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Richard Roth: Blix confident, determined
PARIS, France (CNN) -- Hans Blix, the head of a United Nations commission charged with searching Iraq for alleged weapons of mass destruction, said Saturday he would not countenance spies within his team of inspectors. CNN Correspondent Richard Roth is traveling with Blix and filed this report: ROTH: A lot of what Mr. Blix said to journalists here in Paris he said in New York on Friday. He appears very confident, very determined. Still, a soft-spoken Swedish diplomat at heart. He knows what he has to do. He has the money, he has a new staff. But he needs people to help him out in Iraq and he needs countries to help him with intelligence information. I flew on the plane with him from New York and it was interesting -- one of his aides was selected for random frisking and searching due to the terrorism alert, while Mr. Blix looked on, kind of smiling. I don't think the people who were searching the aide had any idea of what Mr. Blix and his aide would be searching for in a few days -- weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Blix will go to Vienna on an overnight personal stop then he'll link up with the International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Mohammed ElBaradei and they'll go to Cyprus before heading to Baghdad. It's going to be an advanced staging party -- this team just setting up the communications, the computers, the technology -- it's a process that just has to play out. Everyone will be watching though for how Iraq will cooperate with inspectors because they have big firm new backing by that resolution that passed unanimously -- unimpeded, unrestricted access to even to the presidential sites, even to mosques, which Mr. Blix said Friday "there are no sanctuaries." That may be difficult for the Iraqi bureaucracy and the machinery there and the political structure to handle. It is November 27 when Mr. Blix said would be the first day of inspections. Sixty days from that date, January 27, Blix will file his report to the Security Council.
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