[A-List] Iraq: it's all Chalabi's fault!

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

It doesn't say much for the quality of US leadership that, not only are we
expected to believe that it was duped by Ahmad Chalabi and Iranian
intelligence, but also that this absolves the US leadership of
responsibility for the deepening mess.

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The trail to Tehran

He was Washington's favourite Iraqi, a prized intelligence source and a
dream post-Saddam leader. Now his former CIA masters are rubbishing him,
saying he helped Iran trick the US into war. No one, says Iraq expert Andrew
Cockburn, should be surprised

Wednesday May 26, 2004
The Guardian

In the aftermath of last week's raid by Iraqi's police and US forces on the
elegant Baghdad mansion currently inhabited by Ahmad Chalabi (it actually
belongs to his sister), his angry spokesman cited as evidence of the
intruders' barbarity the fact that they seized "even his holy Koran - his
personal holy Koran was taken as a document".

If reports that US intelligence has at last woken up to Chalabi's Iranian
connection are true, then taking his Koran may have been more than personal
spite, since, according to a former close associate, the Pentagon's
erstwhile favorite Iraqi owns one bearing an affectionate inscription from
the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini himself, evidence of how deep and long
standing a relationship he has had with the Islamic Republic. "Ahmad helped
Iran very much during the war [the Iran/Iraq war of the 1980s]," recalls
this former associate and friend. "Khomeini was very pleased, and he sent
him a copy of the Holy Koran inscribed 'To My Son Ahmed.'"

Another former colleague who, like so many, has subsequently fallen out with
Chalabi, explains that, "It was during the Iraq/Iran war that Ahmad
discovered the value of information as a commodity, that it was something
you could trade, buy and sell, and he has used that ever since."

Chalabi has vehemently rejected allegations that he was operating on behalf
of Tehran as "a lie a fib and silly". He has accused the CIA director George
Tenet of conducting a smear campaign against him. During that war, Chalabi
was resident in Amman, busily trading the Petra bank into a bankruptcy that
eventually almost collapsed the Jordanian economy. But he was also endearing
himself to US officials in Amman with the quality of his intelligence on the
war. "I could get an answer on any question about what was going on in 10
minutes out of Ahmad," recalls one former US ambassador with affection.

By the end of 1991, Chalabi was deep in business with the CIA, following up
on an opportunity he had scented early on. "The United States is prepared to
allocate substantial sums for the Iraqi opposition," he confided to an
opposition activist soon after the 1991 war. "We should go for that money."
The Langley spooks liked what they saw in him - his efficiency, his
readiness to tell interlocutors what they wanted to hear, not to mention the
source of his cash. The presumption that Chalabi's activities were funded by
money embezzled from the Petra bank ensured that few initially suspected his
true sponsor: the CIA. (Chalabi has always maintained that the charges
brought against him in relation to the Petra bank affair were politically
motivated.) His new handlers showed no sign of being bothered about his
links to Iran, not even after he moved to the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan
in 1992 and recruited a Shia Kurd named Arras Karim Habib to organise his
security and intelligence.

"Arras was brought up in Iran. He was always an Iranian agent," insists a
fellow veteran of those days in the mountains, "a double agent really, for
both the Iranians and the Americans, but always for the Iranians first."
"The CIA knew that Arras was an Iranian agent from the early 90s," says Bob
Baer, a longtime covert operator who, for a period in the mid 1990s, was the
senior CIA official posted to northern Iraq. "They were really pissed about
it, pissed about Chalabi's dealing with the Iranians in general, like the
time he forged a letter from the National Security Council saying that the
NSC had authorised the assassination of Saddam Hussein and left it on his
desk for the Iranians to find." Meanwhile, Baer discovered that while the
CIA was paying Chalabi an extortionate rent, the Iranian intelligence
contingent in the mountain town of Salahaddin, where the INC was based, were
enjoying their quarters gratis, courtesy of Chalabi.

The CIA may have thought that at least Chalabi was serving his two masters
to the same end: opposition to the regime of Saddam Hussein. But an obscure
episode in the hunt for Saddam's banned weapons during those years points to
the Iranians' use of Chalabi in something far more serious: the manipulation
of US foreign policy through the production of fake intelligence. It was an
operation that may ultimately have helped bring about the invasion and
occupation of Iraq.

Early in the winter of 1994, Chalabi had a visitor from Baghdad named Khidir
Hamza, who announced himself as a senior member of Saddam's nuclear weapons
team with much to reveal about the ongoing bomb programme being pursued by
the dictator under the noses of the UN inspection teams. Chalabi in turn
handed him to one of the resident spooks, who contacted Langley to see if
they were interested in sponsoring this defector. After quizzing Hamza over
the shortwave radio, a CIA nuclear expert at headquarters concluded that
Hamza had nothing to offer and declined to assist his passage to the US.

It was a wise decision. As veterans of the Iraqi bomb program have
subsequently revealed, Hamza grossly exagerrated his nuclear bombmaking
credentials while downplaying the role his Ba'athist connections had played
in advancing his scientific career. Imad Khadduri, the Iraqi nuclear
physicist in charge of all documentation for the bomb project later
scathingly reported that Hamza had a "deep inner fear of radiation" which
"prevented him from ever entering the reactor hall or touching any
scientific gadgets, probably due to his continual fear of an electric jolt
that he experienced as a child". This paranoia, a significant drawback for a
nuclear weapons builder, meant that his work was confined to theoretical
research, well away from any actual experimentation. "He did not," says
Khadduri, "even remotely, get involved in any scientific research, except
for journalistic articles, dealing with the fission bomb, its components or
its effects."

Cultivating a relationship with Hussein Kamal, Saddam's loutish cousin who
was for a period all powerful as head of the weapons programmes and much
else beside, Hamza nevertheless served briefly as head of the bomb design
team in 1987, before being relegated to a makework job before being sacked,
according to Khadduri, for filching air conditioners from the office. He
then sank into obscurity before surfacing in Kurdistan in 1994.

Even though the nuclear experts in Langley rejected him as an intelligence
source, documents provided by him found their way to the International
Atomic Energy Agency's teams investigating the Iraqi bomb programme. Early
in 1995, an IAEA "Action Team" descended on the offices of the Iraqi nuclear
programme in Baghdad. They had with them a 20-page document that apparently
originated from inside "Group 4," the Iraqi government department that had
been responsible for designing Saddam's nuclear bomb. The stationery, page
numbering, and stamps all appeared authentic, according to one senior member
of the Iraqi bomb team.
"It was a 'progress report,'" he recalls, "about 20 pages, on the work in
Group 4 departments on the results of their continued work after 1991. It
referred to results of experiments on the casting of the hemispheres [ie the
bomb core of enriched uranium] with some crude diagrams." As evidence that
Iraq was successfully pursuing a nuclear bomb in defiance of sanctions and
the inspectors, it was damning. However, after a thorough investigation, the
IAEA concluded that the document, as one official recently confirmed to me
by email, was "determined not to be authentic." The official later told me
on the phone that the document originated with Khidir Hamza, a point
confirmed by an Action Team veteran.

The IAEA had an excellent source to confirm that the document was forged -
none other than Hamza's old boss, Hussein Kamal. In August, 1995, Kamal,
until then considered to be the second most powerful man in Iraq, defected
to Jordan. Soon after his arrival, the former Iraqi weapons supremo spoke
freely to senior UN inspection officials. In one session, the IAEA's
Professor Maurizio Zifferero showed Kamal the document. Kamal, according to
the transcript, immediately recognised it as a forgery, a view in which the
official concurred, adding that "Dr Khidir Abdul Abbas Hamza is related to
this document".

"He is a professional liar," said Kamal. "He worked with us, but he was
useless and was always looking for promotions. He consulted with me but
could not deliver anything."

Kamal suggested that the document might have been faked by Egyptian
intelligence, but the Iraqi scientists had found clues pointing in another
direction. Some of the technical descriptions used terms that would only be
used by an Iranian. "Most notable," says Khadduri, "was the use of the term
'dome' - 'Qubba' in Iranian, instead of 'hemisphere' - 'Nisuf Kura' in
Arabic." In other words, the document had to have been originally written in
Farsi by an Iranian scientist and then translated into Arabic.

The Iranians, it seemed, were supplying fake information designed to show
that Saddam was pursuing his efforts to build weapons of mass destruction,
and therefore the onerous UN economic sanctions, despite their civilian
toll, should be kept in place.

There is no evidence that Hamza, who eventually found his way to the United
States and a lucrative career as "Saddam's Bombmaker," ever visited Iran.
But, while roosting at Chalabi's headquarters in northern Iraq, he had been
in close proximity to many Iranian agents, including of course (according to
the CIA) Arras Karem Habib.

In subsequent years, of course Chalabi produced a stream of defectors
attesting to Saddam's iniquitous weapons initiatives. Though their stories
turned out to be utterly fallacious, they had a superficial credibility, the
product, as one former UN inspector told me, of "very skillful coaching".

Chalabi was not shy about his Iranian intelligence connections. "When I met
him in December 1997 he said he had tremendous connections with Iranian
intelligence," recalls Scott Ritter, the former UN weapons inspector. "He
said that some of his best intelligence came from the Iranians and offered
to set up a meeting for me with the head of Iranian intelligence." Had
Ritter made the trip (the CIA refused him permission), he would have been
dealing with Chalabi's chums in Iranian Revolutionary Guard intelligence, a
faction which regarded Saddam with a venomous hatred spawned both by the
bloody war of the 1980s and the Iraqi dictator's continuing support of the
terrorist Mojaheddin Khalq group.

The CIA knew, as Bob Baer makes clear, that Chalabi had close Iranian
connections. They knew that before the war he had meetings with Iranian
intelligence officials, including the Revolutionary Guard intelligence
official responsible for Iraq, General Sirdar Jaffari. But whatever their
distaste for their former protege, they were unable to counter his influence
and favour with the neo-conservatives clustered in the Pentagon and
Vice-President Cheney's office who were beguiled by Chalabi.

Only in recent weeks has Chalabi's increasingly disruptive performance in
Baghdad, denouncing the efforts of UN envoy Lakhdar Ibrahim to craft a post
June 30 settlement, goaded the administration into abandoning their friend,
permitting the raid on his house and the leaking of reports that he has been
funneling American secrets to Tehran. After serving, or using, two masters
for so long, Chalabi is now linked only with Iran, a position which may
serve him well in garnering support among the Iraqi Shia masses.

Baer, who served in the CIA outpost in the mid 1990s, says that "a lot of
people in the CIA believe that the Iranians used Chalabi, and or Arras, to
manipulate us into a war. Maybe they just thought they were steering us to
keep up the pressure on Saddam, keeping him under sanctions and no fly
zones, never dreaming that he would actually get the US to go to war and put
the US army right on the Iranian border. It's the law of unintended
consequences."

· Andrew Cockburn is co-author with Patrick Cockburn of Saddam Hussein: An
American Obsession, published by Verso Books.

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Chalabi 'boasted of Iranian spy link'

Iraqi accused by CIA made claim in 1997, says former inspector

Julian Borger in Washington
Wednesday May 26, 2004
The Guardian

Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi leader accused by the CIA of passing US secrets to
Tehran, claimed to have close links with Iranian intelligence seven years
ago, according to a former UN weapons inspector.

Scott Ritter, who before the war insisted that Saddam Hussein did not have
significant weapons stocks, made the claim to Andrew Cockburn, a
Washington-based journalist and the author of a biography of the ousted
Iraqi dictator.

"When I met [Mr Chalabi] in December 1997 he said he had tremendous
connections with Iranian intelligence," Mr Ritter said, according to an
article by Mr Cockburn published today in the Guardian. "He said that some
of his best intelligence came from the Iranians and offered to set up a
meeting for me with the head of Iranian intelligence."

Mr Chalabi has repeatedly denied passing secrets to the Iranians and has
denounced the allegations made by US intelligence officials as a CIA
"smear".

He also denied providing false information about weapons of mass destruction
to the US.

He said he only put the CIA in touch with three defectors, who were believed
to have had critical information. The FBI and US intelligence agencies are
re-examining information provided by or channelled through Mr Chalabi's
Iraqi National Congress, to determine whether the decision to go to war in
Iraq was influenced by Iran.

Mr Ritter told the Guardian he stood by his allegation. He said he never
made the trip to Iran because the CIA refused permission.

Meanwhile, both Democratic and Republican senators have called for an
investigation into the alleged links between Mr Chalabi and Iranian
intelligence.

US intelligence officials have said they have hard evidence that Mr Chalabi
passed US secrets to Tehran, and that his intelligence chief, Aras Karim
Habib, was an Iranian agent. Mr Habib is being sought by Iraqi police, and
according to one American press report is now in Tehran.

"This is a very, very serious charge," Senator Chuck Hagel, a moderate
Republican from Nebraska, told CNN. "There is no way the Senate intelligence
committee is not going to be in this."

The Pentagon defends the INC's intelligence input. An official said
yesterday: "We should point out that the INC has provided valuable
intelligence that has saved coalition lives and has provided great
quantities of documents from Saddam's regime that are of great value."

Mr Chalabi has offered to travel to Washington to deny the allegations and
make his case directly to Congress.

Richard Perle, a former adviser to the Pentagon, and one of the INC's most
outspoken backers in the capital, said he did not believe the CIA's
allegations against Mr Chalabi.

"I believe they have been hostile to Ahmad Chalabi for a long time and are
not to be trusted on this and I think they are seeking to transfer
responsibility for their own intelligence failures to others," Mr Perle told
BBC Radio 4's Today programme yesterday.

According to US intelligence sources, the FBI has opened an investigation
into the leak of secret information to the INC from within the
administration.

A Pentagon official said yesterday he was not aware of any investigation.

Patrick Lang, former head of the Middle East desk at the Defence
Intelligence Agency (DIA), said the agency was re-examining prewar
intelligence provided by the INC in the light of the CIA's findings of a
link with Iranian intelligence.

"The people investigating this aren't sure yet, but the investigation is
under way, and the DIA are looking through its documents and realising
they've been had," Mr Lang said.

"If it turns out to be true, it was certainly a genius operation. [The
Iranians] created an anti-Saddam opposition to get rid of him, and they got
us to pay for it."

A Pentagon official confirmed that a "reassessment process" was under way,
but refused to give details.