The Rise And Fall Of Chalabi: Bush's Mr. Wrong

But Saddam's henchmen underestimated Chalabi's wiles and staying power. He may be a dandy, but he is also a nervy risk taker. If he reinvents himself as an Iraqi patriot, his moral shortcomings may even be overlooked by history. Who remembers that in his day, Simon Bolivar, the liberator of South America, was regarded as a crook? Engaging scoundrels can be effective, if they don't get killed by the enemies they make (or fool) along the way.

Chalabi has not always charmed his patrons. His first run as a CIA asset in the early- and mid-' 90s was a disaster. Chalabi's attempts to foment an insurrection were aborted in a fiasco still known around the agency as the "Bay of Goats." His case officers didn't trust him. "There was a lot of hanky-panky with the accounting: triple billing, things that weren't mentioned, things inflated... It was a nightmare," says a former U.S. intelligence official who worked with Chalabi. "His primary focus was to drag us into a war that [President] Clinton didn't want to fight."

Chalabi had more luck with a group of Republican hard-liners who formed a kind of government-in-exile in the 1990s. So-called neoconservatives like Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, the veteran bureaucratic infighter known in the Reagan administration as the "Prince of Darkness," were drawn to Chalabi's ideas. Several, like Wolfowitz and Doug Feith, a then obscure Washington lawyer who had once worked for Perle at the Pentagon--and now serves--as under secretary of Defense for policy--began talking about a speech Chalabi gave to the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs in June 1997. In that speech, Chalabi promised that Saddam could be overthrown on the cheap if the United States dared back a guerrilla force led by Chalabi. (Feith told NEWSWEEK that he found Chalabi's vision of post-Saddam Iraq to be "quite moving.") A side benefit, Chalabi suggested in his conversations with the neocons, would be an Arab country friendly to Israel. Soon Chalabi was dining from time to time with Perle, a fellow epicure.

But Chalabi was broke, or nearly so. In 1998 he and his friends skillfully lobbied Congress to provide funding for his organization, the Iraqi National Congress. The Iraq Liberation Act passed with overwhelming support from Democrats and Republicans. It was seen as an easy vote, giving the appearance of taking a stand against Saddam without actually having to do much.

Clinton had no intention of going to war with Iraq. Bush might not have either, but for 9/11. Before the terrorists struck, Bush administration policy toward Iraq consisted mostly of a futile attempt by Secretary of State Colin Powell to fiddle with sanctions against Iraq before the United Nations dropped them altogether. But the neocons in the Bush cabinet, led by Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz, were ready to march on Baghdad before the World Trade Center stopped smoldering. President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary Rumsfeld were all itching to show off American strength. The rest of the government and the American people needed some persuading. Ever the opportunist, Chalabi came along to tell the war hawks just what they wanted to hear--and to provide the sort of frightening "evidence" that could galvanize the nation into action.

Chalabi is an expert manipulator who knows how to work the press as well as congressmen, lobbyists and think-tankers. He began coming up with Iraqi defectors who told reporters stories of Saddam's allying with terrorists and stockpiling weapons of mass destruction. After lurid stories appeared in the press (and softened up bureaucratic skepticism in the government), Chalabi would pass on the defectors to American intelligence agencies. Thus, in December 2001, Chalabi produced a defector who told The New York Times that he had seen biological- and nuclear-weapons labs hidden around Baghdad, including one underneath a hospital. The defector later became a source for the Defense Intelligence Agency. To Vanity Fair, Chalabi peddled another defector, a supposed former general in the Iraqi secret police, who told of terrorists-in-training practicing to hijack passenger aircraft at a secret base near Baghdad. (The defector, Abu Zeinab, was dismissed by the CIA as a "bulls----er," according to an intelligence source; newly coached by the INC, he went back to the CIA and was again rejected.)