Mohamed El-Baradei, the head of the UN nuclear watchdog agency, appealed to the United States on Friday for more help in the hunt for banned Iraqi weapons, asking for specific intelligence on "where to go and where to inspect."
"We need more actionable information," he told reporters after briefing members of Congress. "We have a good dialogue with the United States and with other intelligence agencies and I hope in the next few weeks this process will intensify and that we'll get additional information that can accelerate our job in the field."
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said Washington was providing a "tremendous amount of information" to UN arms inspectors as they improved their ability to keep communications secure.
"You always have to be mindful that when you put anybody in Iraq, you are putting them in a position where the Iraqi regime would like to listen in and find out everything they possibly can about what any visitor to Iraq is up to," he said.
El-Baradei, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, met National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell on Friday, a day after testifying to the UN Security Council on the status of two months of weapons inspections in Iraq.
Afterward, El-Baradei said inspectors were "inching forward" but not as fast as he would like.
He and Hans Blix, chief of the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, said there were no "smoking guns" to prove Iraq had nuclear, chemical or biological arms but demanded Baghdad provide evidence to back claims that it had destroyed its weapons of mass destruction.
The White House insisted it knew "for a fact" that Iraq had such weapons but provided no evidence, saying it would wait to see where UN inspections led.
El-Baradei said he did not think there would be enough information on Iraq's arms programs to enable the Security Council to decide on military action on Jan. 27, the date on which he and Blix are next scheduled to report.
"I think we made that clear yesterday at the Security Council, Hans Blix and I, that Jan. 27 is a status report," he said. "That's not the end of our work. We have been saying to the Security Council that we need much more time before we come to a conclusion."