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Saddam FM 'spied for CIA'
21/03/2006 18:16 - (SA)
Washington - Iraq's foreign minister under Saddam Hussein spied for the CIA before the United States-led invasion in 2003 in return for a $100 000 payment, said reports on Monday.
According to reports, in September 2002, Iraq's top diplomat Naji Sabri traded information on Hussein's alleged weapons programme for cash in a French-sponsored New York City hotel room meeting.
US intelligence agents believed Sabri was fully aware he was selling information to the CIA.
During the cloak-and-dagger meeting, Sabri told the CIA's middleman that Saddam had chemical weapons and wanted a nuclear bomb, but needed much more time to build one than the CIA estimate of several months to a year.
Sabri not included in 'deck of cards'
He also denied that Saddam had any biological weapons. Sabri's tips were thought to be more accurate than the CIA's own guesses on Saddam's arsenal.
The reports said the foreign minister broke off his contacts weeks later after he repeatedly resisted CIA pressures to defect to the US and publicly renounced Saddam.
After the US invasion of March 2003, Sabri was not arrested or included in the notorious "deck of cards" of the US military's most wanted Iraqi suspects.
The reports said Sabri, who now taught journalism in Qatar, had turned down repeated requests for comments. Saddam's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programmes were revealed to be non-existent after the war.
US-led invasion
A new US military study, based on interviews with jailed members of Saddam's regime, revealed that Saddam had tricked even his inner circle to believe he had weapons of mass destruction until shortly before the US-led invasion.
Sabri, fluent in English, was one of Iraq's public faces in the West.
The former English literature professor at a Baghdad university was recalled from Iraq's London embassy in 1980 after two of his brothers were arrested for plotting against the regime. One of them later died in prison.
For the next decade, Sabri edited an English language newspaper and translated English books into Arabic, including a biography of George Bernard Shaw.
He returned to prominence ahead of the 1991 Gulf War as Iraq's deputy information minister. He was later appointed Iraq's ambassador to Austria in 1998 before being named foreign minister in 2001.
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