THE Russian Government had a spy inside the US military command who passed information to Saddam Hussein on America’s war plan in the opening days of the invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon announced yesterday.

The explosive revelation was based on Iraqi documents captured since the fall of the dictator and were set last night to trigger a major diplomatic incident between Washington and Moscow.

The Russian spy, who was not named, passed detailed information on US troop movements through the Russian Ambassador in Baghdad, who sent the information to Saddam’s personal secretary.

The first document is a handwritten account of a meeting with the Ambassador in Baghdad, who in March 2003 was Vladimir Titorenko, that details his description of the composition, size, location and type of US military forces arrayed in the Gulf and Jordan.

It includes the exact number and locations of tanks, armoured vehicles, aircraft, missiles, helicopters, aircraft carriers and other forces. The ambassador also described the positions of two Special Forces units.

The second document, dated March 25, 2003, five days after the invasion began, is a typed account, signed by Hammam Abdel Khaleq, the Deputy Foreign Minister, which states that the Russian Ambassador had told the Iraqis that the US was planning to deploy its force into Iraq from Basra in the South and up the Euphrates and would avoid entering major cities on the way to Baghdad — exactly what happened.

The documents also state: “Americans are also planning on taking control of the oil fields in Kirkuk.”

Referring to the Russian mole inside US Central Command, the document adds that the information was obtained by the Russians from “sources at US Central Command in Doha, Qatar”. The intelligence, the document states, was that American forces were moving to cut off Baghdad from the south, east and north, that US bombing would concentrate on Baghdad and that the assault on the Iraqi capital would not begin before about April 15. Baghdad fell about a week before that date. Army Brigadier General Anthony Cucolo, of US Joint Forces Command, said that he viewed the decision by Russia to give intelligence to Saddam’s Government as “driven by economic interests”.

The report notes Russian business interests in Iraq’s oil industry. Mr Titorenko also appears in documents released by the Volker Commission, which investigated the UN Oil-for-Food scandal, as receiving allocations of 3 million barrels of Iraqi oil worth about $1.5 million (£865,000).

The Pentagon report also describes an extraordinary telephone call. Several Iraqi Army officers contacted the Russian Embassy in Baghdad and stated that the ambassador was their source. This caused embarrassment to the ambassador and the officers were told “not to mention the ambassador again in that context”.

The revelations were contained in a 160-page report by the US military’s Joint Forces Command, the Iraqi Perspectives Project, assessing the Iraqi view of events in the opening months of the war, from March to May 2003. It has been two years in the making and is based on interviews with senior Iraqi officials and tens of thousands of captured documents.

However, it was unclear last night whether the information was a help or hindrance to Saddam.

Saddam was also told that the invasion from Kuwait was a diversion.

Saddam was also told that the US would not attack until the Army’s 4th Infantry Division arrived on about April 15. The attack on Baghdad began well before that. The report said this kind of information “was only one of the fog-generators obscuring the minds of Iraq’s senior leadership”.

The US State Department and Pentagon refused to comment on the revelations last night, as did a duty officer at the Russian Foreign Ministry.

Pavel Felgenhauer, an independent Moscow-based military analyst, said that the report came at an inauspicious time diplomatically between Washington and Moscow, and could mark “the beginning of a real degradation of relations” between the US and Russia.

Times Recommends

• Rio Tinto four held as China prepares case
• Diplomats must keep heads down and trousers up
• When in Rome should one make like Berlusconi?