THE Bay Tree Hotel in Burford won the Small Hotel of the Year gold award in the Oscars of English tourism earlier this year.

So it is perhaps not surprising that senior spies from Libya, Britain and the United States chose it as a base for top-level talks on November 20, 2003, to agree how to end Colonel Gaddafi’s bid to build nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.

The Cotswold connection with the intelligence world was unearthed by a national newspaper journalist examining secret files in Tripoli after the fall of the Gaddafi regime.

It is understood the paperwork showed Musa Kusa, then head of Libya’s foreign intelligence service, met MI6 and CIA representatives at the hotel to discuss a way of ending the weapons threat.

The next month, the Gaddafi regime admitted having nuclear, chemical and biological weapon programmes and pledged to abandon them.

Staff and guests at the hotel in Sheep Street were stunned yesterday to learn the hotel had been the venue of the meeting for senior spies.

The hotel is run by Cotswold Inns and Hotels, which also runs The Lamb Inn in Burford, and 500 properties across the Cotswolds.

It is not known if the intelligence bosses stayed at the hotel and hotel manager Quinton Fisher said records of guests did not date back to 2003.

Mr Fisher added: “Staff at The Bay Tree Hotel were completely surprised to see this story in The Times yesterday.”