WASHINGTON, March 21: Iraq’s foreign minister under Saddam Hussein spied for the CIA before the US-led invasion in 2003 in return for a $100,000 payment, a US television station said on Monday. In Sept 2002, Iraq’s top diplomat Naji Sabri traded information on Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons program for cash in a French-sponsored New York City hotel room meeting, NBC reported, citing intelligence sources.

American intelligence agents believe Naji Sabri was fully aware he was selling information to the CIA, it said.

During the cloak-and-dagger meeting, Mr Sabri told the CIA’s middleman that Saddam possessed chemical weapons and wanted a nuclear bomb but needed much more time to build one than the CIA estimate of several months to a year.

Mr Sabri’s tips were thought to be more accurate than the CIA’s own guesses on Saddam’s arsenal, NBC said.

However, the foreign minister broke off his contacts weeks later after he repeatedly resisted CIA pressures to defect to the United States and publicly renounce Saddam, the sources told NBC.

After the US invasion of March 2003, Mr Sabri was not arrested or included in the ‘deck of cards’ of the US military’s most wanted Iraqi suspects.

Mr Sabri, who now teaches journalism in Qatar, has turned down repeated requests for comments, NBC said. Mr Sabri, fluent in English, was one of Iraq’s public faces in the West.

The former English literature professor at Baghdad University was recalled from Iraq’s London embassy in 1980 after two of his brothers were arrested for plotting against the Saddam government. —AFP