Writing through the rubble

To many, Ahmad Chalabi is an Iraqi hero, the charismatic champion of a free Iraq who would stop at nothing to reach his goal: the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. To others, he is a dangerous operator whose obsession with returning to the lost Iraq of his childhood knew no bounds -- the man who, in the name of freedom, fed bogus "intelligence" on WMD and Saddam's supposed contacts with al-Qaida to the media, including the now disgraced Judith Miller. Chalabi, as "The Man Who Pushed America to War," the fascinating new biography by NBC investigative reporter Aram Roston, makes clear, is all of this and more. A debonair mathematician, banker and fraudster from a wealthy Iraqi banking family who received millions of dollars from the CIA and other U.S. government agencies to fund his political and propaganda activities, Chalabi played a scandalously huge role in the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Roston calls him "the man who pushed America to war," and he makes his case.

Ahmad Chalabi first got involved with the CIA in the early 1990s. He had fled to London from Amman, Jordan, after his Petra Bank was shut down by the government -- one of many Chalabi banks and corporations that had gotten into legal trouble. Although lawyers were crawling "all over the carcass of the Chalabi banking empire," Chalabi commandeered his considerable charm and Rolodex to start building up a new sort of business aimed at the ouster of Saddam Hussein. After Iraq invaded Kuwait and the U.S. government turned against its former ally, Chalabi emerged as a leading voice for a democratic Iraq and became a trusted source for many journalists. Saddam survived the Gulf War, of course, but after formal hostilities ended, George H.W. Bush set up a covert program to topple the dictator, releasing millions of dollars into the CIA's bloodstream. It was then that Chalabi came into the fold, beginning a long and contentious relationship with U.S. intelligence agencies that would fund his operations for more than a decade, including some of the false info on WMD that made it into Colin Powell's fateful 2003 speech at the United Nations.

Roston spells out Chalabi's impact on America as having three components: ideological, primarily through his deep influence on the neoconservatives; political, through his masterly ability to work the power corridors of Washington; and as a source for "intelligence," which he spoonfed both to the U.S. government and to some of the biggest media outlets in this hemisphere.

Five years after the invasion of Iraq, it's still galling to contemplate the chorus line of lies that was trotted out to sell the war. In perhaps the most enraging section of the book, Roston details how Chalabi and his team within the Iraqi National Congress created four major narratives linking Saddam to WMD and al-Qaida -- all of which were lies. Saddam's hijacking school for Islamic terrorists (Salman Pak); the underground silos for chemical and nuclear weapons; the mobile WMD labs; and the claim from Saddam's mistress that the dictator had met with Osama bin Laden: These stories came largely from "defectors" supplied by Chalabi and the INC, which, as the leading exile organization with powerful supporters in the White House, Congress and intelligence community, had major credibility. Plus it had access. Chalabi's long career of courting journalists -- he'd befriended Judith Miller back in Jordan, for example -- paid off in spades as he doled out "scoops" to top reporters at "60 Minutes," Vanity Fair, ABC, the New York Times, the Washington Post and other venerable outlets. For even more spin, Chalabi could count on the services of the A-list conservative Washington lobbying firm Black Kelly Scruggs & Healy, which, with government knowledge, represented Chalabi and his interests.

All of this activity, Roston reveals, was financed by U.S. taxpayers. By this time it was no longer the CIA paying the bills, but the State Department and later the Defense Intelligence Agency. Although the CIA had come to mistrust Chalabi (the agency transferred its financial support to Awad Allawi, Chalabi's arch rival), he still found many sympathetic ears in the intelligence community for his defectors' tales. The claims by the Iraqi civil engineer Adnan Haideri about underground weapons storage made it into the National Intelligence Estimate. When David Rose's explosive story on mobile weapons labs came out in Vanity Fair in 2002, the CIA and DIA knew it was bunk. But the story thrived in the media and was eventually cited as fact by Colin Powell in his U.N. speech. Thanks to the dysfunctional rivalry between the CIA, the Department of Defense and the State Department, the shadow intelligence effort run out of the White House to justify the need to invade Iraq, and the fact that the INC was an entity funded by the U.S. government, let's just say that the truth, it did not out.

Rose, who is humiliated by his reporting errors and winces when he remembers how he came under Chalabi's spell, tells Roston that he's "absolutely convinced the INC was mounting a sophisticated disinformation campaign." Indeed, Mohammed al-Zubaidi, the INC's man on the ground in the Middle East, now says that even at the time he didn't believe key elements of the INC defectors' stories.

Chalabi is by all accounts a brilliant, sophisticated man -- with a personal magnetism that is legendary. He easily dazzled journalists, intellectuals, politicians and other powerbrokers with his charm and erudition (he was a gifted professor of mathematics before getting into the family's banking business), and always had a group of loyalists around him. Besides his many media friends, perhaps his most important group of supporters were the neoconservatives, including Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Michael Ledeen and Douglas Feith, who saw in Chalabi their ideal "Arab democrat," the force that they believed would be unleashed when their dream of regime change in Iraq was realized. Chalabi himself was no neoconservative. And in spite of his rhetoric, his commitment to democracy was also murky. His deep ties with Iran's Islamic revolution never waned (it was rumored, but never proved, that he was an Iranian agent), causing more moderate Iraqi exile leaders to question his belief in a secular society and human rights. Indeed, after Saddam fell, he formed a coalition with the radical Shiite militia leader Muqtada al-Sadr, hardly a force for democracy in Iraq.

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