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06-06-2004, 01:46 AM
THE MANIPULATOR
by JANE MAYER
Ahmad Chalabi pushed a tainted case for war. Can he survive the occupation?
Issue of 2004-06-07
Posted 2004-05-29
Ahmad Chalabi, the wealthy Iraqi Shiite who spent more than a decade working for
the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, prides himself on his understanding of the
United States and its history. ?I know quite a lot about it,? he told me not
long ago. It was after midnight in Baghdad, but he was still in his office in
the new headquarters of the Iraqi National Congress, the exile opposition group
that Chalabi helped found in 1992. As a young man, he said, he spent several
years in America, earning an undergraduate and a master?s degree in mathematics
from M.I.T., and a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Chicago. Chalabi
began studying the uses of power in American politics, and the subject developed
into a lifelong interest. One episode in American history particularly
fascinated him, he said. ?I followed very closely how Roosevelt, who abhorred
the Nazis, at a time when isolationist sentiment was paramount in the United
States, managed adroitly to persuade the American people to go to war. I studied
it with a great deal of respect; we learned a lot from it. The Lend-Lease
program committed Roosevelt to enter on Britain?s side?so we had the Iraq
Liberation Act, which committed the American people for the liberation against
Saddam.? The act, which Congress passed in 1998, made ?regime change? in Iraq an
official priority of the U.S. government; Chalabi had lobbied tirelessly for the
legislation.
Three days after our conversation, Chalabi?s Baghdad home was raided at gunpoint
by Iraqi police, who were supported by American troops. His offices were also
searched. Chalabi had sensed that a confrontation with the Bush Administration
was imminent. As he put it, ?It?s customary when great events happen that the
U.S. punishes its friends and rewards its enemies.? For years, he had been
America?s staunchest Iraqi ally, and he had helped the Bush Administration make
its case against Saddam, in part by disseminating the notion that the Baathist
regime had maintained stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons, and was
poised to become a nuclear power. Although Chalabi developed enemies at the
C.I.A. who disputed his intelligence data and questioned his ethics, he forged a
close bond with Vice-President **** Cheney and many of the top civilians at the
Pentagon, such as Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Under-Secretary of
Defense Douglas Feith, and Under-Secretary of Defense William J. Luti. Yet now
that the occupation of Iraq appeared to be headed toward disaster, he said, many
in the Administration had united in making him the scapegoat. As Chalabi saw it,
he had understood America too well, and had been too successful in influencing
its foreign policy. ?There is a smear campaign that says I am responsible for
the liberation of Iraq,? he said. Then he added with a chuckle, ?But how bad is
that??
Between 1992 and the raid on Chalabi?s home, the U.S. government funnelled more
than a hundred million dollars to the Iraqi National Congress. The current Bush
Administration gave Chalabi?s group at least thirty-nine million dollars.
Exactly what the I.N.C. provided in exchange for these sums has yet to be fully
explained. Chalabi defined his role simply. ?I clarified the picture,? he said.
His many critics, however, believe that he distorted it. Diplomatic and
intelligence officials accuse him of exaggerating the security threat that Iraq
posed to the U.S.; supplying defectors who offered misleading or bogus testimony
about Saddam?s efforts to acquire nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons;
promoting questionable stories connecting Saddam to Al Qaeda; and overestimating
the ease with which Saddam could be replaced with a Western-style democracy.
Vincent Cannistraro, a former C.I.A. counter-terrorism specialist who now
consults for the government, told me, ?With Chalabi, we paid to fool ourselves.
It?s horrible. In other times, it might be funny. But a lot of people are dead
as a result of this. It?s reprehensible.?
The humiliating raid on Chalabi?s home was authorized by the White House, as was
a recent decision, by the Defense Department, to eliminate an I.N.C. stipend of
three hundred and forty-two thousand dollars per month. Chalabi?s allies at the
Pentagon were not notified of the raid in advance, although some knew that it
was under consideration. The raid took place amid allegations that Chalabi or
other members of the I.N.C. had engaged in numerous misdeeds, including
embezzlement, theft, and kidnapping. After Baghdad police began investigating
these charges, several of Chalabi?s top lieutenants fled Iraq.
One of them, Aras Karim Habib, the I.N.C.?s intelligence chief, escaped just
before the serving of an arrest warrant. He is under investigation for passing
classified U.S. government information to Iran?a member of what President Bush
calls ?the axis of evil.? According to a Chalabi aide, the I.N.C. has heard that
it will be accused of telling Iran?s intelligence service that the U.S. had
cracked one of its internal codes. Chalabi has denied any wrongdoing, and claims
that the spying charge is politically motivated. ?They are charges put out by
George Tenet and his C.I.A. to discredit us,? he told Tim Russert, on ?Meet the
Press, ? referring to the C.I.A.?s director. Meanwhile, according to
Cannistraro, two Pentagon officials connected to Chalabi are being investigated
by the F.B.I., to determine whether an American official gave Chalabi classified
intelligence on Iran.
The spying charges have forced Chalabi?s patrons at the Pentagon to distance
themselves from him. Paul Wolfowitz, who was one of the earliest and most
outspoken proponents of an invasion of Iraq, and who has been friends with
Chalabi for years, spoke of him with studied detachment at a recent
congressional hearing. He praised the I.N.C.?s effectiveness in providing
battlefield intelligence since the war began, but he said, ?I think there?s
quite a bit of street legend out there that somehow he is the favorite of the
Defense Department, and we had some idea of installing him as the leader of
Iraq.?
But a prominent State Department official told me that he saw numerous documents
that had been prepared by the Pentagon?s Office of Special Plans, which devoted
considerable effort to planning the war. The office was overseen by Douglas
Feith. ?Every list of Iraqis they wanted to work with for positions in the
government of postwar Iraq included Chalabi and all of the members of his
organization,? the State Department official said.
Chalabi has consistently denied having any personal political ambitions, or any
desire to lead Iraq. As early as 1994, he told the Los Angeles Times, ?Anyone
who wants to take power in Baghdad is crazy. I?m just in this to get rid of
Saddam.? In our conversation, however, Chalabi said that he could no longer
uphold his promise that he would never seek office in Iraq. ?Never is a very
long time,? he said. Scott Ritter, a former weapons inspector for the United
Nations, who has known Chalabi for seven years, said that Chalabi had confided
to him his plans to run Iraq once America had liberated it. Ritter, who strongly
opposed the war and produced a controversial documentary in 2001 asserting that
Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, also said that Chalabi spoke of
benefitting financially from Iraq?s oil reserves, which are the second largest
in the world. (Chalabi?s office denies this.)
Chalabi?s admirers claim that he has been demonized by his political enemies.
Jim Hoagland, a columnist at the Washington Post, argued that the raid on
Chalabi?s home was in retaliation for his candid criticism of the occupation.
?By coming out in open, bitter opposition to the latest U.S. transition plan and
its rehabilitation of senior Baathists, Chalabi seems to have crossed a final
red line,? he wrote.
Peter Galbraith, a former Ambassador to Croatia and a human-rights activist, who
has long supported Chalabi?s efforts to depose Saddam, suggested that if the
Administration was unhappy with the outcome in Iraq it had only itself to blame.
?Chalabi is one of the smartest people I know,? he told me. As Galbraith put it,
Chalabi ?figured out in the eighties that the road to Baghdad ran through
Washington. He cultivated whom he needed to know. If he didn?t get what he
wanted from State, he went to Capitol Hill. It?s a sign of being effective. It?s
not his fault that his strategy succeeded. It?s not his fault that the Bush
Administration believed everything he said. Should they have? Of course not.
They should have looked critically. He?s not a liar; he believed the information
he was purveying, and part of it was valuable. But his goal was to get the U.S.
to invade Iraq.?
THE WASHINGTON FRONT
Since 1996, the Washington headquarters of the I.N.C. has been situated in a
million-dollar brick row house in Georgetown. The house looks as stately and
manicured as its neighbors, but, inside, the carpets on the front stairs are
filthy. The day I visited, piles of newspapers were strewn alongside half-empty
coffee mugs, and ants carried cookie crumbs across a leather couch, giving the
place the atmosphere of a frat house. Padding around in socks and an untucked T-shirt
was a sandy-haired, boyishlooking man named Francis Brooke.
For most of the past decade, Brooke has functioned as Chalabi?s unofficial
lobbyist in Washington. Brooke, his wife, Sharon, and their children live for
free in the town house, which is owned by Levantine Holdings, a Chalabi family
corporation based in Luxembourg. Part home, part office, with a succession of
Iraqi exiles camping out in the basement, this was the place from which Chalabi
spearheaded a sophisticated marketing operation that Brooke described proudly as
?an amazing success.? As he put it, ?This war would not have been fought if it
had not been for Ahmad.?
Brooke, who is a devout Christian, has brought an evangelical ardor to the cause
of defeating Saddam. ?I do have a religious motivation for doing what I do,?
Brooke said. ?I see Iraq as our neighbor. And the Bible says, When your neighbor
is in a ditch, God means for you to help him.?
After graduating from Duke University, in 1983, Brooke worked briefly for the
unsuccessful Georgia senatorial campaign of Hamilton Jordan, who had been Jimmy
Carter?s chief of staff. Brooke then became a representative for the beer
industry. (?If you want to understand constituent politics, you should try
mobilizing opinion against a beer tax,? he said.) But in 1991 he took a public-relations
job with an American firm in London called the Rendon Group, which described its
specialty as ?perception management.? The company had been founded by John
Rendon, a former executive director of the Democratic National Committee. It
didn?t take long for Brooke to realize that the project he was assigned at
Rendon was funded by the C.I.A. Brooke, who at the time was thirty years old,
said that he was paid twenty-two thousand dollars a month.
The genesis of Brooke?s assignment was the decision not to unseat Saddam Hussein
at the end of the first Gulf War. In May, 1991, President George H. W. Bush
signed a covert ?lethal finding? that authorized the C.I.A. to spend a hundred
million dollars to ?create the conditions for removal of Saddam Hussein from
power.? Robert Baer, a former C.I.A. officer who was assigned to Iraq at the
time, said that the policy was all show, ?like an ape beating its chest. No one
had any expectation of marching into Baghdad and killing Saddam. It was an
impossibility.? Nonetheless, the C.I.A. had received an influx of cash, and it
decided to create an external opposition movement to Saddam.
The C.I.A. had been forced to abolish domestic operations after a series of
scandals in the nineteen-seventies, and it had folded many of its overseas
programs when the Cold War ended. So it outsourced the Iraq project to the
Rendon Group. According to Brooke, the company signed a secret contract with the
C.I.A. which guaranteed that it would receive a ten-per-cent ?management fee? on
top of whatever money it spent. The arrangement was an incentive to spend
millions. ?We tried to burn through forty million dollars a year,? Brooke said.
?It was a very nice job.?
From an office near Victoria Station, the Rendon Group set out to influence
global political opinion against Saddam. Given Saddam?s record of atrocities
against his own people, it wasn?t a hard sell. ?It was a campaign environment,
with a lot of young people, and no set hierarchy,? Brooke recalled. ?It was
great. We had a real competitive advantage. We knew something about the twenty-four-hour
media cycle, and how to manage a media campaign. CNN was new at that point. No
one else knew how to do these things, but Rendon was great at issue campaigns.?
The group began offering information to British journalists, and many articles
subsequently appeared in the London press. Occasionally, he said, the company
would be reprimanded by project managers in Washington when too many of those
stories were picked up by the American press, thereby transgressing laws that
prohibited domestic propaganda. But, for the most part, Brooke said, ?It was
amazing how well it worked. It was like magic.?
In addition to generating anti-Saddam news stories and creating a travelling
?atrocity exhibit,? which documented the human-rights abuses of Saddam?s regime,
the Rendon Group was charged with the delicate task of helping to create a
viable and unified opposition movement against Saddam. ?That is when I first met
Dr. Chalabi,? Brooke said.
Chalabi, who had become an international banker and financier, had surfaced
almost immediately as the C.I.A.?s favored opposition figure. As Frank Anderson,
a former agency official, said, ?Chalabi had rare administrative competence.? A
secular Shiite who was passionately dedicated to overthrowing Saddam, he spoke
excellent English, dressed elegantly, and was well organized and impressively
connected. He also displayed a facility for backroom political maneuvering. He
wasn?t popular with other exiles, however. According to a former I.N.C. member,
in June, 1992, the Iraqi National Congress held one of its first organizational
meetings, in Vienna; Chalabi didn?t win enough backing to qualify for a seat on
the fifteen-member board. By the time attendees returned from the meeting,
however, Chalabi?s name had somehow been added to the list of members. (Chalabi
claims that support for him was unanimous.) His management of the group, other
exiles complained, was similarly impervious to the democratic will.
The C.I.A.?s sponsorship of Chalabi came at an opportune moment. He had recently
been convicted, in absentia, by a military court in Jordan for his part in a
spectacular bank fraud that imperilled the country?s fragile economy. With the
help of the U.S. government, Chalabi was able to recast himself from an accused
swindler to a charismatic political leader and a champion of liberal democratic
values.
THE JORDAN AFFAIR
Ahmad Chalabi was born on October 30, 1944, into one of Iraq?s wealthiest and
most influential Shiite families. When the 1958 revolution forced his family
into exile, it lost much of its fortune, including what Chalabi said were ?a
million-plus square metres of land? of prime property in central Baghdad, which
he now intends to reclaim. He told an American friend that his father, before
going into exile, had had more land and industrial power than anyone else in
Iraq. His forebears leveraged their fortune into political clout by performing
favors for the powerful, such as paying off the personal debts of the royal
family. In his lifetime, Chalabi?s grandfather held posts in nine Cabinets.
Chalabi?s father was president of the senate and an adviser to the king.
Imad Khadduri, an Iraqi exile who now lives in Canada, and who was a schoolmate
of Chalabi?s at a Jesuit academy in Baghdad, told me that Chalabi?s grandfather
kept his own personal prison, in which he incarcerated serfs who failed to pay
taxes or produce wheat. (Chalabi?s office denies this assertion.) Chalabi, he
recalled, was a ?very bright? young man, but also a sore loser. ?He threw a
tantrum when he didn?t get the highest grades.? When Chalabi was thirteen, the
Iraqi Communist Party and the Army overthrew the royal family, and he was sent
to Jordan for safety. Thus began thirty-four years of exile. Khadduri, who
severed his friendship with Chalabi after he learned of his ties to the C.I.A,
said, ?Ahmad wanted to avenge his father?s ouster and the deprivation of his
lands. Now he?s trying to fit in his father?s shoes, like your little Bush.?
After attending boarding school in England, Chalabi went to America to study
math. Upon finishing his Ph.D., which was in the rarefied branch of geometry
known as knot theory, Chalabi moved to Lebanon, to teach math at the American
University in Beirut. In 1977, however, Crown Prince Hassan of Jordan invited
him to found a new bank in the country, whose financial sector was largely
dominated by Palestinians. With the help of royal patronage and of innovations
previously unavailable in Jordan, such as consumer credit cards, computerized
banking, and A.T.M.s, the company created by Chalabi, Petra Bank, grew
impressively. Within a decade, it had become the second-largest bank in Jordan,
and Chalabi became a rich and well-connected man in Amman. Like his father and
grandfather, he extended easy credit to important benefactors. He boasted to an
American friend that he had personally made Prince Hassan, the King?s brother,
?a wealthy man.? (Prince Hassan, who continues to regard Chalabi as a friend,
declined to be interviewed.) Chalabi lived with his family in the suburban hills
outside Amman, in a house of his own design, surrounded by a collection of
modern art. His children rode horses with the royal family. In his spare time,
he pursued a variety of intellectual passions. Judith Kipper, the director of
the Middle East Forum at the Council on Foreign Relations, remembers bumping
into him in Cairo; he had come with his math books, he told her, to try to
figure out how the pyramids had been built.
In 1989, however, Chalabi?s comfortable life collapsed amid allegations of
criminality. Jordan?s Central Bank, facing a liquidity crisis, demanded that the
country?s banks place thirty per cent of their foreign currency in its accounts.
Petra balked, prompting an emergency audit. Chalabi betrayed little outward
concern about this sudden turn. Patrick Theros, a former Ambassador to Qatar,
who was then stationed in Jordan, had dinner at Chalabi?s home during this
period. ?He was completely charming, particularly to the ladies?he could talk
about any subject,? Theros recalled. Two days later, Chalabi, who had apparently
been tipped off about his impending arrest, fled. He forfeited many of his
family?s assets, and resettled with his wife, Leila, and their four children in
London.
On April 9, 1992, a military tribunal in Jordan delivered a two-hundred-and-twenty-three-page
verdict, which concluded that Chalabi was guilty of thirty-one charges,
including embezzlement, theft, forgery, currency speculation, making false
statements, and making bad loans to himself, to his friends, and to his family?s
other financial enterprises, in Lebanon and Switzerland. The Jordanian docket
shows that Chalabi was sentenced to serve twenty-two years of hard labor, and to
pay back two hundred and thirty million dollars in embezzled funds. An Arthur
Andersen audit commissioned by Jordanian authorities found that the bank had
overstated its assets by more than three hundred million dollars. In addition, a
hundred and fifty-eight million dollars had disappeared from its accounts,
apparently as a result of transactions involving people linked to the former
management. (Swiss documents obtained by the Newsweek correspondent Mark
Hosenball show that Socofi, an investment firm in Switzerland run by the Chalabi
family, also collapsed under suspicious circumstances, leading to pleas of no
contest by two of Chalabi?s brothers, Jawad and Hazam, in 2000.)
After Chalabi arrived in England, he claimed that the Petra affair had been a
political frameup. He said that he was targeted because he had been an outspoken
critic of Saddam (an assertion that is not unlike his recent defense in
Baghdad), and claimed that he was indicted because the Jordanians were beholden
to Saddam for oil and other economic aid. Chalabi, like many Iraqi exiles living
in Jordan, had indeed opposed Saddam openly. However, a well-informed American
friend of Chalabi?s could not recall other instances of Saddam forcing Jordan to
clamp down on his critics there.
John Markham, a lawyer representing Chalabi, recently forwarded to me a
previously undisclosed letter, which Chalabi claims is ?the smoking gun? that
proves his accusers are lying. During the trial proceedings, the Jordanian
military prosecutor wrote to the country?s authorities that ?the method of
dealing with the Petra Bank and its liquidation was the result of personal
hatred and envy.? The prosecutor blamed Said Nabulsi, the head of Jordan?s
Central Bank. According to Markham, Nabulsi was complicit with Saddam.
In Jordan, banking officials scoff at Chalabi?s claims of innocence. Petra had
opened a subsidiary in Washington, D.C., in 1983, and after the bank?s collapse,
according to a top Jordanian finance official, investigators combed America for
forty-five days, trying to locate the bank?s hidden assets. Almost all the
assets listed on the books, the official said, were worthless, except for an
auxiliary office that was listed as a repository for valuable bank records. The
investigators soon discovered that the ?office? was a country estate with a
swimming pool, in Middleburg, Virginia. It belonged to the Chalabi family, which
was charging the bank a monthly rent. ?There was not one business record in the
whole place,? the official said. ?This man is a vicious liar. There is no end to
it. It?s like you find someone killing with a gun in his hand, and he says he?s
innocent. He just wears you down.? The official declined to be named, because he
feared Chalabi?s influence. ?He has more powerful friends in Washington than you
or me,? he said, adding, ?Really, some of your people are such suckers.?
By 1993, with the C.I.A.?s support, Chalabi had solidified his role as the
leader of the Iraqi National Congress. Before long, however, financial questions
arose. A former I.N.C. associate said, ?The agency didn?t know how he spent his
money. All transactions were cash.? Kurds who had joined the I.N.C. complained
that Chalabi wouldn?t tell them anything about the group?s finances. A Kurdish
leader said that Chalabi ?snapped? when asked about debts that were still owed
to Kurds, and argued that he couldn?t disclose funding details because his
financing was ?covert.? A former C.I.A. officer said that successive audits
identified no wrongdoing. But the I.N.C.?s finances weren?t easy to inspect. At
one point, he said, I.N.C. officials ?refused to coöperate with an audit because
they argued that it would breach the secrecy of the operation.? On one occasion,
a team of government auditors was spirited into the offices of the I.N.C. at
night. ?It was a real headache,? he recalled. The auditors found that the books
were in order, but that many expenditures were wasteful.
Some observers of the I.N.C. wondered what return the U.S. government was
getting for its multimillion-dollar investment. In 1994 and 1995, Robert Baer,
the former C.I.A. officer, met Chalabi several times in Kurdistan, in northern
Iraq, an autonomous area protected from Saddam by the United States. Chalabi had
established an outpost in Kurdistan. ?He was like the American Ambassador to
Iraq,? Baer recalled. ?He could get to the White House and the C.I.A. He would
move around Iraq with five or six Land Cruisers.? But Baer added that Chalabi?s
long absence from Iraq diminished his power there, and his ineffectiveness made
him a useful foil for Saddam. ?If he was dangerous, they could have killed him
at any time. He was the perfect opposition leader,? he said.
Hundreds of thousands of dollars were flowing each month ?to this shadowy
operator?in cars, salaries?and it was just a Potemkin village,? Baer said. ?He
was reporting no intel; it was total trash. The I.N.C.?s intelligence was so
bad, we weren?t even sending it in.? Chalabi?s agenda, he said, was to convince
the United States that Saddam?s regime was ?a leaking warehouse of gas, and all
we had to do was light a match.? But when the agency tried to check Chalabi?s
assertions about troop movement or palace plans, Baer said, ?there was no
detail, no sourcing?you couldn?t see it on a satellite.?
In retrospect, one detail of Chalabi?s operation seems particularly noteworthy.
In 1994, Baer said, he went with Chalabi to visit ?a forgery shop? that the
I.N.C. had set up inside an abandoned schoolhouse in Salahuddin, a town in
Kurdistan. ?It was something like a spy novel,? Baer said. ?It was a room where
people were scanning Iraqi intelligence documents into computers, and doing
disinformation. There was a whole wing of it that he did forgeries in.? Baer had
no evidence that Chalabi forged any of the disputed intelligence documents that
were used to foment alarm in the run-up to the war. But, he said, ?he was
forging back then, in order to bring down Saddam.? In the Los Angeles Times,
Hugh Pope wrote of one harmless-seeming prank that emerged from Chalabi?s
specialty shop: a precise mockup of an Iraqi newspaper that was filled with
stories about Saddam?s human-rights abuses. Another faked document ended up
directly affecting Baer. It was a copy of a forged letter to Chalabi, made to
look as if it were written on the stationery of President Clinton?s National
Security Council. The letter asked for Chalabi?s help in an American-led
assassination plot against Saddam. ?It was a complete fake,? Baer said, adding
that he believed it was an effort to hoodwink the Iranians into joining a plot
against Saddam; an indication of American involvement, Chalabi hoped, would
convince them that the effort was serious. Brooke acknowledged that the I.N.C.
had run a forgery shop, but denied that Chalabi had created the phony
assassination letter. ?That would be illegal,? he said. To Baer?s dismay, the
letter eventually made its way to Langley, Virginia, and the C.I.A. accused him
of being involved in the scheme. Baer said he had to pass a polygraph test in
order to prove otherwise.
CHALABI VS. THE C.I.A.
In 1995, Chalabi began spending some of his C.I.A. funding to create an armed
militia in Kurdistan. With Washington?s approval, he hatched a quixotic plan to
use his militia, along with tribal leaders he had bribed, to mount a
simultaneous three-city strike against Saddam?s forces. Just before the attack
began, it became clear that Baathist officials had learned of the plot. Baer was
told to tell Chalabi that ?any decision to proceed will be on your own.?
Chalabi, who had no military experience, refused to abort the operation. By
then, many of the insurgents had deserted, and the revolt quickly foundered. The
C.I.A. was furious that it had funded such a folly.
A year later, in August, 1996, a second disaster befell Chalabi. One of the
Kurdish factions within the I.N.C. invited Saddam Hussein into Kurdistan, to
crush a rival faction that was allied with Chalabi. Forty thousand Iraqi
soldiers and three hundred tanks crossed into Kurdish territory?a flagrant
violation of U.S. strictures against Saddam?s entering Kurdistan. The Clinton
Administration failed to react immediately, and Saddam?s forces captured,
tortured, and slaughtered hundreds of Chalabi?s supporters. The U.S. government
eventually evacuated seven thousand supporters.
Francis Brooke told me that, when he heard the news, ?I was sick for a week,
just throwing up.? He had been involved in an exchange of letters between
Chalabi and Vice-President Al Gore, in which Gore promised to protect the
democratic resistance in northern Iraq. Brooke felt responsible for the carnage.
?I couldn?t believe it,? he said. ?I?m not interested in getting a whole lot of
people killed and being morally wrong. I was stunned.? He called Chalabi, who
was in London at the time, and asked, ?What are we going to do??
Chalabi and Brooke decided to seek revenge through the press. Using the skills
he had honed while working for the C.I.A., Brooke helped ABC News put together a
documentary that was highly critical of the C.I.A.?s missteps in northern Iraq.
?It pissed them off in the biggest way,? Brooke said. Afterward, a close
associate recalled, ?The agency stopped supplying him.?
Chalabi?s desire to bring about an invasion of Iraq was undiminished, but, with
the loss of covert support, he had to find benefactors in Congress. ?We needed a
new campaign,? Brooke said, and ?Chalabi was a great candidate. He?d spent his
whole life getting ready for this.?
In 1996, Chalabi and Brooke set up shop in Georgetown, and mapped out a
strategy. They studied how the African National Congress had won mainstream
support, by portraying apartheid as tantamount to slavery. They also examined
how various American Jewish groups organized themselves to support Israel. ?We
knew we had to create a domestic constituency with some electoral clout, so we
decided to use the aipac model,? Brooke said, referring to the American Israel
Political Action Committee.
In June, 1997, Chalabi gave a speech at the Jewish Institute for National
Security Affairs, in Washington. He told the audience that it would be easy to
topple Saddam and replace him with a government that was friendly to Israel, if
the U.S. would provide minimal support to an armed insurgency organized by the
I.N.C. Although Chalabi later denied that oil had played a role in his campaign,
he gave an interview to the Jerusalem Post in 1998 in which he spoke of
restoring the oil pipeline from Kirkuk to Haifa, which had been inoperative
since the creation of Israel, in 1948.
Chalabi?s pitch stirred enthusiasm and curiosity among a group of American
neoconservatives who had played crucial roles in the first Bush Administration
but were now scattered among Washington think tanks. After the fall of
Communism, the neoconservatives were eager for a new cause, and Chalabi?an
educated, secular Shiite who was accepting of Israel and talked about spreading
democracy throughout the Middle East?capitalized on their enthusiasm. Judith
Kipper, the Council on Foreign Relations director, said that, around this time,
Chalabi made ?a deliberate decision to turn to the right,? having realized that
conservatives were more likely than liberals to back the use of force against
Saddam.
As Brooke put it, ?We thought very carefully about this, and realized there were
only a couple of hundred people? in Washington who were influential in shaping
policy toward Iraq. He and Chalabi set out to win these people over. Before
long, Chalabi was on a first-name basis with thirty members of Congress, such as
Trent Lott and Newt Gingrich, and was attending social functions with Richard
Perle, a former Assistant Secretary of Defense, who was now a fellow at the
American Enterprise Institute, and **** Cheney, who was the C.E.O. of
Halliburton. According to Brooke, ?From the beginning, Cheney was in
philosophical agreement with this plan. Cheney has said, ?Very seldom in life do
you get a chance to fix something that went wrong.??
Wolfowitz was particularly taken with Chalabi, an American friend of Chalabi?s
said. ?Chalabi really charmed him. He told me they are both intellectuals. Paul
is a bit of a dreamer.? To Wolfowitz, Chalabi must have seemed an ideal
opposition figure. ?He just thought, This is cool?he says all the right stuff
about democracy and human rights. I wonder if we can?t roll Saddam, just the way
we did the Soviets,? the friend said.
Chalabi was running out of money, however, and he needed new patrons. Brooke
said that he and Chalabi hit upon a notion that, he admitted, was ?naked
politics?: the I.N.C.?s disastrous history of foiled C.I.A. operations under the
Clinton Administration could be turned into a partisan weapon for the
Republicans. ?Clinton gave us a huge opportunity,? Brooke said. ?We took a
Republican Congress and pitted it against a Democratic White House. We really
hurt and embarrassed the President.? The Republican leadership in Congress, he
conceded, ?didn?t care that much about the ammunition. They just wanted to beat
up the President.? Nonetheless, he said, senior Republican senators, including
Trent Lott and Jesse Helms, ?were very receptive, right away.?
Congressional hearings on the C.I.A.?s failures in Iraq were held in 1998, and
Chalabi?s think-tank allies, such as Richard Perle, gave testimony that
excoriated the Clinton Administration. Meanwhile, Chalabi continued to gather
intelligence from Iraq that would further his cause. He found an opportunity in
the U.N.?s weapons-inspection program, which had been set up in 1991 to prevent
Saddam from developing weapons of mass destruction. On January 27, 1998, Chalabi
met in London with Scott Ritter, who was then working as a liaison for the U.N.
program. At the time, the U.N. had been unable to account for a number of
weapons?including nearly nine thousand litres of anthrax?that Saddam?s regime
said it had dismantled. U.N. inspectors had exhausted other sources of
intelligence. Chalabi claimed to have operatives who had penetrated Saddam?s
circle, and offered to help.
The meeting took place in Chalabi?s apartment, on Conduit Street in Mayfair.
Half a dozen Arab servants served tea, Ritter recalled. Chalabi sat on a couch,
taking notes, ?playing the overlord.? (Ahmed Alawi, an I.N.C. official, also
attended the meeting.)
?I should have asked him what he could give me,? Ritter said. ?Instead, I let
him ask me, ?What do you need??? The result, he said, was that ?we made the
biggest mistake in the intelligence business: we identified all of our gaps.?
Over the next several hours, Ritter said, he outlined most of the U.N.
inspectors? capabilities and theories, telling Chalabi how they had searched for
underground bunkers with ground-penetrating radar. He also told Chalabi of his
suspicion that Saddam may have had mobile chemical- or biological-weapons
laboratories, which would explain why investigators hadn?t been able to find
them. ?We made that up!? Ritter said. ?We told Chalabi, and, lo and behold, he?s
fabricated a source for the mobile labs.? (The I.N.C. has been accused of
sponsoring a source who claimed knowledge of mobile labs.) When Ritter left the
U.N., in August, 1998, there was still no evidence of mobile weapons
laboratories. Chalabi?s people, Ritter said, eventually supplied detailed
intelligence on Saddam?s alleged W.M.D. programs, but ?it was all crap.?
Ritter had one other memorable encounter with Chalabi. Six months after the
London meeting, Ritter was feeling dispirited. U.N. investigators had discovered
trace evidence of VX nerve gas on warheads in Iraq; he was concerned that Saddam
was still hiding something. Chalabi invited him to the town house in Georgetown,
and they discussed the VX discovery. Chalabi then talked to Ritter about doing
intelligence work for the I.N.C. In a demonstration of his seriousness, he
showed Ritter two studies advocating Saddam?s overthrow. One was a military
plan, written, in part, by a conservative friend, retired General Wayne Downing,
who had commanded the Special Forces in the first Gulf War. The study suggested
that Iraqi insurgents would be able to topple Saddam almost by themselves. Since
the plan required few American troops, it could be easily sold to Congress.
Ritter, a former marine, told me that he wasn?t impressed. He recalled, ?I said,
?I don?t think the small units could do the jobs you?re saying. It?s a ploy?? to
get the Americans involved. Chalabi, he said, did not deny it. ?So how come the
fact that you?d need more American assistance is not in the plan?? Ritter asked.
?Because it?s too sensitive,? Chalabi replied.
According to Ritter, Chalabi went on to describe a clear vision of Iraq?s future?with
himself in charge. Ritter said, ?He told me that, if I played ball, when he
became President he?d control all of the oil concessions, and he?d make sure I
was well taken care of. I guess it was supposed to be a sweetener.? Chalabi?s
office denied Ritter?s account, calling him a ?liar.? Ritter left without
agreeing to work for Chalabi.
A DISINFORMATION CAMPAIGN
On October 7, 1998, the Iraq Liberation Act, which had been drafted by Trent
Lott and other Republicans, passed in Congress almost unanimously. Chalabi,
Brooke, and their allies in Congress crafted the legislation together. The act?s
call for ?regime change? in Iraq was radical, yet it created remarkably little
controversy, because Chalabi had once again shrewdly pitched the removal of
Saddam as a project by and for Iraqis, requiring minimal air support from the
U.S. At this time, Congress also passed bills giving overt support of ninety-seven
million dollars to the I.N.C.
Shortly after the act?s passage, General Anthony Zinni, who was then the
commander of centcom, which is assigned operational control of U.S. combat
forces in the Middle East, saw a copy of Chalabi?s military plan. ?It got me
pretty angry,? he told me. Zinni knew Iraq?s terrain well, and testified before
Congress that Chalabi?s plan was ?pie in the sky, a fairy tale.? He said, ?They
were saying if you put a thousand troops on the ground Saddam?s regime will
collapse, they won?t fight. I said, ?I fly over them every day, and they shoot
at us. We hit them, and they shoot at us again. No way a thousand forces would
end it.? The exile group was giving them inaccurate intelligence. Their scheme
was ridiculous.?
When the Bush Administration took office, in 2001, neoconservatives such as
Wolfowitz and Perle were restored to power. Brooke told me that in February of
that year Wolfowitz called him late one night and promised that this time Saddam
would be deposed. Brooke said that Wolfowitz told him he was so committed to
this goal that he would resign if he couldn?t accomplish it. (Wolfowitz called
this account ?nonsense.?)
After the attacks of September 11th, many in the Administration began to
consider a preëmptive strike against Saddam?s regime, and they eagerly received
Chalabi?s intelligence briefings. In 2002, an Information Collection Program for
I.N.C. intelligence, which had been funded by the State Department, was
transferred to the Defense Intelligence Agency, a division of the Pentagon.
?Chalabi was the crutch the neocons leaned on to justify their intervention,?
Zinni said. ?He twisted the intelligence that they based it on, and provided a
picture so rosy and unrealistic they thought it would be easy.?
The C.I.A. remained skeptical of the defectors that the I.N.C. was promoting,
and insisted on examining them independently. President Bush was informed of the
C.I.A.?s view of Chalabi soon after taking office, but he ultimately sided with
Vice-President Cheney and the neocons. In the months before the invasion of
Iraq, Bush and Cheney both referred in public addresses to Saddam?s mobile
weapons laboratories. Six weeks before the U.S. invasion, in a February 5, 2003,
address to the United Nations, Secretary of State Colin Powell?who had initially
found the intelligence on W.M.D.s inconclusive?spoke of unnamed eyewitnesses,
one of whom had supplied ?firsthand descriptions of biological weapons factories
on wheels and rails.? It was, he testified, ?one of the most worrisome things
that emerges from the thick intelligence file we have on Iraq.?
Bob Drogin and Greg Miller, of the Los Angeles Times, recently reported that the
source of this intelligence was an Iraqi defector code-named Curveball, who is
allegedly the brother of one of Chalabi?s aides. (Chalabi says that the defector
is not related to anyone in his organization.) Curveball is said to have
approached German intelligence officials and provided them with detailed maps
and descriptions of mobile weapons labs. Curveball neglected to tell German
officials that before fleeing Iraq he had been jailed for embezzlement.
Moreover, U.S. and U.N. experts searched every corner of Iraq for the mobile
labs; all they found were two trucks, whose function is still in dispute. Last
January, Cheney cited those trucks as conclusive proof that Iraq had mobile
weapons labs, but experts have said that they more likely contained equipment
for weather balloons.
By the time I asked Chalabi about Curveball, the defector had become a sore
subject. ?These are the sorts of reports we are expected to deny?? he asked, his
voice rising. ?Anonymous reports about anonymous people? No one even knows who
this person is! How are we supposed to know?? Chalabi questioned why he was
being blamed for defectors? inaccuracies, when it was the U.S. intelligence
community?s job ?to check these people out.? He asked, ?What would you want us
to do? Hush it up when these people tell us these things??
Others at the I.N.C. were emphatic that the organization had no ties to German
intelligence. But Vincent Cannistraro, the former counter-terrorism specialist,
told me that the C.I.A. now believes that Aras Habib, the I.N.C. intelligence
chief suspected of giving U.S. secrets to Iran, ?arranged for Curveball to be
presented to the Germans.? He added, ?The C.I.A. is positive of it.?
After the war, even Chalabi?s sponsors at the Defense Intelligence Agency
concluded that most of the information they had received from his defectors was
?of little or no value.? According to the Times, in early 2003, an official
agency report concluded that several Iraqi defectors introduced to American
intelligence by the I.N.C. had falsely claimed to have direct knowledge of
illicit weapons programs in Iraq.
Chalabi and his supporters have argued that critics like Zinni have inflated the
exiles? role in offering misleading intelligence about W.M.D.s. ?How can we be
blamed for the failure of the entire world?s intelligence?? Chalabi asked me.
Certainly, there is blame to share, most notably among the war?s civilian
planners in the Department of Defense and the White House, who flouted
intelligence protocol by accepting the I.N.C.?s information without rigorous
vetting. As Robert Baer, the former C.I.A. official, put it, ?Chalabi was
scamming the U.S. because the U.S. wanted to be scammed.?
An internal I.N.C. document reveals how influential the Information Collection
Program was. On June 26, 2002, Entifadh Qanbar, an I.N.C. official, sent a memo
to the Senate Appropriations Committee, in which he gave the I.N.C. credit for
?product? cited in a hundred and eight English-language news stories that
appeared between October, 2001, and May, 2002. These articles, the letter said,
relayed I.N.C. information collected from ?defectors, reports, and raw
intelligence? about Iraq. In addition, Qanbar wrote, the I.N.C. provided its raw
information directly to ?U.S. government recipients,? including William Luti, at
the Pentagon, and John Hannah, the special assistant for national security in
the Office of the Vice-President.
The news stories in which the I.N.C. claimed to have placed its ?product?
include some of the most disputed journalism to appear in the prelude to the
war. On December 20, 2001, Judith Miller published a front-page story in the
Times about an Iraqi engineer who claimed to have direct knowledge of twenty
secret chemical-, biological-, and nuclear-weapons sites in Iraq. One site, he
said, was hidden under a hospital. He also described tests of these prohibited
weapons on live Kurdish and Shiite prisoners. Miller disclosed in her story that
the I.N.C. had helped the engineer to leave Iraq, and had arranged the
interview, and that the I.N.C.?s agenda was to overthrow Saddam Hussein. She
also noted that U.S. officials were ?trying to verify? the defector?s claims.
Despite these caveats, Miller reported that ?experts said the information seemed
reliable and significant.? In a subsequent piece, she wrote that the same
defector had given U.S. intelligence officials ?dozens of highly credible
reports on Iraqi weapons-related activity and purchases.?
The defector?s name is Adnan Ihsan Saheed al-Haideri. Since the war, neither
U.N. weapons inspectors nor David Kay, a top U.S. weapons inspector, have found
evidence to confirm his accounts. According to a recent Knight Ridder report,
American officials escorted Haideri back to Iraq after the war, but he failed to
locate any prohibited-weapons facilities. The I.N.C. reportedly provided Miller
with the exclusive Haideri story three days after he had shown deception in a
polygraph test administered by the C.I.A. at the request of the Defense
Intelligence Agency.
When asked about Haideri?s credibility problems, a Chalabi aide who declined to
be named disputed the polygraph story, saying that D.I.A. officials had told him
that Haideri ?was a gold mine? of information, and that ?even if only three per
cent of it was true? it was worthwhile.
Miller declined to comment on her Iraq coverage, as did other officials at the
Times. For months, the Times has been criticized for its prewar coverage of the
W.M.D. debate. On May 26th, the paper published an editor?s note acknowledging
that it had been improperly influenced by Chalabi. ?Accounts of Iraqi defectors
were not always weighed against their strong desire to have Saddam Hussein
ousted,? the note said. ?It looks as if we, along with the administration, were
taken in.?
In an unusual arrangement, two months before the invasion began, the chief
correspondent for the Times, Patrick E. Tyler, who was in charge of overseeing
the paper?s war coverage, hired Chalabi?s niece, Sarah Khalil, to be the paper?s
office manager in Kuwait. Chalabi had long been a source for Tyler. Chalabi?s
daughter Tamara, who was in Kuwait at the time, told me that Khalil helped her
father?s efforts while she was working for the Times.
In early April, 2003, Chalabi was stranded in the desert shortly after U.S.
forces airlifted him and several hundred followers into southern Iraq, leaving
them without adequate water, food, or transportation. Once again, the assistance
of the U.S. military had backfired. Chalabi used a satellite phone to call
Khalil for help. According to Tamara, Khalil commandeered money from I.N.C.
funds and rounded up a convoy of S.U.V.s, which she herself led across the
border into Iraq.
Tyler told me that he hadn?t known that Khalil had helped Chalabi get into
southern Iraq. He added that Khalil had a background in journalism, and that
Chalabi hadn?t been a factor in the war when he hired her. ?We were covering a
war, not Chalabi,? he said. The Times dismissed Khalil on May 20, 2003, when
word of her employment reached editors in New York. During the five months that
Khalil was employed, Tyler published nine pieces that mentioned Chalabi. When
asked about Khalil?s rescue of Chalabi, William Schmidt, an associate managing
editor of the Times, said, ?The Times is not aware of any such story, or whether
it happened. If so, it was out of bounds.?
Another story promoted by Chalabi?s organization offered an unsubstantiated link
between Iraq and Al Qaeda. The I.N.C. disseminated a story that Mohamed Atta,
the mastermind of the September 11th attacks, had met in Prague in April, 2001,
with an Iraqi intelligence agent. In February, 2002, David Rose wrote in Vanity
Fair that a defector named Abu Zeinab al-Qurairy said that he had worked at a
terrorist camp in Iraq called Salman Pak, where non-Iraqi fundamentalist Arabs
were trained to hijack planes and land helicopters on moving trains. He also
asserted that Atta had met with an Iraqi agent in Prague. Rose noted the I.N.C.
had sponsored Qurairy, and wrote that an aide of Chalabi?s served as the
translator for the defector.
On November 12, 2001, the I.N.C. provided another defector, Sabah Khalifa
Khodada al-Lami, to the press through a video feed from London. Lami, who was
described as a former colonel in Saddam?s Army, claimed that Islamic militants
were training at Salman Pak. He also said that the training camp was
contaminated by anthrax, an accusation that was made soon after the U.S. began
investigating incidents of anthrax poisoning in New York, Florida, and
elsewhere. Stories about Lami subsequently appeared in the Washington Times, the
Seattle Times, and other papers. Since the overthrow of Saddam, no foreign
terrorist-training camps have been found in Iraq.
The I.N.C. was equally successful in disseminating its stories to U.S.
government officials. Haideri?s tale found its way into an official White House
study, called ?A Decade of Deception and Defiance,? which was released as
supporting material for an address on Iraq that President Bush delivered before
the U.N. on September 12, 2002. Haideri ?supported his claims with stacks of
Iraqi government contacts, complete with technical specifications,? the study
said.
Chalabi denied that he or his aides, in order to build their case, coached
witnesses or in other ways twisted information. ?We didn?t mislead anyone,? he
said. ?We said we had information. We didn?t say the information was great. We
thought it would be useful.? He stopped short of saying that he believed the
defectors? stories. ?I believed they were who they said they were,? he said. No
defector has come forward to say that Chalabi knowingly spread false stories.
The case of Khidhir Hamza, however, illuminates how information can become
propaganda. Hamza is a nuclear scientist who served as a senior administrator in
Saddam?s nuclear-weapons program during the nineteen-eighties. He defected from
Iraq in 1994. He was at first spurned by the C.I.A., which thought he knew
little of interest. In 1997, he was asked to join the Institute for Science and
International Security, an organization in Washington run by David Albright, a
former nuclear-weapons inspector. When Hamza first started working with him,
Albright told me, his information seemed reliable. In 1998, Hamza even helped
debunk an inflated story offered by another defector, just as Chalabi was trying
to drum up support for the Iraq Liberation Act. ?We saw the claws of Chalabi
then,? Albright said. Someone from the I.N.C., he said, called to upbraid Hamza,
telling him that he had undercut the cause of liberating Iraq. ?Hamza was
shaken, and said he?d never do that again,? Albright told me.
In 1999, Hamza left Albright?s institute to write a memoir, ?Saddam?s
Bombmaker,? with Jeff Stein, a Washington-based author. According to Albright,
many of the claims in the book, including those about the importance of Hamza?s
role, ?were just ridiculous.? Hamza, who had not been involved in Iraq?s nuclear
program for nearly a decade, asserted that Saddam was within years, and possibly
months, of developing a nuclear bomb.
Hamza?s claim was startling. After the first Gulf War, the U.S. learned that
Saddam had attempted to build a nuclear weapon. But his nuclear program was
later dismantled, and by the mid-nineties most experts believed that this threat
had subsided. According to Albright, Francis Brooke ?was involved? in promoting
Hamza?s book. ?It was clear he had a part in it,? he said.
Chalabi?s people helped Hamza to promote his story to the media, and the tale
became widely known. Cheney began giving alarmist speeches about the imminent
Iraqi nuclear threat. On August 26, 2002, he declared that Saddam had ?resumed
his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons,? and might soon be able to engage in
?nuclear blackmail? with his enemies.
Hamza, who had been managing a gas station in Virginia prior to his association
with Albright, began taking high-paying speaking engagements. A former Chalabi
aide said that many of the defectors who had given hyperbolic accounts were
?desperate? people; the I.N.C. offered them a financial lifeline, and, to grab
it, ?many bent their ethical standards.?
Since the war, no evidence of an active Iraqi nuclear program has been found.
Albright said that Hamza has ?been told not to talk about this W.M.D. stuff.?
Last spring, Hamza returned to Iraq. The Coalition Provisional Authority, the
American occupation government, had offered him a top post in the Ministry of
Science and Technology, which gave him partial control of Iraq?s nuclear
industry. According to the London Independent, Hamza failed at the job; he
fought with his colleagues and was frequently absent. This spring, the C.P.A.
did not renew his contract.
Nine days after the attacks of September 11th, Chalabi addressed a meeting of
the Defense Policy Board, an honorary committee of experts that advises Donald
Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense. At the time, Richard Perle was the group?s
chairman. Francis Brooke, who attended the session, said that the Pentagon still
smelled of smoke from Al Qaeda?s attack, and that it was ?a very emotional
meeting.?
Chalabi?s message, which Brooke said the group endorsed, was to skip any
intervention in Afghanistan, where the Taliban had harbored Al Qaeda, and to
proceed immediately with targeting Iraq. A participant at the meeting, who asked
not to be named, recalled that Chalabi made a compelling case that the Americans
would have an easy victory there: ?He said there?d be no resistance, no
guerrilla warfare from the Baathists, and a quick matter of establishing a
government.?
Soon afterward, however, Chalabi began to clash with the Administration. Chalabi
told me that he would have preferred to sell the war to the American people on
philosophical grounds, as a fight against genocidal tyranny and in favor of
bringing democracy to the Arab world, but that this approach was rejected by the
Bush Administration. ?Look, our focus was on Saddam?s crimes, moral crimes,
genocide,? Chalabi said. ?We were not focussed on W.M.D. The U.S. asked us. We
didn?t bring these people up; they asked us! They requested this help from us.?
(He refused to name who made the request.) Francis Brooke said that nobody had
ordered the I.N.C. to focus solely on W.M.D.s. ?I?m a smart man,? he said. ?I
saw what they wanted, and I adapted my strategy.? Last year, in an interview
with Sam Tanenhaus for Vanity Fair, Paul Wolfowitz admitted that the W.M.D.
evidence was not the best argument for the war, but that for bureaucratic
reasons ?we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, which was
weapons of mass destruction.?
As a result, the war was largely marketed domestically as a scare campaign, and
the I.N.C. was enlisted to promote the danger posed by Saddam?s regime. Brooke
said, ?I sent out an all-points bulletin to our network, saying, ?Look, guys,
get me a terrorist, or someone who works with terrorists. And, if you can get
stuff on W.M.D., send it!??
In Washington, many of the war?s supporters, including Jim Hoagland and Fouad
Ajami, a professor of Middle East Studies at Johns Hopkins, have worried about
the triumph of political expediency over idealism. These critics claim that a
war waged in the name of liberation has become a political damage-control
operation. Chalabi himself has attacked the Administration?s plan to transfer
sovereignty to an interim government on June 30th as a sham, crafted for Bush?s
reëlection campaign and not for the Iraqi people. Considering the nature of the
campaign that he and his aides waged to prompt an invasion, however, it?s a bit
late for Chalabi to express such qualms. Jack Blum, a former lawyer for the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told me that the Administration compromised
its vision from the start, by relying on dubious partners such as Chalabi. He
said, ?We ruined what could have had some promise by dealing with all the wrong
people.?
CORRUPTION IN BAGHDAD
Soon after Chalabi returned to his homeland, in January, 2003, allegations of
corruption and criminal behavior began to emerge. A former member of the I.N.C.
said that some of Chalabi?s militia, the Free Iraqi Fighters, had been accused
of looting and robbing their way into Baghdad. He also said that some members of
the militia had stolen a fleet of S.U.V.s that belonged to Saddam?s regime, then
sold them abroad. According to police officers in Baghdad, several of Chalabi?s
men were taken to the Al Baya station and arrested for stealing cars and having
false I.D.s. A C.P.A. official confirmed the incident, and said that more
charges might be added. Chalabi didn?t deny that his troops had engaged in some
misconduct, but he asked, ?What war doesn?t have this? Can you guarantee that no
Coalition soldiers looted anything??
Similar allegations have been made about Chalabi?s ?de-Baathification? program,
a policy he says he devised to bring justice to those in the Sunni ruling class
who had been complicit in Saddam?s crimes. The Defense Intelligence Agency
credits Chalabi?s forces with rounding up more than half of the fifty-five
Baathists placed on a Most Wanted list by the Pentagon. However, two reliable
sources?a former American diplomat and a former member of Chalabi?s militia?said
that de-Baathification had devolved into the confiscation of Sunni assets,
including houses that were expropriated by Chalabi?s aides. Newsweek reported
that an Iraqi official claimed that half a million dollars allocated for de-Baathification
had disappeared. Chalabi denied there was any corruption in the program.
Chalabi told me that he had no business interests in Iraq. ?I am in politics
now,? he said. But several American businessmen involved in ventures in Iraq
said that Chalabi had gained a substantial foothold in the country?s financial
sector, by insuring that relatives and longtime loyalists held key positions.
Chalabi heads the finance committee of the Iraqi Governing Council, a U.S.-appointed
group of twenty-five people representing Iraq?s religious and ethnic factions;
as a result, he was able to install the oil, finance, and trade ministers, as
well as the governor of Iraq?s Central Bank. Ali Allawi, the Minister of Trade
and Defense, is Chalabi?s nephew. Nabeel Musawi, a former I.N.C. spokesman, is a
deputy on the Governing Council. The Central Bank is run by Sinan Shabibi,
another close ally. Chalabi had wanted to nominate Mudar Shawkat, his deputy at
the I.N.C., as Minister of Finance, but a former associate of Chalabi?s told me
that the Iraqi Governing Council had objected. Subsequently, the Los Angeles
Times reported, Shawkat was awarded a large stake in a mobile-phone contract.
Several of Chalabi?s friends have been awarded lucrative contracts. Abdul Huda
Farouki, a Jordanian-American businessman who lives outside Washington, D.C.,
has obtained big stakes in two companies, Nour USA and Erinys Iraq, that will be
paid millions of dollars to supply the Iraqi Army and to secure the country?s
oil infrastructure. Farouki became a friend of Chalabi?s when he took out twelve
million dollars in loans from Petra Bank.
An adviser to the Bush Administration in Iraq said that Chalabi had encountered
little resistance to his cronyism: ?People are scared to death. He may become
Prime Minister still, and he has some very fancy friends.?
Peter Galbraith, the former ambassador, has observed that, historically, ?the
lines drawn between politics and business are different in the Middle East.?
Indeed, allegations of cronyism have been made about many other prominent
players in Baghdad. Chalabi himself accused the C.P.A. of corruption, telling
me, ?There are so many bribes and kickbacks!?
For months, Chalabi?s friends in Washington dismissed the allegations against
him as petty and unfair. Danielle Pletka, an executive at the American
Enterprise Institute, who helped draft the Iraq Liberation Act, said of the
corruption charges, ?I don?t know and I?m not sure it matters. No one said you
have to be a saint to be a patriot.? But Lakhdar Brahimi, the U.N. envoy to
Iraq, took seriously the criticisms of Chalabi. Brahimi, an Algerian Sunni, is
close to the Jordanian leadership who have questioned Chalabi?s honesty since
Petra Bank failed. This spring, Brahimi was asked by the White House to form an
interim government, and he refused to recruit Chalabi, or any other members of
the I.N.C. The White House acquiesced in Brahimi?s refusal, infuriating Chalabi,
whose aides refer to the current U.S. strategy as ?ABC,? or Anybody But Chalabi.
A top State Department official said that, with the Presidential election
looming, the White House was so eager to turn the Iraq mess over to the U.N.
that Brahimi ?could hand us a Safeway list, and we?d give it to him.?
Chalabi lashed out at the U.N. and his American sponsors. He obtained documents
related to the U.N.?s Oil for Food program, which has been accused of extensive
corruption, and he is now holding an investigation into the allegations.
Meanwhile, in an effort to win more street credibility and to forge a new power
base, Chalabi has turned his considerable backroom skills to trying to organize
a potentially explosive coalition of powerful Shiites, called the Shiite
Political Council. Chalabi, who is not religious, spoke to several hundred
Shiite leaders in a packed meeting recently. One observer described his
reception as ?rapturous.? On May 27th, Chalabi participated in a sit-in outside
a mosque in Najaf, insisting that the U.S. end its crackdown against Moqtada al-Sadr,
the radical Shiite cleric. (That afternoon, the U.S. agreed to pull back from
Najaf.)
When Chalabi was asked by CNN about his reinvention of himself as a religious
leader, he said, ?Why is this a concern?? But a former admirer of Chalabi?s was
alarmed by his turn toward Shiite nationalism, and said that his actions risked
unleashing sectarian political strife that could pitch the country into civil
war. He said, ?There?s an irresponsibility in how he?s approaching this. It?s
reckless. Iraq needs a stable government. But Ahmad?s pushing his private agenda
at the cost of the country?s needs.? In Jordan, a former financial official who
dealt with Chalabi on Petra Bank said, ?He?ll become an imam if he has to!?
Chalabi?s embrace of the Shiite faction of Iraq has fed the speculation that he
gave intelligence secrets to Iran, a Shiite theocracy. Aras Habib, the I.N.C.
intelligence chief, has long been suspected of spying for Iran. Chalabi and his
aides dismissed these rumors, claiming that in 2002 Habib had passed a C.I.A.
polygraph test about his relationship with Iran, and that neither he nor Chalabi
had access to U.S. classified materials. For many years, Chalabi has been openly
collegial with reformist leaders in Iran, such as President Mohammad Khatami,
with whom he met last November, in Tehran. He has also admitted to meeting with
the head of Iran?s Ministry of Intelligence and Security. Immediately before the
invasion of Iraq, Chalabi was living in a gated villa in Tehran that he had
persuaded the U.S. to purchase as a satellite branch of the I.N.C.
Chalabi claimed that his relationship with Tehran was purely expedient. ?There
are geopolitical reasons to be friendly with Iran,? he said. ?Iran has the
longest border with Iraq. Also, Iran is a much stronger state than Iraq, with
three times the population. So strategically it?s not a good idea to be on bad
terms. My good relations were not a secret from the U.S.?
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