Top Saddam aide gave CIA info on WMD
21.03.2006, 14:51
Months before the Iraq war, Iraq's foreign minister gave the CIA more accurate information about Saddam Hussein's WMD program than the US agency had, for which he was paid more than $100,000, NBC News said on March 20.
Hotels in Lisbon
Naji Sabri, for a short time beginning with a UN General Assembly in September 2002, was the highest ranking Iraqi informant on the CIA's payroll. He communicated with CIA officials through an intermediary at a New York hotel room, intelligence sources said.
In exchange for $100,000 in "good-faith money", Sabri relayed information about Saddam's actual capabilities that was far more accurate than the proclamations that he made at the United Nations and closer to reality than the CIA's estimates.
According to the sources, all of whom requested anonymity, Sabri said that Saddam had no significant biological weapons program, wanted a nuclear bomb but needed much more time to build one than the several months that the CIA had estimated, and had poison gas left over from the Gulf War.
Weboldal készítés
On the biological and nuclear weapons program, Sabri was more accurate than CIA, but on chemical weapons he was as wrong as the US agency, since none were found after the US invasion, NBC News said quoting its sources.
Sabri broke off his contacts weeks after he repeatedly resisted CIA pressures to defect to the United States and publicly renounce Saddam, the sources said.
After the US invasion three years ago, Sabri was not arrested or put on the notorious "deck of cards" of the US military's most-wanted Iraqi suspects.
Internet marketing
He now resides in an undisclosed location in the Middle East and has turned down repeated requests for comments on the report, much the same as the CIA, NBC News said.