Baghdad, Iraq ? Three Iraqi arms experts gave private interviews to U.N. monitors Friday on the eve of a pivotal visit by the two chief weapons inspectors, who will demand greater cooperation from Baghdad to stave off war.

Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei, who were due here today, said they took as a hopeful sign Iraq’s decision a day earlier to grant the first such unmonitored interview.

The three new interviews were part of a flurry of activity by the Iraqi leadership Friday as President Bush courted the leaders of France and China in an uphill struggle to win U.N. backing for war with Iraq.

“The U.N. Security Council has got to make up its mind soon as to whether or not its word means anything,” Bush said.

Bush spoke by phone with French President Jacques Chirac and Chinese President Jiang Zemin. He told Jiang that “time was of the essence in dealing with Iraq” and that “the credibility of the United Nations was at stake,” spokesman Ari Fleischer said.

But France and China pressed more inspections.

The United Nations confirmed the new interviews late Friday, saying inspectors interviewed a senior scientist, a missile expert and a chemical engineer without the presence of Iraqi witnesses. Their names were not released.

There was no comment from the three Iraqis who were interviewed, and the Iraqi Foreign Ministry simply reported the sessions without comment.

However, Sinan Abdel-Hassan, the biologist who gave the first interview on Thursday, told reporters he had agreed to talk of his own free will to deprive the United States of a pretext to attack his country.

Abdel-Hassan’s name appeared on a list of about 400 scientists involved in past weapons programs submitted by Iraq to the United Nations in December. The United Nations believes the list is incomplete.

The Bush administration, which has threatened to disarm Iraq by force if it fails to comply with U.N. demands to surrender its alleged banned weapons, played down the significance of the interviews, pointing out that Abdel-Hassan worked for the Iraqi unit responsible for dealing with inspectors.

But the U.N. inspectors appeared to regard the interviews as a sign of positive movement by the Iraqis under the intense pressure of a growing military buildup in the Persian Gulf region, and Secretary of State Colin Powell’s indictment of Iraq at the U.N. Security Council on Wednesday.

In response to Powell’s presentation of evidence that Iraq is hiding banned weapons, Iraqi authorities took foreign reporters to two sites the secretary of state had mentioned.

One Iraqi site director, at a missile assembly installation, sounded puzzled at Powell’s charge that the loading of a truck in his compound, photographed by a U.S. reconnaissance satellite, masked suspicious activity.

Karim Jabar Youssef said such shipments are an everyday occurrence at his plant on the Euphrates River, 35 miles south of Baghdad. “So any day Colin Powell can claim there is intense activity here,” he said.

In his address to the U.N. Security Council on Wednesday, Powell charged that such sites made Iraq a global threat. But U.N. officials said U.N. teams had repeatedly inspected some of the installations.