WASHINGTON, Nov 6: Weeks before the March 20 invasion, then Iraqi president Saddam Hussein tried to secure a deal with Washington to avoid war, US media reported on Wednesday.

An influential adviser to the US Defence Department, Richard Perle, met a Lebanese-American businessman, Imad Hage, who had been approached by the Iraqi intelligence chief, the New York Times said on Thursday giving details of Saddam’s attempts to avoid the invasion.

Iraqi officials apparently wanted to get across a message that the country had no weapons of mass destruction and offered to allow searches by American troops and experts, said reports by the Times and other media.

Mr Perle met Hage in an office in the London district of Knightsbridge less than three weeks before the war started on March 20 to discuss the Iraqi approach.

“I was dubious that this would work,” Richard Perle was quoted as saying by the Times. “But I agreed to talk to people in Washington.”

Mr Perle said he sought authorization from the Central Intelligence Agency to speak to Iraqi officials but this was turned down. “I was given the impression that there had already been contacts.”

Mr Hage, president of the American Underwriters Group insurance company and known in the Middle East as having close US contacts, told ABC News how an Iraqi intelligence official arrived unannounced at his Beirut office.

A week later, according to Mr Hage, he and an associate were asked to come to Baghdad, when Hage says he met Saddam Hussein’s chief of intelligence, General Tahir Habbush, who is still on the US military’s most wanted list.

“Based on my meeting with his man,” said Imad Hage, “I think an effort was there to avert war. They were prepared to meet with high-ranking US officials.”

Mr Hage said Habbush repeated the regime’s denials that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and offered to allow several thousand US agents or scientists to carry out inspections.

Mr Habbush also offered UN-supervised free elections, oil concessions to US companies and was prepared to turn over a top al-Qaeda terrorist, Abdul Rahman Yasin, who Habbush said had been in Iraqi custody since 1994.

The reports said the initiative never went anywhere. This was in part because Hage was detained at Washington’s Dulles airport in January on suspicions that he was trying to smuggle weapons out of the country.

US Customs inspectors discovered an undeclared semiautomatic .45 calibre pistol and four stun guns in his luggage, Newsweek magazine said. They also found he was carrying the business card of Pentagon official Jaymie Durnan.

Although he was questioned by Federal Bureau of Investigation agents, Hage was allowed to board a plane to Lebanon because he was carrying a Liberian diplomatic passport.

Hage said he set records of his meetings with the Iraqis to a Defence Department analyst, Michael Maloof, on February who passed it on to Perle.

Hage said the Baghdad regime was so desperate to avoid a war that it was ready to support US efforts to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

He told the New York Times that there had been contacts between the CIA and Iraqi intelligence in Rome but this also failed to produce a breakthrough. —AFP