Chalabi's Bay of Goats: The Iran Connection

U.S. Gen. Anthony Zinni declared before 9/11 that a flashy Iraqi exile named Ahmed Chalabi was "going to lead us to a Bay of Goats" if Washington bought his plans to depose Saddam Hussein. The outcome, the commander of U.S. forces in the region warned, would be a fiasco that would make the U.S. adventure at the Bay of Pigs look like child's play.

If anything, the reality was far worse. The notorious Shi'ite con man, who died last week in Baghdad of a heart attack, was admired before the Iraq war by a handful of secretive U.S. national security types and exiled neoconservative Republicans in Washington. His stature grew considerably after President George W. Bush's election and the 2003 U.S. invasion. The media postmortems of Chalabi and his legacy have rightly focussed on his critical role in funneling wholesale fictions about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction to gullible -- or manipulative -- U.S. policymakers, who for years financed and fed on his disinformation-spewing Iraqi National Congress.

When later questioned about the non-existent WMD, Chalabi quipped, "We were heroes in error."

False intelligence provided by Chalabi's network was instrumental, if not decisive, in enabling the U.S. decision to go to war. Chalabi couldn't have achieved his aims without powerful backers in Washington. But I'm left wishing more attention had been paid to his connections in Tehran. Even for those familiar with Chalabi's past and his methods, it is striking how much is not  known about his record as a member of the Iraqi Parliament and official in the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. What little we do know, however, is consistent with reports of his pre-war relationship to the revolutionary government in Iran.

This is an odd oversight, given current public concern about Iran. The New York Times mentioned the word "Iran" once in two Chalabi stories -- passing reference to wartime suspicions that he might have shared intelligence with Tehran. The great Grey Lady instead incessantly detailed the WMD disinformation that Chalabi and his exile group, the Iraqi National Congress, stove-piped to sympathetic minions within the Bush administration. Old news, yes, arguably worth reiterating. But the Times treatment smacked of an in-house mea culpa intended, once more, to correct the uncritical scroll of pre-invasion intelligence 'scoops' the paper once swallowed whole and sold to the American people.

The Iran angle is provocative. Before the war, Chalabi and the INC, funded by the CIA to foment an Iraqi uprising in northern Iraq, were suspected of being simultaneously on the payroll of Iranian intelligence. A close confidant of Chalabi's, Aras Habib, was believed himself to be an Iranian agent. The CIA repeatedly warned senior Bush defense officials that the INC had been infiltrated by Iranian spies. Questioned in 2002 about his Iranian connections, Chalabi was dismissive. "This relationship is normal and necessary," he told CIA interrogators. Neither Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld nor Vice-President Cheney lodged any objection.

During the war, the INC is believed to have helped Iranian Revolutionary Guard operatives open up businesses in Iraq by revealing the positions of U.S. combat forces. U.S. intelligence also suspected that Chalabi told the Iranians that Americans regularly intercepted their secret communications, thus betraying sensitive U.S. intelligence sources. Chalabi at the time alternated between his antennae-studded base near Irbil in Iraqi Kurdistan and a home in Tehran, where he was believed to maintain close ties with Iranian officials. He later played an instrumental role in protecting Shi'ite militias in Iraq with strong ties to Iran.

After the invasion, Chalabi took a lead role in the provisional government's de-Baathification program, likening it to the de-Nazification of Germany after World War II.  He was head of the committee that helped execute a policy that destroyed the Iraqi army and reduced Baghdad to a virtual failed state under Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Chalabi reportedly was responsible for engineering wholesale Sunni disenfranchisement by stripping Baathist teachers and civil servants of jobs and disqualifying between 50,000 and 100,000 candidates from local and national election lists.

Together with the disbanding of the Baathist-dominated Iraqi army, Chalabi's de-Baathification work led to unemployment of hundreds of thousand Sunnis, a near-civil war in Iraq, the rise of al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, and eventually the emergence of its fanatical offshoot, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, which now dominates huge swaths of Iraq and Syria.

Chalabi later served as interim Iraqi oil minister and deputy prime minister. He was appointed in 2007 to the U.S.-appointed National Council, but dismissed on suspicion of having ties to Iranian Revolutionary Guard officers. He was elected a member of Parliament and served as head of its Finance committee at the time of his death. Chalabi never denied his Tehran connections, and maintained that dealing with the mullahs was part of doing business in Iraq.

Toward the end, Chalabi reportedly admitted that blocking Sunni participation in the political system was a mistake. But by then, of course, the damage was done, ISIS was on the march -- and the record suggests that Chalabi's longstanding Iranian ties may have played a significant role in hollowing out the state that, next to Syria, is the Ayatollah's major focus in the region.


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