The American intermediary who received a last-minute peace offer from Iraq immediately before the American invasion says a report that Iraq’s foreign minister, Naji Sabri, warned the CIA that his country possessed no serious biological weapons program is confirmed by what Iraqi interlocutors told him at the time.

Michael Maloof, a former Pentagon policy analyst, said yesterday: “I think they were trying to make it known prior to the war that they were willing to make concessions. This is what my contact was saying, that they were desperate and they wanted to make a deal. This Sabri offer is consistent with the unconditional offer from the Iraqis in February of 2003.”

The CIA paid Mr. Sabri more than $100,000 in September 2002 after he came to the United Nations to give a speech renouncing plans to invade his country, NBC News reported on Monday. In the CIA contacts that followed, Mr. Sabri said through a third party that Saddam Hussein possessed stockpiles of chemical weapons but had no biological weapons program.

In January 2003, Mr. Maloof, who was one of the founding members of a Pentagon unit charged with evaluating raw intelligence on links between Al Qaeda and state sponsors of terrorism, had also been approached indirectly by the Iraqis, he said. A senior adviser to President Assad, Mohammed Nassif, went through a Lebanese-American friend of Mr. Maloof’s to, among other things, allow American soldiers to inspect sites in Iraq.

Asked for his reaction to the NBC story, Mr. Maloof said, “Once again the agency did not believe him, so they broke off the relationship. Just like the offer from the Iraqis was ignored by the administration.”

The NBC story is by no means the first to point out that intelligence and information existed within the national security bureaucracy that challenged some of the president’s prewar assessments of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs.

In 2004, the Washington Post published an exhaustive story on how the Department of Energy and the State Department’s intelligence shop questioned whether intercepted aluminum tubes were intended for nuclear centrifuges, as the secretary of state at the time, Colin Powell, said in his testimony before the U.N. Security Council. More recently, the New York Times has reported that an Iraqi American the CIA sent to Baghdad to gather information on the regime’s nuclear program came back to report that it had been shelved.

But the NBC report comes out as two key bodies are re-examining pre-war intelligence. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is still working on the final details of the second phase of its report on pre-war intelligence, that will examine the role of the Pentagon’s office of special plans and the unit to which Mr. Maloof belongs. The Defense Department’s inspector general has also started an investigation into the use of intelligence from the Pentagon offices established to evaluate this data before the Iraq war.

At the same time, the Directorate of National Intelligence has decided to declassify more than 50,000 boxes of documents captured in Iraq and nearly 3,000 hours of recorded conversations between Saddam and his top advisers. Some of the documents and recordings already made public suggest that Saddam had a parallel nuclear plasma research program through his Ministry of Industry and military industrialization, which was missed by American weapons inspectors, who concluded there was no evidence of Iraq’s pre-war stockpiles predicted by American intelligence.

A former senior CIA operations officer, Duane Clarridge said yesterday there was no way Mr. Sabri could know definitively that Iraq did not have an active biological weapons program. He said, “The simple point is that Sabri may have been foreign minister, but by the time he was foreign minister it was a non-job. That he would know what was going on in the inner circles of Saddam’s government is ridiculous. He was a front man.”

Mr. Clarridge has financed his own search for the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq for nearly two years, which he described yesterday as a “hobby.” Based on his interviews of former regime officials and numerous visits to the country, Mr. Clarridge said nearly all the decisions made about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq were “made in Saddam’s household and through an organization which originally was called Teco and later changed to al Faw.” Al Faw is the peninsula where, during the Iran-Iraq war in 1985, the Iraqis repelled the Iranians on their way to Basra. Al Faw was an office inside the Ministry of Industry and Military Industrialization, which was insulated from Iraq’s Foreign Ministry, Mr. Clarridge said.

The deputy director of the office of Near East analysis for the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the time, Wayne White, said that most of the evidence his charges received in September of 2002 suggested Iraq had an active chemical and biological weapons program.

“You get into a quantity and quality issue. In many cases we did not know where the information was coming from,” he said. “I would hear about the sheer preponderance of evidence on this stuff. How could there be all this smoke and no fire? And this was particularly true for CW and BW.”

Mr. White noted that he was not directly analyzing the intelligence on biological and chemical weapons in Iraq at the time and was basing this on what his analysts were telling him.

The chairman of the Defense Policy Board at the time of the CIA’s offer to Mr. Sabri, Richard Perle, said yesterday that he thought the NBC story was “bizarre.” He said: “The piece seemed to suggest that the CIA should have taken the information from Sabri at face value. Why would they do that? They paid him. Given the history of CIA recruitment of agents, a high percentage of which have turned out to be double agents, what is surprising about the story is that we should have trusted him at all.”