Former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter provides an insider’s view into the hunt for weapons of mass destruction during the 1990s in “Iraq Confidential: The Untold Story of the Intelligence Conspiracy to Undermine the U.N. and Overthrow Saddam Hussein” (Nation Books, $26).

Ritter writes that American policy to rid the Middle East of Saddam, spanning three administrations, prevented the inspections from demonstrating Iraq’s compliance with U.N. Security Council Resolutions that could have led to the lifting of economic sanctions, which continued largely unabated until the U.S.-led invasion 12 years after Desert Storm.

Ritter, a former U.S. Marine officer and ballistic missile expert who led numerous teams by the U.N. Special Commission (UNSCOM) charged with assessing Iraqi compliance, discusses his relationship with Israeli intelligence to aid the inspection process – a revelation that could have had serious consequences at the time because of distrust of Israel throughout the Arab world, and especially in Iraq.

He also provides in unprecedented detail accounts of close U.S. intelligence involvement with the inspections, and puts his focus on an aborted CIA coup plot in Baghdad in 1996.

The Iraqis contended almost from UNSCOM’s beginning that it was being manipulated, if not controlled, by the CIA.

In his book, the former inspector faults the agency for insisting that Iraq continued to have hidden long-range missiles and at least a capability of producing biological, chemical and nuclear weapons long after it had actually been disarmed – which he says was as early as 1991.

Scott Ritter, then head of a U.N. weapons inspection team, waits for the Iraqi escort to start his inspection tour while standing beside U.N. vehicles in Baghdad in 1998.

“The reality was that there were many in the U.S. government who simply did not want UNSCOM to succeed,” he writes. “In this perverse formulation, a failed UNSCOM would forever justify the continuation of economic sanctions against Iraq.”

For their part, Ritter writes, the Iraqis failed to help matters by concealing information about weapons programs, which added to the distrust of U.N. officials, as well as intelligence agencies. He says they unilaterally destroyed SCUD missiles during the summer of 1991, without being able to provide documentation, and ran a concealment operation that may have been aimed primarily at preventing the inspectors from obtaining secret information on Saddam’s security but instead caused UNSCOM to continue believing that weapons material or data was being withheld.

Ritter was one of the most hard-line inspectors in his years with UNSCOM, which ended in 1998. Still, he was one of the few who was outspoken with claims that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction.

He largely provides a gripping outline of his role in the hunt for WMD through an account that often reads like a spy novel. But there are flaws. The book traces a complex conundrum of plots and counter-plots that lends to confusion and – perhaps inevitably – unanswered questions.

Overall, Ritter provides a view through trained eyes of an unprecedented international effort to rid a rogue regime of weapons of mass destruction, and of a determination by hidden forces to prevent that effort from being acclaimed as a success.