Chalabi group still on US payroll for intelligence

At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing this week, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, a New York Democrat, asked CIA director George Tenet about continued payments to the INC. Tenet replied, ‘‘We’re not paying them.’’

She then turned to Vice Adm. Lowell Jacoby, director of the Defence Intelligence Agency, and asked if he was paying them. Jacoby replied: ‘‘Senator, you have me in a situation where this would be best dealt with in closed session. I could give you detail.’’ Chalabi, asked about the US payments on Sunday, said: ‘‘It’s a very small programme in terms of cost.’’

Congress authorised the funds for the ‘‘Intelligence Collection Programme’’, which was transferred to the Defence Intelligence Agency from the State Department about two years ago and mainly pays for intelligence gathering by the INC, officials said. The CIA has been more wary of Chalabi and his group than the Pentagon has.

The Senate Intelligence Committee is looking at how intelligence agencies used information provided by the INC. No WMDs have been found in Iraq and it has become a key political issue heading into the presidential polls in November, with Democrats saying White House exaggerated the threat to gather support for war.

US officials said last month a major in the Iraqi intelligence service who was a source for a pre-war US intelligence claim that Iraq had mobile biological weapons labs had been labelled a fabricator. He was introduced to the Defence Intelligence Agency by the INC. —(Reuters)