Electronic eavesdropping on Iraqi telephone links has for the first time picked up references to Saddam’s death. Iraqi officials began referring to him in the past tense after last Monday’s bombing of a property in the Baghdad district of al-Mansour where the dictator was believed to be at the time.

Several American officials cautioned yesterday that the evidence was not conclusive, and the telephone conversations may have been a ruse to persuade coalition forces to call off their hunt for Saddam.

The CIA is also attempting to establish if the officials heard talking about Saddam would have been in a position to know his fate. But one intelligence source said the conversations recorded last week were “totally different in nature” from the official “chatter” picked up after the first attempt to kill Saddam on the opening night of the war.

“At the outset we heard nothing to suggest we’d got him,” the source said. “Now it’s pretty clear that at least some of his underlings really believe he’s dead.”

Asked on Friday about Saddam’s status, Donald Rumsfeld, the US secretary of defence, chose his words carefully. “I have not personally seen enough intelligence from reliable sources . . . that would enable me to say that I have conviction that he’s dead. I also lack conviction that he’s alive,” he said.

The latest twist in the hunt for the former Iraqi leader followed a dramatic intelligence breakthrough that, for the second time in the three-week war, presented Pentagon planners with precise co-ordinates of Saddam’s whereabouts.

The airstrike on the well-to-do al-Mansour district last Monday came 45 minutes after an unidentified Iraqi source tipped off the CIA that Saddam, his son Qusay and other regime leaders were meeting at a house near the al-Saa restaurant.

The information coincided with earlier evidence from communications intercepts that Qusay, Saddam’s younger son, was still alive and apparently in charge of Iraq’s security forces. In conversations monitored by American agents, several Iraqi officers mentioned receiving their orders from Qusay.

It also became clear that regional commanders were “lying through their teeth” when reporting back to Baghdad about the progress of the war, American officials said. Iraqi generals talking to Qusay on satellite and other telephones boasted about inflicting heavy casualties and assured him that American tanks had been forced to retreat from Baghdad airport.

The confirmation of Qusay’s central role strengthened American suspicions that Uday, Saddam’s elder son, had been killed or seriously wounded in the attack on March 19 on the Dora Farm compound in Baghdad, which was destroyed by Tomahawk cruise missiles and a pair of 2,000lb bunker-busting bombs. But subsequent television appearances by Saddam indicated that the Americans’ principal target had somehow survived the attack.

For almost three weeks the CIA’s intelligence sources apparently dried up. When word finally arrived on Monday of another sighting of Saddam, a B-1B bomber was diverted from a raid on western Iraq. At 2pm Baghdad time, four 2,000lb bombs, two fitted with delayed fuses, turned the al-Mansour target into a 60ft crater.

American officials said it might take several days before the district, which was heavily populated with Saddam loyalists, was safe enough for a large excavation effort — and even then it might prove impossible to find identifiable remains.

Despite the new evidence from telephone intercepts, British and other intelligence officials cautioned that it was still possible that Saddam had left the building via one of the many tunnels that snake beneath Baghdad.

Embarrassed by their continuing failure to track down Osama Bin Laden, the Al-Qaeda leader, President George W Bush and other senior administration officials have recently been playing down the significance of the hunt for Saddam.

Both Bush and General Tommy Franks, the coalition commander, suggested on Friday that Saddam’s whereabouts were of secondary importance to the collapse of his regime. Saddam was “either dead or running like hell”, said Franks.

But other officials acknowledged that finding Saddam and his sons was crucial to coalition efforts to stabilise Iraq, not least by convincing Iraqis that their former oppressors would never return to punish them for co-operating with coalition troops. “Finding them or their bodies is important to the enterprise,” one official said.

Without definitive evidence of Saddam’s death, elite teams of American commandos are continuing to search across Iraq for traces of the fallen dictator. The special forces pursuers include a covert unit called Grey Fox.

Previously known as the Intelligence Support Activity, it has since been transformed into a so-called black unit that operates independently of the CIA and other American special forces to provide the Pentagon with its own covert intelligence capability.

Grey Fox members are believed to have infiltrated Tikrit, Saddam’s former stronghold and the place where he may yet be hiding.

If evidence emerges that Saddam not only succeeded in slipping out of Baghdad, but made it across the border to Syria, Grey Fox may be called on to pursue him to the gates of Damascus and beyond.

Additional reporting: Jonathon Carr-Brown

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