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MAY 29: 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 Scott Ritter, a former UN
weapons inspector.
"When I met [Mr Chalabi] in December 1997 he said he had tremendous
connections with Iranian intelligence," Mr Ritter said, according
to an article published in the Guardian, UK. "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.
Now his Baghdad home has been raided, it seems on US
orders, amid whispers from Washington that he all along duped the
Americans by spying for the Iranians.
All lies, Mr Chalabi says, and a smear by the CIA.
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.
 To be fair, Mr Chalabi's was not the only exile group
furnishing intelligence.
The Iraqi National Accord came up with the contact on the famous 45
minutes claim, for instance.
Interestingly, Iraqi National Accord's founding member, who happens to
be the 58-year old wealthy secular Shia former exile Iyad Allawi, was
unanimously nominated by the Iraqi Governing Council yesterday as the
interim prime minister of Iraq.
The Bush administration appeared to be caught off guard and somewhat
confused yesterday when the announcement was made by the Council
nominating Allawi a physician with longtime CIA ties as the
post-occupation prime minister. Officials in Washington scrambled to
respond after the Iraqis took the public lead in a process that was
supposed to be run by a U.N. envoy.
The UN response has been cool, speaking only of "respect" for the
decision.
"I'm pleased that Mr Allawi has that kind of support," US secretary of
state Mr Colin Powell told reporters in Washington.
"We have no position on any candidate at this moment because we are
waiting to hear from Ambassador Brahimi and he needs time to complete
his work."
Mr Allawi - a British-educated neurologist had left Iraq after turning
against Saddam Hussein in the 1970s.
In 1978, while living in London, Mr Allawi survived an
assassination allegedly ordered by Saddam Hussein.
He later became a founding member of the Iraqi National Accord, a
group of exiles backed by US and British intelligence that included
many former military officers opposed to the Baghdad regime.
In 1996 he participated in a failed attempt by the CIA to overthrow
Saddam Hussein.
Allawi also happens to be a relative of Ahmed Chalabi but
is a bitter political rival.
His cousin, Ali Allawi, runs the defence ministry presently.
Both Allawi and Chalabi however reach out to the same political forces
in Iraq for their survival, says some observers. It is therefore
possible, that the Coalition let Allawi have an edge in order to
marginalize Chalabi who is in the dog house now.
Mr Allawi, who
has strong links with senior Iraqi military officers, has been busy
picking up the remnants of the old Baath Party, building links to
Iraqi trade unions and seeking good relations with the Sunni minority
that dominated the country under Saddam.
In recent months he has also
been busy creating a new version of the secret police. Though Iraq is
bound to need a counter-insurgency force, Mr Allawi's rivals have
accused him of recruiting former torturers to man a new apparatus of
oppression.
 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.
Mr Chalabi has offered to travel to Washington to deny the
allegations and make his case directly to Congress.
If the information was dodgy, says Mr Chalabi, the
Americans should have checked it out more thoroughly.
On the face of it, nothing singles out Mr Chalabi's ties with Iran
either. His contacts were not a secret.
He is not nearly as close to Tehran as another exile group, the
Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, whose headquarters
were based in Iran till the war ended.
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 news reports, the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA),
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," a former DIA official
has 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."
According to International Herald Tribune, UK's respected newspaper, the fall from grace of Ahmad Chalabi,
known until recently as America's best friend in Iraq, is
being described as an error of judgment belatedly corrected.
But this is not an isolated incident of the United States making a
mistake in its choice of overseas friend, nor of deserting him, says
IHT.
The United States has embraced numerous characters of dubious
integrity, from President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines to
the shah of Iran, only to be accused by these erstwhile allies
of abandoning them when the going gets rough. While they are
friends, the United States claims they are "good guys." When it
dumps them, it feels compelled to blame them for some evil
action.
Pakistan's late dictator, Field Marshal Ayub Khan, suggested
that the United States was unable to give assistance to people
in developing countries "on the basis of mutual respect";
Americans, he said, did not know how to be "friends, not
masters." Perhaps the Chalabi affair will prompt some thinking
in Washington about how not to choose a "bad" friend in the
first place, and how to avoid giving the impression that its
allies have duped the United States. Washington also needs to
figure out a way of cutting ties with undesirable allies without
deepening the impression that America does not stand by its
friends.
The shah of Iran, restored to the throne in 1953 as absolute
monarch in a CIA-backed coup, complained in his last days that
he was overthrown through American machinations. Marcos, backed
for long years by the United States despite his corrupt and
authoritarian regime, felt the same way when his regime
collapsed in 1986. Panama's dictator, Manuel Noriega, went from
being a paid U.S. intelligence asset to an outlaw - he is
currently serving a prison term in Florida for drug trafficking.
The Bush administration supported and defended Ahmad Chalabi, no
questions asked, right up to the recent decision to cut off his
funding, followed by accusations of secret links with Iran.
In an imperfect world, America has to support some leaders
who do not meet its criteria for honest, democratic leadership.
Chalabi, however, was not the unsavory ruler of a strategically
important country. He was an exile adopted as a friend by a U.S.
faction because he provided it with arguments that advanced
their strategic vision. But even if the intention behind the
neoconservative vision for war in Iraq - the creation of an Arab
democracy - was noble, its Iraqi architect, Chalabi, was far
from an above-board ally. A nation like the United States, which
claims a moral purpose in the world, cannot afford to let ends
justify the means.
Also read:
 Opinion: Bush being ambushed?
When allegations about Chalabi's integrity first surfaced,
his backers should have at least qualified their support for
him. While insisting on seeing a world of gray in terms of black
and white, they chose to whitewash Chalabi's record. His lack of
support among Iraqis was glossed over. The inability to verify
his intelligence was ignored. And no one in the U.S. government
or the U.S. media adequately questioned Chalabi's past financial
dealings.
This unqualified support for Chalabi until the recent break
with him reflects a major problem in American relations with the
world. The United States does not have sufficient nuance in its
friendships, nor does it seem to know how to distance itself
from friends it no longer needs.
Ideally, America's friends abroad should share America's
proclaimed values. But when the United States is forced to join
hands with unsavory characters for strategic reasons, it should
not become their unquestioning advocate. In international
relations, there are many categories between friend and rogue.
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