Special Report: Tension accelerates in Iraq

                     Trial of Saddam Hussein

    WASHINGTON, March 23 (Xinhua) -- Saddam Hussein's last foreign minister was a paid spy for French intelligence, which later turned him over to the CIA for information about Iraq's secret weapon programs, The Washington Post reported Thursday.

    The French intelligence and the CIA used a third-country intermediary to get information about Iraq's weapon programs and Saddam's inner circles from Naji Sabri, when he served as the Iraqi foreign minister before Saddam's government was toppled by U.S. troops in 2003, the report quoted former U.S. intelligence officials as saying.

    In September 2002, the French arranged a meeting between a CIA middleman and Sabri at a hotel room in New York, when the latter was attending a UN. meeting there.

    At the meeting, the then Iraqi foreign minister sold intelligence on Iraq's alleged secret weapon programs to the CIA for 100,000 U.S. dollars.

    He 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.

    The information provided by Sabri was thought to be more accurate than the CIA's own assessment on Saddam's arsenal.

    However, Saddam's alleged nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs were proved to be nonexistent after the war.

    Sabri later broke off the secret contacts with U.S. intelligence agents after refusing to accept the CIA's proposal that he should defect to the United States and publicly renounce Saddam.

    After the U.S. troops toppled the Saddam regime, Sabri was neither arrested nor included in the notorious "deck of cards" of the U.S. military's most wanted Iraqi suspects.

    He now lives in Qatar teaching journalism. During a telephone interview with U.S. media Wednesday, the former Iraqi top diplomatflatly denied being a CIA spy. Enditem