[5] 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.

[7][8][9] 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.

[1] While working in Votkinsk as an intelligence offer, Ritter met his second wife Marina Khatiashvili, a Soviet translator from Georgia.

[18][19] 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.

[23][24] 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.

[26] 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.

"[29][30][28] According to Gellman, Senate Democrats joined Biden and "amplified on the Clinton administration's counterattack [against] Scott Ritter" with exceptions such as John Kerry, while Senate Republicans "were unanimous in describing Ritter's disclosures as highly damaging to the credibility of the Clinton administration on one of its core foreign policies.

The previous chief inspector for Iraq, Rolf Ekéus, said that Ritter was "not in a position to know all of the considerations that go into decision making on the commission," and defended Albright's support for UNSCOM.

Albright publicly disputed Ritter's claims in a speech, saying "In fact, the United States has been by far the strongest international backer of UNSCOM.

"[4] Writing in The New York Times, Matt Bai said that Butler's caveat notwithstanding, Ritter was in fact vindicated about Iraq's lack of WMDs and that the aftermath of the war could be calamitous.

[citation needed] In a 2005 interview, Ritter criticized the Clinton administration's use of a blocked inspection of a Ba'ath party headquarters to justify Operation Desert Fox, a three-day bombing campaign in December 1998.

[32] 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.

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.

In the film, Ritter argues that Iraq is a "defanged tiger" and that the inspections were successful in eliminating significant Iraqi WMD capabilities.

At the same time Ritter offered an opposing view on Portuguese radio station TSF: "The United States is going to leave Iraq with its tail between its legs, defeated.

[4] His views at the time are summarized in War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You To Know a 2002 publication which consists largely of an interview between Ritter and anti-war activist William Rivers Pitt.

Little Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Ritter talked about a U.S. war with Iran: "We just don't know when, but it's going to happen," and said that after the U.N. Security Council will have found no evidence of WMD, then Under Secretary of State John Bolton "will deliver a speech that has already been written.

[48][11] Ritter suggested at the time that the case, which coincided with his prominent dissent against the buildup to the Iraq War, was a smear campaign designed to silence him.

[51] 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.

According to court testimony, by 2004 when he stopped attending therapy, he had made an almost daily habit of trying to meet women from internet chat rooms, in cars or out-of-the-way places, so they could watch him masturbate.

In 2009, when Scott Ritter's arrest became public, he lost the only regular job he had had in recent years—writing analyses on world events for a private energy firm—and was reported to be heavily in debt.

Also at the time, Ritter was removed from active duties in the Delmar Fire department, something he described as “one of the most profound disappointments I have experienced.”[4] 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.

[63] DisInfoChronicle, a website of the NGO Detector Media which claims to refute Russian disinformation, wrote that Ritter was being used by Russia to "promote narratives needed by the Kremlin".

American government-owned news outlet Polygraph.info wrote that Ritter's claims about Russia winning the war and about the Bucha massacre were false.

[58] In January 2024, Ritter visited Chechnya, addressing thousands of Chechen fighters in a central square in Grozny, the capital.

[7][8] According to Ritter, three U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents stopped him as he was about to board a flight to Istanbul going to the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.

[7] On August 7, 2024, the FBI conducted a raid of Ritter's home near Albany as part of efforts by the Department of Justice to combat Russian election interference.