New York ? Saddam Hussein refused to order a counterattack against U.S. troops when war erupted in March because he misjudged the initial ground thrust as a ruse and had been convinced earlier by Russian and French contacts that he could avoid or survive a land invasion, former Iraqi deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz has told interrogators.

Aziz, who surrendered to U.S. authorities on April 24, has also said Iraq did not possess stocks of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons on the eve of the war, an assertion that echoes the previously reported statements of other detained Iraqi leaders and scientists. Yet Saddam personally ordered several secret programs to build or buy long-range missiles in defiance of international sanctions, according to Aziz’s reported statements.

The official has described an argument he had with Saddam in 1999, in which the Iraqi president insisted that U.N. Resolution 687, enacted to limit Iraq’s armaments, prohibited long-range missiles only if they were armed with weapons of mass destruction.

Aziz said he countered, “No, it’s a range limit,” and all Iraqi missiles able to fly beyond 150 kilometers (about 93 miles) were banned, according to a senior U.S. official familiar with the interrogation reports. Saddam demanded in reply, “No, I want to go ahead,” according to the senior official.

After nearly five months of prisoner interviews, document searches and site visits, “We know the regime had the greatest problem with the 150-kilometer limit” on missile ranges, said Hamish Killip, a former U.N. arms inspector now working with the Iraq Survey Group, a CIA-supervised body appointed by President Bush to lead the hunt for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Saddam and his most senior military commanders saw the range limit “as an invasion of their sovereignty,” Killip added. They fumed because hostile neighbors might hit Baghdad with missiles, but Iraq would be unable to answer in kind.

Yet investigators have found no comparable evidence to date that Saddam was willing after 1999 to risk being caught in major defiance of U.N. bans on nuclear, chemical or biological weapons, officials involved in the weapons hunt said.

“They seem to have made a mental separation between long-range missiles and weapons of mass destruction,” Killip said.