PARIS, May 25: Gen Maher Soufiane al-Tikriti, head of Saddam Hussein’s presidential guards, happened to be a double agent working for the CIA, a report on Sunday said.

French weekly newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche quoting sources said that the “a high-level Iraqi official with close links to the former regime,” Gen Tikriti was paid several million dollars by the CIA and was sent with his family, probably to the United States, on April 8 on board a US C130 aircraft. At that time, the America had announced in an official communique that Gen Tikiriti had died on the day Iraqi capital was attacked.

The newspaper says that Gen Tikriti was convinced by the CIA to become a double agent a year ago in London through a relative who had fled to UK in 1995 with one of Saddam’s sons-in-law, Hussein Kamel. Kamel was subsequently killed by Iraqi secret police when he attempted to return to Iraq after he divulged to the CIA “all of Iraq’s military secrets,” according to the report.

The newspaper source affirms that it was because of Gen Tikriti’s surprise defection that Saddam Hussein’s presidential guards offered no resistance at the time of the US attack on Baghdad. It was also the reason that Saddam Hussein was heard by many of his confederates during his final days in Baghdad to have bemoaned that he had been betrayed.

Indeed, another Iraqi general who was part of the presidential guard, Mahdi Abdallah al-Douleimi, recently told French public TV channel France 2 that on April 4 when he asked Gen al-Tikriti for orders in the face of a US tank attack on Baghdad, he was surprised to be told to “cease fighting and pull back.”

The report also adds French intelligence know that another member of the Tikriti family, Barzan al-Tikriti, Saddam’s half-brother, had also been suspected of being recruited by a Western intelligence service when he was stationed in Geneva during 1987 and 1999.

He was arrested in Baghdad on April 17 by US special forces.