WASHINGTON, 22 March 2006 — Iraq’s foreign minister under Saddam Hussein spied for the CIA before the US-led invasion in 2003 in return for a $100,000 payment, a US television station reported.
In September 2002, Iraq’s top diplomat Naji Sabri traded information on Saddam’s alleged weapons program for cash in a French-sponsored New York City hotel room meeting, NBC reported, citing intelligence sources.
US intelligence agents believe Sabri was fully aware he was selling information to the CIA, it said.
During the cloak-and-dagger meeting, Sabri told the CIA’s middleman that Saddam possessed 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.
He also denied Saddam had any biological weapons. Sabri’s tips were thought to be more accurate than the CIA’s own guesses on Saddam’s arsenal, NBC said.
However, the foreign minister broke off his contacts weeks later after he repeatedly resisted CIA pressure to defect to the United States and publicly renounce Saddam, the sources told NBC.
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.
Sabri, who now teaches journalism in Qatar, has turned down repeated requests for comments, NBC said.
Sabri, fluent in English, was one of Iraq’s public faces in the West.
The former English literature professor at 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.
Exasperated and besieged by global pressure, Saddam and his top aides searched for ways in the 1990s to prove to the world they had given up banned weapons. “We don’t have anything hidden!” a frustrated Iraqi president interjected at one meeting, transcripts show. At another, in 1996, he wondered whether UN inspectors would “roam Iraq for 50 years” in a pointless hunt for weapons of mass destruction. “When is this going to end?” he asked. It ended in 2004, when US experts concluded the men in those meetings were telling the truth, that Iraq had eliminated its weapons of mass destruction long ago.
