Everybody Loves Ahmad--Not
Why Chalabi's Washington pals pulled the plug
Once upon a time, Ahmad Chalabi was Washington's man in Iraq. In the early days of the war, a U.S. military C-130 flew the exile leader and his private militia of 620 Iraqis--appealingly called the Free Iraqi Fighting Force--to Tallil air base outside Nasiriyah. U.S. Special Forces, who showed up the next day to train and arm the militia, were stunned to find that Chalabi was part of the deal. The plan was to put the FIFF to work at checkpoints. Chalabi, however, had other plans: The FIFF was to accompany him, he insisted, to Baghdad.
As he did almost every day of his stay at the bombed-out air base, Chalabi rang up Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz on his Thuraya satellite phone to gripe. And it worked. In the end, a FIFF platoon traveled with Chalabi to Baghdad, where the Bush administration installed him on the interim Iraqi Governing Council. As recently as January, he showcased his powerful Washington connections, sitting directly behind first lady Laura Bush at the president's State of the Union address.
That may have been Chalabi's high point. Today he's in big trouble over his alleged dealings with Iran, and he faces still more trouble at home over suspected corruption. A police raid on Chalabi's headquarters in Baghdad was carried out with the approval of the top U.S. official there.
This time, no one in Washington is taking Chalabi's calls--his entree with the most powerful men in government appears over. A source in his group, the Iraqi National Congress, says "no one from the INC has been in touch with Mr. Wolfowitz since January." Senior administration officials may come to rue their support of the controversial Iraqi, who has at different times been on the payroll of the CIA, the State Department, and the Defense Intelligence Agency. Washington, a town famous for hot-potato politics, has dropped Chalabi like a stone.
That's because Chalabi's organization is suspected of having passed highly classified intelligence to the Iranian government. The FBI has opened a counterintelligence investigation--agents want to know if officials in Washington gave Chalabi government secrets. According to a Defense Department source, investigators are focusing on Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith. Feith and Wolfowitz have been Chalabi's most ardent supporters, along with former Pentagon adviser and prominent neoconservative Richard Perle. Through a spokesman, Feith said that his last communication with Chalabi was in Baghdad last August and that it would not be appropriate to comment on any investigation. A U.S. military intelligence official said: "It wasn't our business to provide them with information; they were supporting us."
Questions. Separately, the U.S. General Accounting Office is trying to determine whether the INC misused some of the $33 million Washington paid it over the years, as part of the Iraq Liberation Act--legislation that the exile group adroitly and almost single-handedly steered through Congress in 1998. And the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is set to criticize the INC-supplied intelligence--such as key information on alleged--but still-unfound--mobile bioweapons labs. Gen. Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, did credit the INC with providing information on threats to American soldiers in postwar Iraq. Chalabi had captured a trove of documents from the old regime and was aggressively using them to track down Saddam Hussein loyalists--and sometimes, according to his foes, to blackmail them.
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