UNITED NATIONS – Secretary-General Annan yesterday said he expects all Syrian troops, military assets, and intelligence officers to leave Lebanon before the mid-May elections there, but dissidents and American officials were skeptical of Damascus’s pledges to do just that.

Mr. Annan’s envoy for implementing the Security Council resolution calling for Syria to withdraw, Terje Roed-Larsen, said yesterday after returning from the region that he saw “movement” of Syrian personnel and equipment that seems to confirm that the Assad regime is fulfilling commitments made to the U.N. envoy for a complete two-phase withdrawal.

In a briefing to reporters after meeting with Mr. Annan, Mr. Roed-Larsen added that although it was hard to verify that every plainclothes Syrian officer has indeed withdrawn from Lebanon, there were signs that intelligence offices have been shut down, including the Beau Rivage Hotel in Beirut, well known as Syria’s intelligence headquarters in Lebanon.

Dissidents in Lebanon and America remained skeptical, however. “On the surface, everything looks nice and clean,” the president of the Washington-based pro-democracy Reform Party of Syria, Farid Ghadry, told The New York Sun. Such appearances are deceiving, he said, however, as Syria is deeply entrenched.

Eye-witnesses told Mr. Ghadri’s organization that Syrian intelligence personnel who left the Beau Rivage Hotel were transferred to south Beirut, an area controlled by the pro-Syrian Hezbollah organization. In addition, Mr. Ghadri said, in the late 1990s some 5,000 Syrians received Lebanese citizenship. Dissidents believe they are mostly intelligence agents. Most of Lebanon’s intelligence apparatus, including the head of the General Security Department, Jamil Sayyed, is controlled by Damascus, he said.

Officials in Washington were not quick to embrace the U.N.’s optimism either. “I have not seen an unequivocal statement from Syria that all Syria’s troops and intelligence people will be withdrawn from Lebanon into Syria,” a State Department spokesman, Adam Ereli, said yesterday.

Mr. Roed-Larsen insisted, however, that Damascus gave him “commitments” for a two-stage withdrawal. The first stage, he said, was a redeployment of all Syrian forces eastward, into the Bekaa Valley. “Two-thirds of them will stand on the Lebanese side, one-third will be put into Syria,” he said. This stage, to be completed by April 1, was “by and large already fulfilled,” Mr. Roed-Larsen said.

The Associated Press reported from Lebanon that of the 14,000 Syrian troops that were in Lebanon, at least 4,000 returned to Syria in the past week. The rest are now in the Bekaa Valley. In addition to the Beirut headquarters, Syrian intelligence officials cleared out of their last two offices in the northern city of Tripoli yesterday, according to eyewitnesses.

The next stage, Mr. Roed-Larsen said, will begin on April 7. By April 19, Mr. Annan is due to report to the Security Council on the implementation of Resolution 1559, which demanded the full withdrawal of all foreign troops from Lebanon. Yesterday, however, Mr. Annan concentrated in a written statement on the mid-May elections as a new deadline for full withdrawal.

Mr. Roed-Larsen said that after consultations with council members, the secretary-general sensed a “unique, remarkable, and broad consensus in the international community” that the withdrawal should be completed before the election, to allow it to be “free and fair” and without outside interference.

But at least one member of the council noted that Resolution 1559 never set a date for a final full withdrawal. “There may well be such consensus in the international community, but at the council we have not discussed it,” Algerian U.N. Ambassador Abdallah Baali, the only Arab among the 15 council members, told the Sun.

Separately, Peter Fitzgerald, the Irish deputy police commissioner who has been charged by Mr. Annan to investigate the February 14 assassination of opposition leader Rafik Hariri, returned from Lebanon yesterday and is expected to report his findings to Mr. Annan early next week.

Opposition leaders are skeptical that the U.N. investigation will confirm their suspicion that Syria was behind the explosion that killed Hariri, claiming that much of the evidence was destroyed by Lebanese intelligence immediately after the assassination. The Hariri-affiliated Future TV channel in Beirut reported recently that the car that the former prime minister traveled in was removed from the crime scene after the assassination.

The Lebanese intelligence chief, Mr. Sayyed, yesterday rejected demands for his resignation for alleged negligence that allowed Hariri’s assassination, according to the AP. “All the heads of security institutions are ready for trial and accountability,” he said. The most influential opposition figure in the country, Druze leader Waleed Jumablat, dismissed the offer as a joke, however, saying Lebanon’s senior judges and security chiefs are controlled by Syrian military intelligence.