Iyad Allawi is set to become Prime Minister of the interim Iraqi Government on June 30, having today received the unanimous backing of the Iraqi Governing Council.

The 59-year-old was an intelligence officer and member of Saddam Hussein's Baath party before he fled Iraq in 1971 for a life in exile in Lebanon and Britain.

By 1978, Mr Allawi had reportedly entered into a relationship with the British security services while living in London.

Word of this reached Saddam's feared Muhhabarat in Baghdad, who despatched a team with knives and axes to his home in Kingston-upon-Thames to kill him.

They hacked at him in his bedroom as he lay beside his sleeping wife, and were only prevented from killing him and his wife by the lucky appearance of his father-in-law who happened to be staying in the house. The would-be assassins fled.

Mr Allawi is a member of the Iraqi Governing Council himself and has worked recently on running the council's security committee, which bears responsibility for training the new Iraqi police, Army and intelligence services.

With the deteriorating security situation in the country, this work is likely to have been a factor in his nomination.

The prevalence of experienced former Iraqi military officers within the Iraq National Accord (INA) party that he helped to found is also likely to have been factor.

Ali Allawi, his cousin, is the Iraqi defence minister.

Iyad Allawi is a secular Shia Muslim and one of a number of prominent Iraqis who spent years in exile while Saddam Hussein was in power.

He is politically well connected in Washington and in London, and is understood to have extensive business interests in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

Born in 1945 to a wealthy Shia merchant family, he was educated in Britain and trained to be a neurologist.

He is the general secretary of the INA, which he helped to form in 1991 with the support of the CIA and British intelligence. The organisation recruited disillusioned Baathist military officers who had defected.

From its inception, the INA attempted to foment a coup in Iraq to depose Saddam, using the former Baathist exiles to wield influence over the military and security elites that surrounded the President.

These efforts culminated in a coup attempt in 1996, after the defection to Jordan the previous year of the dictator's son-in-law, Hussein Kamil al-Majid, who was the architect of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs.

The defection encouraged the exiled Iraqi opposition and its masters in Washington, who believed it indicated that Saddam was losing his grip on power.

But the coup ended disastrously when Saddam's intelligence services penetrated the INA's dissident operations inside Iraq.

In June 1996, 30 military officers linked to the INA were executed and another 100 were arrested.

Mr Allawi remained a favourite of the CIA and the US State Department however, which was wary of dealing with Ahmad Chalabi, the better-known Iraqi exile and former Pentagon favourite.

The pair are reported to be related but Mr Allawi has clashed with Mr Chalabi since the fall of Saddam, publicly opposing Mr Chalabi's attempt to purge members of the Baath party from government positions.

The INA is best-known in Britain for passing on to MI6 a report from an Iraqi officer who made the now-infamous claim that Saddam could launch weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes.

It was part of a large amount of information passed on by the INA to MI6 before the invasion last year. The 45-minutes claim came from a single source, an Iraqi frontline officer who called himself Lieutenant Colonel al-Dabbagh.

A New York-based spokesman for Mr Allawi said in January that it appeared that this piece of intelligence was, in fact, "a crock of s**t". He said the officer had in fact never seen the purported chemical weapons upon which his 45-minute claim was based.

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