CIA ‘recruited Saddam’s foreign minister to spy on Iraqi regime’

Saddam Hussein’s foreign minister was recruited by the CIA to spy on the regime, a US television network said.

Naji Sabri told the intelligence agency that Iraq possessed secret stocks of chemical weapons.

If confirmed, the claims made yesterday by NBC’s Nightly News help to explain why President George W Bush and Tony Blair were so confident that Saddam was lying about weapons of mass destruction.

Mr Sabri reportedly said Saddam had around “500 metric tonnes of chemical warfare agents”, that production of the agents had been renewed and that Iraq had additional stockpiles left over from the Iran-Iraq war.

As a senior member of Saddam’s inner circle and a friend of his son, Qusay, Mr Sabri would have seemed an extraordinarily good source. He also claimed that although Saddam desperately wanted a nuclear device, he was years from building one.

According to NBC, Mr Sabri was recruited in 2002 when he visited the United Nations headquarters six months before the outbreak of war. The relationship ended when the Americans pressed him to defect.

NBC said it contacted Mr Sabri numerous times to detail the allegations, but he refused to comment.

Francis Harris in Washington