Ahmed Chalabi

Ahmed Abdel Hadi Chalabi ( ar, أحمد عبد الهادي الجلبي; 30 October 1945 – 3 November 2015) was an Iraqi politician, a founder of the Iraqi National Congress (INC) who served as the President of the Governing Council of Iraq ( 37th Prime Minister of Iraq) and a Deputy Prime Minister of Iraq under Ibrahim al-Jaafari.

He was interim Minister of Oil in Iraq in April–May 2005 and December 2005 – January 2006 and Deputy Prime Minister from May 2005 to May 2006. Chalabi failed to win a seat in parliament in the December 2005 elections, and when the new Iraqi cabinet was announced in May 2006, he was not given a post. Once dubbed the "George Washington of Iraq” by American supporters, he was initially a CIA-backed operative, who later fell out of favor, with US Special Forces raiding his private residence in Baghdad only one year after the invasion of Iraq, he later came under investigation by several U.S. government agencies after switching his allegiances to become an instrument of pro-Iranian influence in Iraqi politics.

In the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Iraqi National Congress (INC), with the assistance of lobbying powerhouse BKSH & Associates,Adam Roston
Chalabi's Lobby
‘’The Nation’’ 3 April 2008 provided a major portion of the information on which U.S. Intelligence based its condemnation of the Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, including reports of weapons of mass destruction and alleged ties to al-Qaeda. Most, if not all, of this information has turned out to be false and Chalabi has been called a fabricator. Along with this, Chalabi also subsequently boasted, in an interview with the British Sunday Telegraph, about the impact that their alleged falsifications had on American policy. These factors led to a falling out between him and the U.S. government. Furthermore, Chalabi was found guilty in the Petra Bank scandal in Jordan.

In January 2012, a French intelligence official stated that he believed Chalabi to be “acting on behalf of Iran”.

Early life

Chalabi was the son of a prominent Shia family, one of the wealthy power elite of Baghdad. He was born in Kadhimiya in 1945. His family, who dated back 300 years to the Sultanate, ran Iraq’s oldest commercial bank under the British-backed Kingdom of Iraq. His father, a wealthy grain merchant and member of the Iraqi parliament, became head of the senate when King Abdullah I of Jordan was assassinated.

His family retired from public life to a farmhouse near Baghdad when the military seized power. Chalabi left Iraq with his family in 1958, following the 14 July Revolution, and spent most of his life in the United States and the United Kingdom. He was educated at Baghdad College and Seaford College in Sussex, England before leaving for America.

Western education

In exile, following the Ba’ath party takeover, his family acted as the Iraqi Shia clergy’s bankers. In the mid-1960s, he studied with cryptographer Whitfield Diffie at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from which he received a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics. In 1969, he earned a PhD in mathematics from the University of Chicago under the direction of George Glauberman on the Theory of Knots. after which he took a position in the mathematics department at the American University of Beirut. He published three mathematics papers between 1973 and 1980, in the field of abstract algebra.

In 1971, Chalabi married Leila Osseiran, daughter of Lebanese politician Adel Osseiran. They had four children.Dexter Filkins
"Where Plan A left Ahmad Chalabi"
‘’The New York Times‘’. 3 November 2006. Accessed 20 January 2008. Whilst still at Beirut the civil war broke out in 1975, so he moved to Jordan and found work as an interpreter.

Business career

Chalabi was a bold and shrewd investor, amassing a fortune of $100 million. During his life he was accused of corruption many times. In 1977, he founded the Petra Bank in Jordan with Crown Prince Hassan, the King’s brother. In May 1989, the Governor of the Central Bank of Jordan, Mohammed Said Nabulsi, issued a decree ordering all banks in the country to deposit 35% of their reserves with the Central Bank. Petra Bank was the only bank that was unable to meet this requirement. An investigation was launched which led to accusations of embezzlement and false accounting. The bank failed, causing a $350 million bail-out by the Central Bank. Chalabi fled the country, in the trunk of a Jordanian prince’s car, before the authorities could react. Chalabi was convicted and sentenced ''in absentia'' for bank fraud by a Jordanian military tribunal to 22 years in prison. Chalabi maintained that his prosecution was a politically motivated effort to discredit him sponsored by Saddam Hussein. It was widely reported that Chalabi escaped Jordan locked in the trunk of a car owned by Prince Hassan of Jordan.

Exile in the UK

Living abroad by 1992 in London, and unable to return home for fear of his life, he set up the Iraqi National Congress with an agenda of regime change for his homeland. The organization was open to all ethnic and religious groups of Iraq, including Arabs, Kurds, Turkmen, Sunni and Shia Muslims. Already a fluent English speaker, he turned his attention to Washington DC.

In 1995 after preparation and lobbying he persuaded President Bill Clinton to fund an expedition into northern Iraq to use subterfuge to start an insurgency. Chalabi was convinced that the Iraqi military would rise up to overthrow the dictator. The commanders to whom he had spoken, were the same who openly supported Saddam and crushed his opponents in the Kurdish and Shia revolts. The insurgency failed, lacking the promised ground troops, and 100 insurgents were killed by the military. The command structure of INC fell apart with factional infighting. Chalabi was banned from those frequent visits to CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia. Nonetheless, Chalabi was doggedly determined: in 1998 Congress passed the Iraq Liberation Act passing into American law the objective of “regime change” in Iraq.

It was reported by BBC News in May 2005 that the Jordanian government was considering whether to pardon Chalabi, in part to ease the relations between Jordan and the new Iraqi government of which Chalabi was a member. According to one report, Chalabi proposed a $32 million compensation fund for depositors affected by Petra Bank’s failure. The website for Petra Bank contains a press release stating that Chalabi would refuse the pardon. Although Chalabi always maintained the case was a plot to frame him by Baghdad, the issue was revisited when the U.S. State Department raised questions about the accounting practices of the Iraqi National Congress (INC). According to ''The New York Times'', “Chalabi insisted on a public apology, which the Jordanians refused to give.”

Conservative pundit Arnaud de Borchgrave stated that following his escape from Jordan as a wanted fugitive, Chalabi established the Iraqi National Congress by sending out “…scores of all-expenses-paid invitations to Iraqi exiles to a conference in Vienna a month later. The conference created INC - and made Mr Chalabi its president…” Around the same time, the Jordan’s Central Bank Governor, Mohammed Said Nabulsi, had referred to Chalabi as “one of the most notorious crooks in the history of the Middle East…”. Chalabi headed the executive council of the INC, an umbrella Iraqi opposition group created in 1992 for the purpose of fomenting the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. The INC received major funding and assistance from the United States. Chalabi was involved in organizing a resistance movement among Kurds in northern Iraq in the early mid-1990s. When that effort was crushed and hundreds of his supporters were killed, Chalabi fled the country. Chalabi lobbied in Washington for the passage of the Iraq Liberation Act (passed October 1998). This earmarked US$97 million to support Iraqi opposition groups. Chalabi and the INC were widely reported to be active CIA assets in the pre-2003 period, with one report in the British Guardian newspaper estimating that CIA operatives had funnelled an estimated $100m to the INC, which had helped to finance the epic failure of the 1996 coup attempt by Kurdish forces. In 2001 it was revealed that INC was accused of false accounting and irregularities. During the period from March 2000 to September 2003, the U.S. State Department paid nearly $33 million to the INC, according to a General Accounting Office report released in 2004, some of which was used to purchase office artefacts.

Invasion of Iraq

Before the Iraq War (2003), Chalabi enjoyed close political and business relationships with some members of the U.S. government, including some prominent neoconservatives within the Pentagon. Chalabi was said to have had political contacts within the Project for the New American Century, a student of nuclear strategist Albert Wohlstetter, and Richard Perle. He also enjoyed considerable support among politicians and political pundits in the United States, most notably Jim Hoagland of ‘’The Washington Post‘’, who held him up as a notable force for democracy in Iraq. He was a special guest of First Lady Laura Bush at the 2004 State of the Union Address. Chalabi was flown back to Iraq after the invasion with a force of 700 US-trained militia and was, according to the ‘’Washington Times’’, being paid over $300,000 a month by the US government, with the direct support of Vice President Dick Cheney, Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith.

The CIA was largely skeptical of Chalabi and the INC, but information allegedly from his group (most famously from a defector codenamed “Curveball”) made its way into intelligence dossiers used by President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair to justify an invasion of Iraq. “Curveball”, Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, fed officials hundreds of pages of bogus “firsthand” descriptions of mobile biological weapons factories on wheels and rails. Secretary of State Colin Powell later used this information in a U.N. presentation trying to garner support for the war, despite warnings from German intelligence that “Curveball” was fabricating claims. Since then, the CIA has admitted that the defector made up the story, and Powell said in 2011 the information should not have been used in his presentation. A later congressionally appointed investigation (Robb-Silberman) concluded that Curveball had no relation whatsoever to the INC, and that press reports linking Curveball to the INC were erroneous.

The INC often worked with the media, most notably with Judith Miller, concerning her WMD stories for ‘’The New York Times‘’ starting on 26 February 1998. After the war, given the lack of discovery of WMDs, most of the WMD claims of the INC were shown to have been either misleading, exaggerated, or completely made up while INC information about the whereabouts of Saddam Hussein’s loyalists and Chalabi’s personal enemies were accurate. Another of Chalabi’s advocates was American Enterprise Institute‘s Iraq specialist Danielle Pletka. Chalabi received advice on media and television presentation techniques from the Irish scriptwriter and commentator Eoghan Harris prior to the invasion of Iraq.

In April as U.S. forces took control during the 2003 Invasion of Iraq, Chalabi entered with allied troops the southern town of Shatrah. 300 US-trained FIF (Freedom for Iraq Fighters) expected opposition, but none emerged. Thousands of Iraqis cheered the troops. Chalabi returned under their aegis and was given a position on the Iraq interim governing council by the Coalition Provisional Authority. He served as president of the council in September 2003. He denounced a plan to let the UN choose an interim government for Iraq. “We are grateful to President Bush for liberating Iraq, but it is time for the Iraqi people to run their affairs,” he was quoted as saying in ‘’The New York Times‘’.

In August 2003, Chalabi was the only candidate whose unfavorable ratings exceeded his favorable ones with Iraqis in a State Department poll. In a survey of nearly 3,000 Iraqis in February 2004 (by Oxford Research International, sponsored by the BBC
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