Former prime minister John Howard has played down the significance of a fragment of intelligence gathered in Australia that is reported to have galvanised then US president George W. Bush’s determination to invade Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein.

In a lengthy piece on US deliberations in the run-up to the 2003 invasion, The New York Times reported on Friday that National Security Agency intercepts had picked up instructions from an Iraqi general to an Iraqi agent based in Australia to buy equipment for unmanned aerial vehicles.