WASHINGTON - A former CIA director who advocated war against Saddam Hussein helped arrange the debriefing of an Iraqi defector who falsely claimed that Iraq had biological-warfare laboratories disguised as yogurt and milk trucks.

R. James Woolsey's role as a go-between was detailed in a classified Defense Department report chronicling how the defector's assertion came to be included in the Bush administration's case for war even after the defector was determined to be a fabricator.

Woolsey's previously undisclosed role in the case of Maj. Mohammad Harith casts new light on how prominent invasion advocates outside the government used their ties to senior officials in the Bush administration to help make the case for war.

Francis Brooke, Washington representative of the Iraqi National Congress, the exile group that produced Harith and other defectors, said intermediaries such as Woolsey and former Pentagon official Richard Perle, another leading war advocate, contacted the Bush administration multiple times on the INC's behalf.

Woolsey is an influential Washington insider who's on the Defense Policy Board, a Pentagon advisory group. He served as CIA director from 1993 to 1995 and has close ties to top administration officials by virtue of stints in senior defense and diplomatic positions since the 1970s.

Woolsey denied in a brief exchange with a Knight Ridder reporter July 1 that he brought Harith to the Defense Department's attention. He declined to respond to multiple efforts to contact him this week after Knight Ridder learned new details of the Harith case.

On July 1, Woolsey said his only role as an intermediary occurred shortly before the invasion of Iraq, when he heard about "an urgent threat" by Iraq to U.S. naval forces in the Middle East. "I called a military officer" and passed on the information, he said.
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