President George W Bush said lots of things about Saddam Hussein in the run-up to the Iraq War. But few of his charges grabbed more attention than an unscripted remark he made at a Texas political fund-raiser on September 26, 2002.

“After all, this is a guy who tried to kill my dad at one time,” Bush said. The comment referred to a 1993 claim by the Kuwaiti government — accepted by the Clinton administration — that the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) had plotted to assassinate President George H W Bush during a trip to Kuwait that spring. Ever since, armchair psychologists have suggested that personal revenge may have been one reason for the president’s determination to overthrow Saddam’s regime.

But curiously little has been heard about the allegedly foiled assassination plot in the five years since the US military invaded Iraq. A just-released Pentagon study on the Iraqi regime’s ties to terrorism only adds to the mystery. The review, conducted for the Pentagon’s Joint Forces Command, combed through 600,000 pages of Iraqi intelligence documents seized after the fall of Baghdad, as well as thousands of hours of audio- and videotapes of Saddam’s conversations with his ministers and top aides. The study found that the IIS kept remarkably detailed records of virtually every operation it planned, including plots to assassinate Iraqi exiles and to supply explosives and booby-trapped suitcases to Iraqi embassies. But the Pentagon researchers found no documents that referred to a plan to kill Bush. The absence was conspicuous because researchers, aware of its potential significance, were looking for such evidence.

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