Anyone But Chalabi?
LAKE, ELI J.
Anyone But Chalabi? Washington battles over how to organize the Iraqi opposition. BY ELI J. LAKE On June 11, the Pentagon's number three official, Doug Feith, delivered a blunt defense of the...
...In other quarters, feuding continued...
...One can only imagine an operative asking a corrupt border official to provide a receipt for the bribe just paid to take a frightened intelligence officer in his car into Kurdish controlled territory...
...Soon after, INC officials told many in the media that the administration had finally approved their operations inside Iraq...
...There is little doubt among House and Senate staffers that the INC would have received a portion of the $30 million the Pentagon sought from Congress for "foreign entities" in its supplemental budget request this year, but for intervention from the State Department...
...Article I of the INC’scharter, drafted during a conference inVienna on June 16-19, 1992, under Chal-abi’s leadership, begins: “The INC willwork to absorb, unify and organizepolitical forces, currents and person-alities (groups and individuals) tocause the desired transition inIraq...
...And why...
...In this last area, the INC has been surprisingly effective...
...around to a policy of regime change, but now it is time for him to be a team player...
...His friends at the Pentagon have failed to stop them...
...At one point the State Department offered a compromise...
...There is a long history of bad blood between Chalabi and the Agency...
...The feeling is mutual...
...He has brought the U.S...
...Al-Hadeiri first revealed to New York Times reporter Judith Miller in an interview published December 20 that Iraq had facilities for biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons in wells, private villas, and even beneath the Saddam Hussein hospital in Baghdad...
...BY ELI J. LAKE On June 11, the Pentagon's number three official, Doug Feith, delivered a blunt defense of the Iraqi National Congress to four Iraqi opposition leaders dissatisfied with the INC, the U.S.-supported umbrella group of those working to unseat Saddam Hussein...
...Zebari, who is a member of the INC's executive committee, said last week, "The Group of Four is the real opposition...
...To this day the money has not been disbursed, though the paperwork approving "lethal" aid has sat on Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's desk for six months...
...Brooke and Chalabi said they knew of people in northern Iraq who had a videotape of war crimes against Kurds being committed by Iraqi soldiers...
...Posing the most immediate risk for Chalabi is the State Department's insistence on closing down his information-collection program...
...As a condition of the grant, Chalabi would have to suspend a $320,000-a-month intelligence operation he controls inside Iraq...
...But in the short term, the Iraq Liberation Act revived Chalabi's reputation in some quarters as one who could secure American political support when it counted...
...officials last year over access to the defectors and is familiar with the Agency's numerous concerns about Chalabi...
...We are in danger of losing everything," Sharif Ali told me...
...The mission of this organiza-tion is nearly identical to thatof the INC, which is no acci-dent...
...And just as President Bush (though not his generals) seems ready to come to grips with Iraq, many in the Iraqi opposition are again getting cold feet about Chalabi...
...But in the absence of any policy consensus on Iraq in the Bushadministration, the utterances of the State Departmentspokesman and even the granting or withholding of smallsums of moneymatter a great deal...
...On the very day the coup was supposed to go down, Iraqi officers loyal to Baghdad beamed praises for Saddam to the CIA station in Amman on the Agency's secure communications system...
...all that mattered was that the opposition stop bickering...
...Washington is not about having your heart in the right place, it is about winning...
...So far, INC operatives and assets have arranged for the defection of two Iraqis claiming to have knowledge of Saddam's chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons facilities and one man who claims to have seen non-Iraqi Arabs training inside the Salman Pak terrorist training facility...
...A fourth defector will soon grant an exclusive interview to CBS...
...Langley's files contend that he compromised a 1996 military officers' coup inside Iraq led by rival Ayad Alawi's Iraqi National Accord, information the Agency has made available to Congress over the years...
...The Cockburn brothers write and Brooke corroborates that Chalabi flew to Washington in March 1996 to warn CIA director John Deutch and Near East Division chief Steve Richter that the coup had been compromised...
...In fact no decision had been taken on broader operations...
...The London representatives of these groups, who have been meeting regularly for over a year, call themselves "the Group of Four...
...We need to have further discussions about the INC and what its role is and what its capabilities are," Leahy senior aide Tim Rieser said last week...
...Ricciardone went along with the plan, and the State Department secured the proper clearance...
...Accordingto a State Department budget justification document forthe group, the money “will specifically support anIraqi National Movement representative in Syria,travel to the Middle East for meetings withthe Iraqi expatriates and regional gov-ernments, and media outreach,focusing on Arabic language TV,radio and printed media out-lets...
...They represent respectively the Kurdish Democratic party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (the two Kurdish parties that share semi-sovereignty in northern Iraq...
...The INC's plans called for the sorts of things the CIA ought to be doing in a country with links to international terrorism and large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons—in a word, espionage...
...intelligence report on the three defectors reveals that al-Hadeiri was in fact a gold mine of information (the other two were less valuable), according to three administration officials familiar with its findings...
...Because of an information-collection program...
...Chalabi, they say, is not to be trusted...
...He asks, "Would you trust these guys, if you had a sensitive defector who had family inside Iraq, to ask the right questions and disseminate the information...
...Thus, last fall Congress removed a restriction on fundsfor Iraqi opposition activities that required the vast major-ity of the money to be earmarked for the INC...
...One consequence of the INC's fight with the State Department and CIA has been to cool the organization's usually reliable support on Capitol Hill...
...But the Agency did not heed the warning and went ahead with the plan, leading to a spectacular operational failure...
...One of these defectors is a civil engineer named Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Hadeiri...
...The INC's executive committee stripped Chalabi of his title and power the following year...
...Another contentious issue is accounting...
...Chalabi has refused to accept any U.S...
...Sharif Ali was in Washington last week to assure the State Department that the INC's executive committee wanted to accept an $8 million grant but could not reach consensus because Chalabi objected to the terms...
...It should be noted that while Feith was delivering his tongue-lashing in Washington, Chalabi was in Tehran meeting with Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim, the SCIRI leader, in an effort to lure that group back into the INC fold...
...The State Department, which is sympathetic to the CIA's concerns about Chalabi, would like the INC to provide documentation for expenses incurred in recruiting defectors and obtaining sensitive intelligence inside a hostile police state...
...Through these vicissitudes, Chalabi has shown some staying power...
...It's a fair question, especially if you're more concerned about effecting regime change in the INC than in Iraq...
...Now, just when President Bush has signaled he is finally prepared to win the war left unfinished a decade ago, the CIA and the State Department are trying to dismantle the very opposition network they helped create...
...The Agency pulled the plug on INC operations in 1995, and the next year the group's forces suffered a crushing defeat in northern Iraq at the hands of Saddam's army...
...Now, the INC may be on the verge of shutting down...
...Randy Scheunemann, a former national security adviser to Trent Lott now working with the INC, was involved in negotiations with U.S...
...This is not helpful to your cause," he said...
...The information-collection program was spawned in January 2001 at a meeting of Chalabi, his Washington adviser Francis Brooke, and the State Department's special coordinator for Iraqi transition, then Frank Ricciardone...
...the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (Iranian and Syrian supported Shiite activists, also called SCIRI...
...Indeed, the $8 million the State Department has notified Congress it intends to give the INC for the remainder of the calendar year has been put on hold by Senators Patrick Leahy and Mitch McConnell, the chairman and ranking member of the Senate appropriations subcommittee for foreign operations...
...According to minutes of the private meeting, Feith told the four that the Pentagon encouraged all Iraqi rebels to work within the INC and not to undermine it...
...In 1998, Chalabi took his case to Congress, which authorized $97 million for military training for the rebels through the Iraq Liberation Act...
...weapons inspectors but for war planners as well...
...Unfortunately for Chalabi, however, the State Department controls the INC's budget, and the diplomats have used the power of the purse to marginalize him...
...officials call the "silver bullet" option...
...An internal U.S...
...and the Iraqi National Accord (a loose affiliation of exiles with close links to the CIA...
...You have talked more about the INC today than overthrowing Saddam...
...He did this at a time Eli J. Lake covers the State Department for UPI...
...This CIA disaster left some in the Agency looking for a scapegoat...
...The INC's official spokesman, Sharif Ali bin al-Hussein (also the leader of the movement for constitutional monarchy in Iraq), put it this way: "Ahmad is fighting yesterday's battles...
...Phone calls to key Senate lawmakers this spring from Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage killed the funding, according to these sources...
...At the June 11 meeting, Feith rebuked Hosh-yar Zebari, Mohammad Sabir, Hamid al-Bayati, and Salah Shaikhly for suggesting this...
...Soon after, Feith ended the meeting ahead of schedule and walked out, impressing upon those left behind in his office that the Pentagon's top civilians still support the man they always have—Ahmad Chalabi...
...In 1999, the Agency abandoned plans to foment a coup among disloyal Iraqi officers in favor of seeking out a lone gunman to assassinate Saddam Hussein—what U.S...
...Danielle Pletka, a Middle East expert and until recently a senior Republican staffer on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said last week, "On a wide range of issues, from money issues to bureaucratic battles inside the administration to actions they could have taken themselves, DOD is not winning the fight...
...money that requires him to forgo this intelligence work, and his position has left the matter deadlocked since last fall...
...In the interagency battles over Iraq policy, the State Department and CIA have also stalled any decision to authorize INC activities inside Iraq...
...If the Pentagon wereas adept at bureaucraticturf war as the StateDepartment, Chal-abi would be inless trouble...
...This is a solid political platform for real, genuine opposition forces to work together and to coordinate...
...Unlike the Pentagon, the State Department believes the Group of Four presents a more viable Iraqi opposition than the INC and Chalabi...
...As State Departmentspokesman Richard Bouchertold reporters on June10, “TheIraqi National Congress is a sig-nificant member of the opposi-tion community, but they’re notthe only opposition group...
...At the endof May, the State Department notified Congress that itintends to disburse $315,000 to a new group, the IraqiNational Movement, a Sunni-led coalition of exiled Iraqimilitary and civilian leaders formed this year...
...Under the proposal, Cha-labi's men would send teams of U.S.-trained rebels into Iraq from neighboring Iran to photograph military installations, recruit operatives inside Saddam's intelligence services, provide on-the-ground verification of weapons facilities, and persuade defectors to share details on all three...
...In that Pentagon crowd, Chalabi is revered as a rare democrat—albeit one with the political cunning of a seasoned ward boss—in a region of despots and monarchs...
...In other Washington circles, however, his stock rises and falls...
...when the CIA's strategy for toppling Saddam was evolving from foolish to feckless...
...But Zebari was careful to add, "This is not to replace the INC or to divide the Iraqi opposition...
...Yet Chalabi managed to hold together the disparate elements of the INC...
...Why go to the New York Times with such information, and not to the CIA...
...The trouble is, the whole pur-pose of the INC was precisely toallow the opposition to present aunited front...
...The coup was scheduled for the third week in June that year but was foiled when Iraqi agents arrested a man carrying a CIA-donated satellite communications device for the plotters, according to Out of the Ashes, the history of Iraq after the Gulf War by Andrew and Patrick Cockburn...
...Saddam's men had the names of all the officers involved...
...Meanwhile, Foggy Bottom has the INC on barest life support, wiring just enough money to Iraqi National Congress Support Foundation accounts in Delaware to keep the INC's offices in London, Washington, Damascus, Tehran, and Prague from closing...
...Since being debriefed by the Defense Intelligence Agency, al-Hadeiri has revealed new data not only on the extent but also the location of Saddam's weapons-of-mass-destruction programs—information critical not only for future U.N...
...The INC would be allowed to use the Defense Intelligence Agency's accounting procedures—which protect the names of sensitive assets by restricting access to the records to officials with secret clearance—but the department refused to provide the procedures (which themselves are classified) to the rebels...
...Its executive committee—of which Chalabi is just one member, though the driving force—rules by consensus, which is often elusive...
...If the INC collapses, there are many who feel they can fill the void...
...The same year also saw a new eruption in the Kurdish civil war...
...We have people on the ground and we are exploring a real opposition strategy...
...What could reasonably be expected of them to be accomplished...
...Liberty TV, the INC's television station in London, shut down on May 1 for lack of funds...
...The Friday before the Feith meeting, Undersecretary of State for y . Political Affairs Marc Grossman told the four Iraqis that he did not care under what structure the Iraqi exiles joined together...
...As one administration official put it, "We're not forcing anybody into any boxes...
...In order to retrieve the tape—which would be valuable for Foggy Bottom's effort to rally international support for war crimes charges against Saddam—the INC would need authorization to spend American money inside Iraq...
...In 1992, following the Gulf War, when Chalabi and others came together to create the INC, the CIA provided support, seeing the need to unify Iraq's anti-Saddam Kurds, monarchists, disloyal military officers, Sunnis, and Shiites...
Vol. 7 • June 2002 • No. 40
