter served in the U.S. Army as a private. In May 1984, he was commissioned as an intelligence officer in the United States Marine Corps. He served in this capacity for about 12 years. He was the lead analyst for the Marine Corps Rapid Deployment Force concerning the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iran–Iraq War. His academic work focused on the Basmachi resistance movement in Soviet Central Asia during the 1920s and 1930s, and on the Basmachi commanders Faizal Maksum and Ibrahim Bek.

During Desert Storm (1991), as a Marine captain, he served as a ballistic missile intelligence analyst under General Norman Schwarzkopf. Ritter filed multiple internal reports challenging Schwarzkopf's claim that the US had destroyed "as many as 16" of Iraq's estimated 20 mobile Scud missile launchers, arguing that they could not be confirmed. In 1992 Ritter was quoted in a New York Times op-ed saying "No mobile Scud launchers were destroyed during the war."

UN Weapons inspector

Ritter worked as a weapons inspector for the United Nations Special Commission from 1991 to 1998, which was charged with finding and destroying all weapons of mass destruction and WMD-related manufacturing capabilities in Iraq. He was the chief inspector in fourteen of more than thirty inspection missions in which he participated.

Ritter was among a group of UNSCOM weapons inspectors which regularly took Lockheed U-2 imagery to Israel for analysis, as UNSCOM was not getting sufficient analysis assistance from the United States and the United Kingdom. That was not authorized by UNSCOM, the U-2 jet had been loaned to UNSCOM and caused him to be subjected to criticism and investigation by U.S. authorities. Iraq protested about information being given to Israel.

Operation Mass Appeal

Beginning in December 1997, Ritter, with the approval of UNSCOM head Richard Butler and other top UNSCOM leaders, began to supply the UK's foreign intelligence service MI6 with documents and briefings on UNSCOM's findings to be used for MI6's propaganda effort dubbed "Operation Mass Appeal": "I was approached by the British intelligence service, which I had, again, a long relationship with, of an official nature, to see if there was any information in the archives of UNSCOM that could be handed to the British, so that they could in turn work it over, determine its veracity, and then seek to plant it in media outlets around the world, in an effort to try to shape the public opinion of those countries, and then indirectly, through, for instance, a report showing up in the Polish press, shape public opinion in Great Britain and the United States. I went to Richard Butler with the request from the British. He said that he supported this, and we initiated a cooperation that was very short-lived. The first reports were passed to the British sometime in February of 1998. There was a detailed planning meeting in June of 1998, and I resigned in August of 1998.[...] This is an operation—Operation Mass Appeal, that had been going on prior to UNSCOM being asked to be the source of particular data, and it's an operation that continued after my resignation."

When the United States and the UN Security Council failed to take action against Iraq for their ongoing failure to cooperate fully with inspectors (a breach of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1154), Ritter resigned from the United Nations Special Commission on August 26, 1998. In his letter of resignation, Ritter said that the Security Council's reaction to Iraq's decision earlier that month to suspend co-operation with the inspection team made a mockery of the disarmament work. Ritter later said in an interview, that he resigned from his role as a United Nations weapons inspector over inconsistencies between United Nations Security Council Resolution 1154 and how it was implemented: "The investigations had come to a standstill, were making no effective progress, and in order to make effective progress, we really needed the Security Council to step in a meaningful fashion and seek to enforce its resolutions that we're not complying with." According to him Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright had supposedly "blocked more inspections in 1997 than Saddam Hussein did," a charge which Albright disputed.

During the testimony on September 3, 1998, Ritter was asked by then-Senator Joe Biden about his position on inspections, which Biden criticized as "confrontation-based policy." According to Barton Gellman, Biden questioned if the inspector was trying to "appropriate the power 'to decide when to pull the trigger' of military force against Iraq," with Biden saying that the Secretary of State would also have to consider the opinion of allies, the United Nations Security Council and public opinion, before any potential intervention in Iraq. Later on, Biden stated that the decision was "above [Ritter's] pay grade."

Reception as weapons inspector

Butler, Ritter's former UNSCOM boss, said that Ritter "wasn't prescient" in his predictions about WMDs, saying, "When he was the 'Alpha Dog' inspector, then by God, there were more weapons there, and we had to go find them a contention for which he had inadequate evidence. When he became a peacenik, then it was all complete B.S., start to finish, and there were no weapons of mass destruction... that also was a contention for which he had inadequate evidence." However, in his 1999 book Endgame, Ritter says that he was the one who had originally pushed for the fateful inspection of the Ba'ath party headquarters over the doubts of Butler, his boss, and also planned to use 37 inspectors. It was temporarily canceled because Iraq broke off cooperation in August 1998.

Commentary in the post-inspection period

right|thumb|Ritter speaks at SUNY New Paltz on March 16, 2006

In Endgame: Solving the Iraq Problem — Once and For All, Ritter reiterated that Iraq had obstructed the work of inspectors and attempted to hide and preserve essential elements for restarting WMD programs at a later date. However, he also expressed frustration at alleged attempts by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to infiltrate UNSCOM and use the inspectors as a means of gathering intelligence with which to pursue regime change in Iraq–a violation of the terms under which UNSCOM operated, and the very rationale the Iraqi government had given in restricting the inspector's activities in 1998. In the book's conclusion, he criticized the U.S. policy of containment in the absence of inspections as inadequate to prevent Iraq's re-acquisition of WMD's in the long term. Ritter also rejected the notion of removing Saddam Hussein's regime by force. Instead, he advocated a policy of diplomatic engagement, leading to gradual normalization of international relations with Iraq in return for diplomatic recognition of Kuwait, Kurdish autonomy and de-escalation of tensions with Israel.

Ritter again promoted a conciliatory approach toward Iraq in the 2000 documentary In Shifting Sands: The Truth About UNSCOM and the Disarming of Iraq, which he wrote and directed. The film is about the history of the UNSCOM investigations through interviews and video footage of inspection missions. In the film, Ritter argues that Iraq is a "defanged tiger" and that the inspections were successful in eliminating significant Iraqi WMD capabilities. (For more see below under "Documentary".)

In 2002, Ritter traveled to Iraq to address the Iraqi Parliament as a private citizen. He told the parliament that the U.S. was about to make an "historical mistake" and urged it to allow inspections to resume.

Commentary on Iraq's lack of WMDs

Despite identifying as a Republican and having voted for George W. Bush in 2000, by 2002, Ritter was an outspoken critic of the Bush administration's claims that Iraq possessed significant WMD stocks or manufacturing capabilities, the primary rationale given for the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Prior to the war, Ritter said that the U.S. and British governments were using the presence of WMD's in Iraq as a political excuse for war.

Later statements on Iraq

In February 2005, writing on Al Jazeera's website, Ritter wrote that the "Iraqi resistance" is a "genuine grassroots national liberation movement," and "History will eventually depict as legitimate the efforts of the Iraqi resistance to destabilize and defeat the American occupation forces and their imposed Iraqi collaborationist government." In 2012, Ritter said that the U.S. was "bankrupt, morally and fiscally, because of this war. The United States is the laughingstock of the world". According to The Washington Times, his documentary was partially financed by Iraqi American businessman Shakir al Khafaji. Al-Khafaji pleaded guilty to multiple felony charges in 2004 for his involvement in the U.N. Oil-for-Food scandal.

Ritter said that there was no quid pro quo with Al-Khafaji and he told Al-Khafaji the financing "can have no connection to the Iraqi government". Ritter was asked "how he would characterize anyone suggesting that Mr. Khafaji was offering allocations in [his] name", he replied: "I'd say that person's a __ liar... and tell him to come over here so I can kick his _."

Ritter's book Target Iran: The Truth About the White House's Plans for Regime Change was published in 2006. Nathan Guttman in his review for The Forward said Ritter accused the "pro-Israel lobby of dual loyalty and 'outright espionage'". Ritter said that Israel was pushing the Bush administration into war with Iran.

Russian invasion of Ukraine

In April 2022, shortly after the start of the Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Ritter tweeted that the National Police of Ukraine was responsible for the Bucha massacre and U.S. President Joe Biden was a "war criminal" for "seeking to shift blame for the Bucha murders" to Russia. Ritter apparently had not commented previously on Ukraine, or Russia. His strongly pro-Russian position quickly attracted negative international attention. He compared Ukraine to a "rabid dog" which needed to be shot. He compared the treatment of Russians under Ukrainian law to Nazi Germany's treatment of Jews. In October 2022, he posted a provocative tweet about Bucha, "Bucha was a war crime, Ukraine did it", to test the reaction of Twitter.

In July 2022, the Ukrainian Center for Countering Disinformation included Ritter on a list of what it called Russian propagandists. In April 2022 and April 2023 Ritter said that Russia was winning the war. American government-owned news outlet Polygraph.info wrote that Ritter's claims about Russia winning the war and about the Bucha massacre were false.

In January 2024, Ritter visited Chechnya, addressing thousands of Chechen fighters in a central square in Grozny, the capital. BBC journalist Francis Scarr called it "one of the most surreal moments of the war yet.[...] Scott Ritter has turned up in Chechnya and spoken in broken Russian (some of which I couldn't make out) to thousands of Ramzan Kadyrov's fighters about his efforts to strengthen the 'friendship between Chechnya and America'." In his speech, Ritter again repeated his belief that Russia will win its war with Ukraine. Kadyrov called his public statement "trolling" and said that it had not been serious. Later in January 2024, Ritter arrived in the Russian-occupied Kherson Oblast region in Ukraine, guarded by GRU agents, and spoke with collaborationist governor Vladimir Saldo. The Kyiv Post denounced Ritter's visit as "illegal" due to the lack of Ukrainian consent.

Selected bibliography

Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika: Arms Control and the End of the Soviet Union, Clarity Press, 2022,
Scorpion King: America's Suicidal Embrace of Nuclear Weapons from FDR to Trump (Paperback), Clarity Press, 2020; 2nd revised edition,
Deal of the Century: How Iran Blocked the West's Road to War (Paperback), Clarity Press, 2017,
Dangerous Ground: America's Failed Arms Control Policy, from FDR to Obama (Hardcover), 2009
Waging Peace: The Art of War for the Antiwar Movement, Nation Books, 2007,
Target Iran: The Truth About the White House's Plans for Regime Change (Hardcover), Nation Books, 2006,
Iraq Confidential: The Untold Story of the Intelligence Conspiracy to Undermine the UN and Overthrow Saddam Hussein (Hardcover), Foreword by Seymour Hersh, Nation Books, 2006,
Frontier Justice: Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Bushwhacking of America Context Books, 2003,
War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know (with William Rivers Pitt). Context Books, 2002,
Endgame: Solving the Iraq Problem — Once and For All (Hardcover) Simon & Schuster, 1999, ; (paperback) Diane Pub Co, 2004,