William Scott Ritter Jr. (born July 15, 1961) is an American former United States Marine Corps intelligence officer, former United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) weapons inspector, author, and commentator.
Ritter was a junior military analyst during Operation Desert Storm. 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. Later he became a critic of the Iraq War and United States foreign policy in the Middle East. In recent years, he has been a regular contributor to Russian state media outlets RT and Sputnik. He has visited Russia in support of Russia since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In June 2024, Ritter claimed that US authorities seized his passport and prevented him from visiting Russia.Opinion: Why Scott Ritter's Passport Seizure Is Long Overdue (June 11, 2024). Kyiv Post.
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.
Early and personal life
The son of an Air Force officer and a military nurse, Ritter was born into a military family in 1961 in Gainesville, Florida. He graduated from Kaiserslautern American High School in Kaiserslautern west of Mannheim, Germany in 1979. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He studied the history of the Soviet Union there and received departmental honors.
While working in Votkinsk as an intelligence officer, Ritter met his second wife Marina Khatiashvili, a Soviet translator from Georgia. The couple married in 1991 and have two children; twin daughters.
Arrests and conviction for sex offenses Ritter was the subject of two law enforcement sting operations in 2001. He was charged in June 2001 with trying to set up a meeting with an undercover police officer posing as a 16-year-old girl. He was charged with a misdemeanor crime of "attempted endangerment of the welfare of a child". The charge was dismissed and the record was sealed after he completed six months of pre-trial probation. 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.
Ritter was arrested again in November 2009 over communications with a police decoy he met on an Internet chat site. Police said that he exposed himself, via a web camera, after the officer repeatedly identified himself as a 15-year-old girl. The next month, Ritter waived his right to a preliminary hearing and was released on $25,000 unsecured bail. Charges included "unlawful contact with a minor, criminal use of a communications facility, corruption of minors, indecent exposure, possessing instruments of crime, criminal attempt and criminal solicitation". 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."Verdict: Ex-UN weapons inspector Ritter guilty of all but one count in sex sting" (April 14, 2011) Ponono Record Retrieved April 14, 2011. In October 2011, he was sentenced to one and a half to five and a half years in prison. He was sent to Laurel Highlands state prison in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, in March 2012 and paroled in September 2014.
Passport seizure In June 2024, US authorities seized Ritter's passport and prevented him from visiting Russia. 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. He said that the agents never showed him a warrant and never gave him a receipt when they seized his passport. Vladimir Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that "details" about the situation were not clear. Peskov also said that restricting the travel of former intelligence agents "is practiced in almost all countries in relation to former intelligence officers" and that if Ritter was removed from the flight to stop him from speaking in Russia, then it was part of a "frenzied campaign to prevent U.S. citizens from establishing at least some contacts with Russia".
FBI raid
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.
Career
Military background In 1980, Ritter served in the U.S. Army as a private. In May 1984, he was commissioned as an intelligence officer in the United States Marine Corps. He served in this capacity for about 12 years. He was the lead analyst for the Marine Corps Rapid Deployment Force concerning the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iran–Iraq War. His academic work focused on the Basmachi resistance movement in Soviet Central Asia during the 1920s and 1930s, and on the Basmachi commanders Faizal Maksum and Ibrahim Bek.
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. In 1992 Ritter was quoted in a New York Times op-ed saying "No mobile Scud launchers were destroyed during the war." He later worked as a security and military consultant for the Fox News network. In an interview with Democracy Now! in 2003 he said he had "a long relationship [...] of an official nature" with the UK's foreign intelligence spy agency MI6.
UN Weapons inspector Ritter worked as a weapons inspector for the United Nations Special Commission from 1991 to 1998, which was charged with finding and destroying all weapons of mass destruction and WMD-related manufacturing capabilities in Iraq. He was the chief inspector in fourteen of more than thirty inspection missions in which he participated.
Ritter was among a group of UNSCOM weapons inspectors which regularly took Lockheed U-2 imagery to Israel for analysis, as UNSCOM was not getting sufficient analysis assistance from the United States and the United Kingdom. That was not authorized by UNSCOM, the U-2 jet had been loaned to UNSCOM and caused him to be subjected to criticism and investigation by U.S. authorities. Iraq protested about information being given to Israel.
Operation Mass Appeal 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. I went to Richard Butler with the request from the British. He said that he supported this, and we initiated a cooperation that was very short-lived. The first reports were passed to the British sometime in February of 1998. There was a detailed planning meeting in June of 1998, and I resigned in August of 1998.[...] This is an operation—Operation Mass Appeal, that had been going on prior to UNSCOM being asked to be the source of particular data, and it's an operation that continued after my resignation."
Last weapons inspections in 1998
In January 1998, Ritter's inspection team in Iraq was blocked from some weapons sites by Iraqi officials who said that information obtained from the sites would be used for future planning of attacks. UN Inspectors then left Iraq, shortly before Operation Desert Fox attacks began in December 1998, using information which had been gathered for the purpose of disarmament to identify targets which would reduce Iraq's ability to wage both conventional and possibly unconventional warfare. UN weapons inspectors were thereafter denied access to Iraq. Ritter spoke on the PBS show, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer: "I think the danger right now is that without effective inspections, without effective monitoring, Iraq can in a very short period of time measured in months, reconstitute chemical and biological weapons, long-range ballistic missiles to deliver these weapons, and even certain aspects of their developing of nuclear weapons program."
When the United States and the UN Security Council failed to take action against Iraq for their ongoing failure to cooperate fully with inspectors (a breach of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1154), Ritter resigned from the United Nations Special Commission on August 26, 1998. 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."
On September 3, 1998, several days after his resignation, Ritter testified before the United States Senate Committee on Armed Services and the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and said that he resigned his position "out of frustration that the United Nations Security Council, and the United States as its most significant supporter, was failing to enforce the post-Gulf War resolutions designed to disarm Iraq."Carnegie Endowment for International Peace According to him Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright had supposedly "blocked more inspections in 1997 than Saddam Hussein did," a charge which Albright disputed.
During the testimony on September 3, 1998, Ritter was asked by then-Senator Joe Biden about his position on inspections, which Biden criticized as "confrontation-based policy." According to Barton Gellman, Biden questioned if the inspector was trying to "appropriate the power 'to decide when to pull the trigger' of military force against Iraq," with Biden saying that the Secretary of State would also have to consider the opinion of allies, the United Nations Security Council and public opinion, before any potential intervention in Iraq. Later on, Biden stated that the decision was "above [Ritter's] pay grade." 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."