The former Iraqi general Nizar al-Khazraji, considered by some as a possible successor to President Saddam Hussein, is in Kuwait after escaping from Denmark last month with the help of the CIA, the Danish daily Politiken reported yesterday.
Citing a report by the former head of the CIA's counter-terrorism department - a copy of which was obtained by the paper - the paper said the US security services see Mr al-Khazraji as their preferred successor for Saddam in a post-war Iraq, a view that is not shared by the Pentagon.
The ex-CIA official, who completed the confidential report on March 28th, said the US intelligence services secretly extracted Mr al-Khazraji and that he was currently helping US forces in the war against Baghdad, according to Politiken.
On March 22nd, it was first reported by another newspaper that the CIA may have been behind a move to spirit Mr al-Khazraji, believed to be the highest-ranking officer to have defected from Iraq, to Saudi Arabia. The ex-CIA official who wrote the report, Mr Vincent Cannistraro, has declined to comment on the document.
Mr al-Khazraji, who has been charged with war crimes for alleged chemical weapon attacks on Iraqi Kurds in the 1980s, went missing from his house arrest in Denmark on March 15th.
He was head of the Iraqi armed forces during the invasion of Kuwait in 1990. He fled to Jordan in 1995 and, three years later, applied for political asylum in Denmark. In February last year London-based Arabic daily Al-Hayat quoted opposition sources in Syria as saying the US had chosen Mr al-Khazraji to run Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam.