THE UNKNOWN.(Middle East war and diplomacy - history)

Jeffrey Goldberg on the chemical attacks on the Kurds

In April of 1998, President Clinton sent his United Nations Ambassador, Bill Richardson, to South Asia. Richardson's stops included New Delhi, Islamabad, and, most unusually, Kabul, where he held the first (and, as it turned out, the last) Cabinet-level negotiations between the United States and the Taliban leaders of Afghanistan. Richardson, who is now the governor of New Mexico, is an effective diplomat. (He returned to international diplomacy briefly last month, when he met with two North Korean envoys in Santa Fe.) He is irreverent, and he is not timid, and his trip might have been a diplomatic success if it had not been an intelligence failure.

During the stop in New Delhi, Richardson met with officials of the new Hindu-nationalist government of the Bharatiya Janata Party. In one encounter, Richardson asked the defense minister, George Fernandes, if his country planned to explode any of its nuclear weapons. The Indians had not tested their bomb since 1974, but in early 1998 the newspapers in New Delhi--and in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital--were filled with speculation about the new government's intentions. The B.J.P. had stated in its election platform that it would "not be dictated to by anybody in matters of security and in the exercise of the nuclear option."

Fernandes, a self-described pacifist, told Richardson that India had no intention of exploding a nuclear device. Then he changed the subject to the situation in Burma. In other meetings, Richardson was given the same soothing message, and the mission to India was so relaxed that the Assistant Secretary of State, Karl Inderfurth, who was managing the trip, spent part of one day trying to set up a cricket demonstration for Richardson, a former minor-league baseball player. The demonstration was interrupted only once, so that Richardson could receive a six-minute intelligence briefing from a New Delhi-based C.I.A. officer.

I accompanied Richardson on the trip, and he allowed me to follow him into many of his meetings, except for C.I.A. briefings. But it is clear that no one from the C.I.A. told Richardson that the Indians were about to explode five nuclear devices in the Rajasthan desert, which is what they did less than a month after the delegation left South Asia. Not long ago, one of Richardson's former top aides, Calvin Mitchell, told me, "Even after we returned from the region, we received no intelligence that the Indians had lied to us."

Richardson was equally ill-informed in Afghanistan. In a single day, we visited Kabul and Sheberghan, a town in the north held by anti-Taliban rebels, and flew back to Islamabad at sundown. It was a strange day; at one stop, a senior National Security Council official fell into a sewage ditch, and the NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell was nearly trampled by a posse of Uzbek horsemen. Nothing was stranger, however, than the meeting with the Taliban.

"We have a whole range of issues we're going to bring up with the Taliban leadership," Inderfurth had told me the day before the trip. Osama bin Laden, the Taliban's most famous guest, "is just one," he said.