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.
The alleged leak of U.S. intelligence, though, was the final straw. Chalabi, a Shiite, has had close and public ties with Shiite-dominated Iran. But Chalabi and his operations chief, Aras Karem Habib, deny giving secrets to Iran as well as the other charges. An INC official said in an E-mail to U.S. News: "The charges of passing intel to Iran are entirely false and are part of a smear campaign by the CIA." Habib, the official said, "has passed a polygraph administered by the CIA on his links with Iran." The test was in the fall of 2002, however, when he became the Defense Intelligence Agency's principal INC liaison.
Habib was part of Chalabi's substantial entourage at the base outside Tallil. He assumed the title of commander of the FIFF but told U.S. News he was a civilian engineer. He recounted participating in an ill-fated uprising in 1995, encouraged by the CIA, that was crushed by Saddam. After 132 people were executed, Washington evacuated some fighters to Guam, Habib said. The White House had refused to support the uprising, and the CIA operative on the scene, Robert Baer, got hung out to dry. In his account, See No Evil, Baer says Chalabi concocted a phony plot to kill Saddam in order to entice Iranian officials to back the revolt. That failed, but the White House found out and accused Baer of leading a rogue operation.
In a monumental case of blowback, Chalabi now appears to have been caught in a still-unexplained web--perhaps one of his own making. One U.S. official involved with Iraq and a longtime Chalabi watcher says the exile leader was the sum total of the Pentagon's plan for postwar Iraq. "They didn't care who ran Iraq," the official said, "as long as his initials were [those of] Ahmad Chalabi."
Chalabi's clashes with Washington, ironically, may now raise his standing at home, where anti-Americanism is a definite political plus. So don't count him out yet. Chalabi, in the end, may prove to have more lives than a Persian cat.
With Chitra Ragavan and Julian E. Barnes
This story appears in the June 7, 2004 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.