U.N. Concedes Inspectors Relayed Iraqi Nuclear Data to Washington : War aftermath: Embarrassed officials of the world body say they ordered briefings to stop.

UNITED NATIONS —  U.N. inspectors relayed contents of some disputed Iraqi nuclear documents to U.S. officials in Washington by satellite telephone during the Baghdad standoff, the U.N. commission on the destruction of Iraqi arms acknowledged Monday.

The inspectors briefed the State Department on the documents’ contents for the first two days they were surrounded by Iraqi guards in the parking lot of the Iraq Atomic Energy Commission, a U.N. commission spokesman said. When U.N. officials in New York discovered this, the inspectors were ordered to stop.

The incident so embarrassed the United Nations on Monday that most officials, at first, would only hint that the briefings had taken place. At one point, they also suggested that the briefings might not have occurred.

Rolf Ekeus, who heads the U.N. commission, told reporters that the briefings may have taken place and that such briefings “may be understandable under the circumstances, but that is not the procedure.”

Francois Giuliani, spokesman for U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar, called such briefings, if, in fact, they took place, “regrettable and improper.”

“If it is confirmed,” Perez de Cuellar told reporters, “it would be very regrettable. I hope it is not confirmed.”

It was finally confirmed, however, by the commission spokesman late in the day.

The issue of contacts with Washington is a barbed one. Iraqi officials, while trying to justify their harassment of the inspection team, insisted that the inspectors were a front for the United States, led by a CIA agent. David A. Kay, the Texas-born political scientist who headed the team, denied any CIA association. But there was no doubt about the team’s American flavor: 27 of 44 inspectors were Americans.

Despite his chagrin Monday, Ekeus seemed confident that the United Nations has resolved its current issues with Iraq over the inspections, which form a vital part of his commission’s job of destroying all of Iraq’s capability for manufacturing weapons of mass destruction. Destruction of such weapons is required by the Persian Gulf War cease-fire.

Ekeus, a Swedish diplomat, said a new inspection team, charged with looking for evidence of ballistic missiles, will arrive today in Baghdad and will start using helicopters to scour the countryside on Thursday. He plans to arrive Friday in Baghdad to work out what he called “the modalities” of future inspections.

By all accounts, the documents, videotapes and film, taken by the inspectors from Baghdad to the commission’s regional headquarters in Bahrain on Monday, make up a trove of evidence that Iraq was embarked on a grand plan to manufacture nuclear weapons. The material also is believed to disclose the names of the countries and companies that helped Iraq in this unsettling endeavor.

But experts insist that the material may not be fully comprehended and put into perspective until it is taken to the headquarters of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna and to the United Nations in New York for more analysis.

There has been much speculation about the names of the companies that helped Iraq. Although present U.N. policy confides these names only to governments concerned, Ekeus said, “it is quite true that some of the material must be made public at some point.”

But Ekeus said the United Nations has to be careful not to besmirch innocent companies that supplied materials unrelated to the actual manufacture of nuclear weapons. Still, “there is no intent on the U.N. side to protect companies and individuals,” he said.

At a news conference in Bahrain, Kay, the head of the inspection team, said the evidence points to a sophisticated nuclear-weapons program in Iraq. “If you look at the quality of the work done, the depth of it . . . you can’t help but be impressed,” he said. “You walk around those sites and you shake your head because they’re far better than most I’ve seen--than all I’ve seen in Europe or North America. It’s a very big program.”

After sleeping four nights in a parking lot while surrounded by armed Iraqi guards, Kay and his team managed to hold on to 25,000 pages of documents, 19 hours of videotape and more than 700 rolls of film. Although Kay said he is reluctant to offer details of the evidence before it is fully analyzed, he has no doubt that some suppliers would be embarrassed.

“It would be very hard for me to understand, with some of the issues of supply, that they did not know they were going to be used in a nuclear program,” he said.

Bob Gallucci, executive vice chairman of the U.N. commission and a member of Kay’s team, said the Iraqi program centered on the enrichment of uranium and the separation of plutonium--telltale signs that the Iraqis were intent on making nuclear weapons.

“The emphasis was on uranium enrichment, virtually every known method,” Gallucci said. “This for a country without a single operating power plant requiring enriched uranium. . . . That is a major anomaly.”

And David Kyd, chief spokesman for the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, was quoted as saying that evidence in the documents proves for the first time that Iraq was researching triggers for nuclear weapons.