The CIA failed to pass on to US President George W Bush before the Iraq war information from relatives of Iraqi scientists that the country had abandoned its programme to develop unconventional weapons, senior government officials said.

The existence of a secret pre-war CIA operation to debrief relatives of Iraqi scientists - and the agency's failure to give their statements to the president and other policymakers -- has been uncovered by the Senate Select Committee on intelligence.

The panel has been investigating the government's handling of pre-war intelligence on Iraq after US and British troops failed to uncover any alleged stockpile of chemical and biological weapons.

The report is expected to contain a scathing indictment of the CIA and its leaders for failing to recognise that the evidence they had collected did not justify their assessment that Saddam Hussein had illicit weapons, The New York Times reported quoting the officials.

However, CIA officials played down the significance of  the information saying that only a handful of relatives made
claims that weapons programme was dead.

The senate report, intelligence officials says, concludes that the agency and the rest of the intelligence community did a poor job of collecting information about the status of Iraq's weapons programme, and that analysts at the CIA and other intelligence agencies did even a worse job of writing reports that accurately reflected the information they had.