Intelligence

The Pentagon favourite who fell from grace

By Andrew Cockburn
The co-author of Out of the Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein, offers a personal view of Ahmed Chalabi, the ‘ultimate chameleon’ who has never been short of surprises

AHMED CHALABI used to be the darling of the Pentagon. He was the Iraqi exile who provided Washington’s hawks with the “intelligence” they craved to justify Saddam Hussein’s removal. He was their postwar favourite to lead a new democratic Iraq.
As recently as January he was seated right behind Laura Bush at her husband’s State of the Union speech, and basked in the applause of Congress. But this week his old friends publicly humiliated him, first by cutting off his funding and then by raiding his Baghdad headquarters.

The fall from grace of this suave former banker mirrors the fate of Washington’s vision for Iraq. The coalition failed to find the weapons of mass destruction he promised. Iraqis rejected the leadership of US-backed exiles like himself. Since this week’s very public breach of his relationship with Washington, Chalabi has now joined the calls for US troops to leave Iraq, but the story may not end there.

The fear now is that this ultimate chameleon will adopt his most destructive role yet: playing the sectarian card in volatile Iraq to become the standard-bearer of Shia hardliners.

It would certainly be a mistake to write Chalabi off. His political obituary has been written many times before. Indeed his career appeared definitively over when he was convicted (in absentia) on 31 counts of fraud and embezzlement by a Jordanian court in 1992, having earlier fled Jordan in the boot of a friend’s car.

But shortly after he emerged as the chosen leader of the CIA-sponsored Iraqi National Congress (INC). To anyone who inquired about his Jordanian conviction, he pleaded total innocence, dismissing the entire case as merely a political manoeuvre orchestrated by Saddam and executed by Saddam’s lackey, King Hussein.

In 1995 he infuriated his US paymasters with a unilateral attempt to draw the US into war with Saddam, launching an incursion from the Kurdish north designed to draw the Americans into the fray. A year later Saddam himself chased Chalabi and his motley forces out of their base in northern Iraq, massacring many in the process.

Again, Chalabi was able to convince enough people in the media and right-wing US political circles that he bore no responsibility for these disasters to enable him to maintain his position as a recognised Iraqi opposition leader.

Inside the exiled opposition, however, many colleagues were driven away by his inability to accept anyone as an equal partner, rather than an employee. “Ahmed”, a fellow opposition activist, once said to him at a meeting in London: “In your heart there is a little Saddam.” The CIA finally cut off all funding shortly after the 1996 debacle, and yet within two years his conservative allies persuaded the US Congress to vote the INC $97 million (£54 million) in support and subsidies. A subsequent State Department investigation found much that was fishy in Chalabi’s accounting for the money he received, which further added to the disdain with which he was treated both at the State Department and the CIA.

Yet, true to form, Chalabi rose like a phoenix once more, this time on a wave of war fever emanating from the neoconservative hawks thronging Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon and the office of Vice-President Dick Cheney.

The intelligence he supplied on Saddam’s weapons and links to terror did much to lubricate the slide to war, but it turned out to be wholly false, as did Chalabi’s claims of widespread popular support in Iraq. Even so, he remained on the Pentagon payroll and was promoted by Paul Bremer, the coalition chief, to membership of the Governing Council. Sitting in the VIP’s gallery at President Bush’s State of the Union speech five months ago, The Washington Post noted that he looked “vastly pleased with himself”.

Chalabi’s prolonged tenure as an American protégé seems all the more remarkable given his long, close and barely concealed association with the reigning ayatollahs in Iran. This was hardly a secret. He has claimed to friends to possess a Koran affectionately autographed by Ayatollah Khomeini himself in gratitude for services rendered. CIA agents stationed at his headquarters in northern Iraq in the mid- 1990s found themselves living cheek by jowl with resident Iranian intelligence agents enjoying Chalabi’s hospitality (he made the CIA pay rent).

Later, he boasted to UN weapons inspectors of his close links to Iranian intelligence. There is even evidence to suggest that some of the fraudulent intelligence passed to the inspectors with Chalabi’s help was made in Iran. In 1995, International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors found that a document supplied by a Chalabi-sponsored defector that purported to show a secret and illegal Iraqi bomb programme in full swing could only have been forged with Iranian assistance.

Ensconced in one of his family homes in Baghdad after last year’s invasion (his “Free Iraq Forces”, notoriously lawless, ultimately seized 45 buildings in the Iraqi capital alone), Chalabi soon began manoeuvring to shed his prevalent image as an American stooge. By September he was becoming openly critical of US occupation policy, while his aides scorned Bremer as “anti-Muslim and anti-Arab”.

Though some of his American friends appreciated his need to strike an independent pose, others were less charmed. In November, according to one senior member of the Governing Council, President Bush told King Abdullah of Jordan: “You can piss on Chalabi.”

In November he secured control of the Governing Council’s de-Baathification committee, giving him arbitary power over the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of former members of Saddam’s party.

He was also taking steps to bolster both his finances (not that he was ever poor, even after his Jordanian escapade) and his control over the nascent Iraqi state apparatus. No one has ever questioned his considerable executive skills and drive, which he swiftly deployed in key areas.

Securing the influential position of chairman of the finance committee of the Governing Council, he inserted loyal acolytes into commanding positions in the economy, including most importantly the Minister of Finance, (a former waiter in an Amman restaurant), and the Minister of Oil, whose father, a genial cleric named Mohammed Bahr al-Uloom, he had once helped with a mortgage back in the days of exile in London.

His influence over the oil ministry, custodian of Iraq’s incalculable oil wealth, was amply demonstrated when he orchestrated the removal of a senior but inconveniently principled official in charge of oil sales. Oil traders took further note when his right hand man, Nabil Mousawi, began travelling to Opec meetings with the minister.

Around Baghdad last winter, it was easy to find businessmen who would grumble that “Ahmed wants it all”. Few believed that there was any serious rift between him and the Americans, despite the embarrassment over non-existent weapons of mass destruction, especially when would-be bidders on contracts for the new Iraqi army were told by American coalition authority officials that they had to go through Ahmed Chalabi, or when Abdul Huda Farouki, his close friend and business associate, secured the main supply contract for the new army.

While he still deployed his charm and articulate delivery in Washington when necessary, Chalabi’s arrogance, never quiescent, was rising to the fore on his native ground, where he was behaving increasingly like a warlord.

Last January, for example, he directed his 70-man personal bodyguard to go and shoot up the offices of Baghdad’s new cellphone company down the street from his house. The phone company security guards had allegedly been disrespectful to his nephew’s driver, so he casually issued a command to “educate them” and retired to take a nap. The affray only ended after 7,000 rounds had been fired and four telephone company guards seriously wounded.

As the Iraqi situation deteriorated in spring, Chalabi came under increasing blame in the US media over his role in supplying the fraudulent intelligence that had originally justified the ill-fated invasion. In vain he protested, not totally unreasonably, that it should have been up to the CIA to analyse intelligence — he had merely provided the defectors.

At home, meanwhile, he was hitching his star to that of the Shia hero Ayatollah Sistani, echoing the venerable cleric’s call for early elections while Chalabi aides boasted of his certain victory in any nationwide poll. (Iraqi opinion polls pegged his unpopularity as three times greater than that of Saddam Hussein.) As his relationship with Washington deteriorated, his enemies there moved to cut off his $340,000 monthly Pentagon stipend and leaked news that intelligence had detected him passing sensitive American security information to his old chums in Iran.

Inexorably, Chalabi migrated further and further into the Shia sectarian camp, casting himself as the Ian Paisley of Iraqi Shia politics. After the horrific bombing of Shia pilgrims in Kerbala and Baghdad in March, a radio address by one of his aides came close to threatening Sunnis with civil war.

More recently, his conduct has become increasingly threatening in the eyes of the occupation, especially after UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi made it clear that there would be no place for Chalabi in a post-June 30 Iraqi government.

In response he stepped up efforts to discredit the UN by publicising details of the UN-administered Oil-for-Food scandal and simultaneously recruited a “Supreme Shia Council”, modelled on a similar institution in Lebanon born during that country’s bloody civil war. Chalabi’s council includes not only some allies from the Governing Council, but also Iraqi Hezbollah and a faction of the Dawa party considered close to the rebel cleric Hojatoleslam Moqtada al-Sadr.

According to one Iraqi source familiar with this undertaking, Chalabi has been telling adherents that Brahimi is part of a Sunni conspiracy to deny the Shia their rights.

“Since Brahimi excluded Chalabi from any prospect of a place in the new government,” a former senior INC official pointed out to me yesterday, Chalabi had entered “a very destructive phase,” mobilising forces to make sure the UN initiative — details of which Brahimi is due to announce shortly — fails.

This former Chalabi associate also points out that “he knows that, sooner or later, Hojattoleslam al-Sadr is going to be killed, that will leave tens, hundreds of thousands of his followers adrift, looking for a new leader. If Ahmed plays the role of victim after this (Thursday’s raid) he can take on that role.”

It seems a strange journey for the man who formerly impressed Western acquaintances with his encyclopaedic knowledge of subjects such as medieval Japan and higher mathematics to end up following in the footsteps of an uncouth clerical mob-leader. But Ahmed Chalabi has never been short of surprises.

US ACCUSED

Baghdad: Iraq’s interim Governing Council blamed the coalition yesterday for the raids on Ahmed Chalabi’s home and offices. “The Council unanimously condemned the raids on Mr Chalabi’s home and holds the coalition authorities responsible,” said Samir al-Askari, a council representative.

Mr al-Askari said that the Governing Council would hold talks with Paul Bremer, the US administrator in Iraq, to ensure that “such incidents do not happen again”. Mr al-Askari contradicted claims by General Richard Myers, the head of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, that the raids had been ordered by the Iraqi interior minister. (AFP)

Copyright 2004 Times Newspapers Ltd.

May 26, 2004 at 07:42 PM in Iraq | Permalink | TrackBack (32) | Top of page | Blog Home