In December, 2003, former UN arms inspector Scott Ritter said it was a campaign aimed at planting disinformation in the media about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction.
[2] Ritter claimed that the SIS operation secretly incorporated the United Nations Special Commission investigation into Iraq's alleged stockpiles of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) into what he described as its propaganda efforts by recruiting him, a UN weapons inspector and former MI6 collaborator, to provide copies of UN documents and reports on their findings to MI6.
[3] According to Ritter: "Mass Appeal served as a focal point for passing MI6 intelligence on Iraq to the media, both in the UK and around the world.
Ritter, in an interview with Amy Goodman of the US news website Democracy Now!, described how he, as an arms inspector for the United Nations Special Commission on Iraq Weapons of Mass Destruction—and UNSCOM itself—became deeply involved in MI6's "Operation Mass Appeal": I ran intelligence operations for the United Nations in regards to the disarmament of Iraq.
We, being Richard Butler, the Executive Chairman who ran UNSCOM, and his senior staff members, of which I was one, that we needed to clean up our public image, and we did a number of things […] [In December of 1997] 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.