NEW YORK, Aug 10: Three months before the US led war on Iraq a broad-based covert operation was set up by US Military, the CIA and the Iraqi exiles in order to forge alliances with Iraqi military leaders in a bid to persuade them not to fight.

In a detailed article the New York Times quoting American officials said: “Even after the war began, the Bush administration received word that top officials of the Iraqi government, most prominently the defence minister, Gen. Sultan Hashem Ahmed al-Tai, might be willing to cooperate to bring the war to a quick end and to ensure a postwar peace.”

General Hashem’s ministry was never bombed by the United States during the war, and the Pentagon’s decision not to knock Iraqi broadcasting off the air permitted him to appear on television with what some Iraqi exiles have called a veiled signal to troops that they should not fight the invading allies, the paper said.

However, the paper said that Washington’s war planners elected not to try to keep him or other Iraqi leaders around after the war to help them keep the peace, a decision some now see as a missed opportunity.

General Hashem’s fate is not known. Some Iraqi exiles say he was shot, and perhaps killed, by Saddam Hussein’s supporters during the war. Other exiles and American officials say he survived the war. Two Iraqi leaders said his family had staged a mock funeral to give the impression that he was dead.

Senior Arab officials and several United States officials told the Times that General Hashem was identified as a potential ally as early as 1995, when he became defence minister. The officials described him as a capable, well-liked infantry officer who had no close connections to Saddam Hussein and his family.

“From the time he was appointed defence minister, he was always someone who was looked at as being someone you could deal with,” a senior Saudi official, whose government had long urged the United States to promote a coup in Iraq rather than a military invasion as a way of toppling Saddam Hussein’s government told the paper. “Sultan Hashem was seen as someone who was more sensible, who could reach rational conclusions, and was not a Baathist ideologue or Baathist fanatic.”

The paper said that people behind the effort, including Iraqis who were involved inside the country, said in interviews that they had succeeded in persuading hundreds of Iraqi officers to quit the war and to send their subordinates away. Iraqi military officers confirmed that after Americans and Iraqis made contact with them, they carried out acts of sabotage and helped disband their units as the war began.

American officials and two Iraqi exiles who played central roles told the paper that the American military spirited out of the country several high-level Iraqi military and intelligence officers who had cooperated with the United States and its allies.

The paper said that in Washington, Europe and the Middle East, more than half a dozen people with direct knowledge of the events said the United States might have missed an opportunity that might have stabilized Iraq as the government crumbled.

American and Arab officials told the Times that as the war approached, the Bush administration was sceptical of the idea of cutting a lasting deal with high-level Iraqi officials like General Hashem.

Such an agreement, they said, might have required that some officials with ties to Saddam Hussein stay in power for a time, but might have eased the entry of American troops into Baghdad and helped keep Iraq’s infrastructure intact.