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. 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. “You have talked more about the INC today than overthrowing Saddam. This is not helpful to your cause,” he said. 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 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. 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. 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. Through these vicissitudes, Chalabi has shown some staying power. 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. The same year also saw a new eruption in the Kurdish civil war. Yet Chalabi managed to hold together the disparate elements of the INC. He did this at a time when the CIA’s strategy for toppling Saddam was evolving from foolish to feckless. 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. officials call the “silver bullet” option. In 1998, Chalabi took his case to Congress, which authorized $97 million for military training for the rebels through the Iraq Liberation Act. 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. 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. In other quarters, feuding continued. The INC’s executive committee stripped Chalabi of his title and power the following year. Now, the INC may be on the verge of shutting down. Its executive committee–of which Chalabi is just one member, though the driving force–rules by consensus, which is often elusive. 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. 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. He has brought the U.S. around to a policy of regime change, but now it is time for him to be a team player.” 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. As a condition of the grant, Chalabi would have to suspend a $320,000-a-month intelligence operation he controls inside Iraq. “We are in danger of losing everything,” Sharif Ali told me. “And why? Because of an information-collection program.” If the INC collapses, there are many who feel they can fill the void. At the June 11 meeting, Feith rebuked Hoshyar Zebari, Mohammad Sabir, Hamid al-Bayati, and Salah Shaikhly for suggesting this. 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 Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (Iranian and Syrian supported Shiite activists, also called SCIRI); and the Iraqi National Accord (a loose affiliation of exiles with close links to the CIA). The London representatives of these groups, who have been meeting regularly for over a year, call themselves “the Group of Four.” Zebari, who is a member of the INC’s executive committee, said last week, “The Group of Four is the real opposition. We have people on the ground and we are exploring a real opposition strategy.” But Zebari was careful to add, “This is not to replace the INC or to divide the Iraqi opposition. This is a solid political platform for real, genuine opposition forces to work together and to coordinate.” 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. UNLIKE THE PENTAGON, the State Department believes the Group of Four presents a more viable Iraqi opposition than the INC and Chalabi. The Friday before the Feith meeting, Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Marc Grossman told the four Iraqis that he did not care under what structure the Iraqi exiles joined together; all that mattered was that the opposition stop bickering. As one administration official put it, “We’re not forcing anybody into any boxes.” 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. His friends at the Pentagon have failed to stop them. Thus, last fall Congress removed a restriction on funds for Iraqi opposition activities that required the vast majority of the money to be earmarked for the INC. At the end of May, the State Department notified Congress that it intends to disburse $315,000 to a new group, the Iraqi National Movement, a Sunni-led coalition of exiled Iraqi military and civilian leaders formed this year. According to a State Department budget justification document for the group, the money “will specifically support an Iraqi National Movement representative in Syria, travel to the Middle East for meetings with the Iraqi expatriates and regional governments, and media outreach, focusing on Arabic language TV, radio and printed media outlets.” The mission of this organization is nearly identical to that of the INC, which is no accident. As State Department spokesman Richard Boucher told reporters on June10, “The Iraqi National Congress is a significant member of the opposition community, but they’re not the only opposition group.” The trouble is, the whole purpose of the INC was precisely to allow the opposition to present a united front. Article I of the INC’s charter, drafted during a conference in Vienna on June 16-19, 1992, under Chalabi’s leadership, begins: “The INC will work to absorb, unify and organize political forces, currents and personalities (groups and individuals) to cause the desired transition in Iraq.” If the Pentagon were as adept at bureaucratic turf war as the State Department, Chalabi would be in less trouble. But in the absence of any policy consensus on Iraq in the Bush administration, the utterances of the State Department spokesman and even the granting or withholding of small sums of money matter a great deal. 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. Phone calls to key Senate lawmakers this spring from Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage killed the funding, according to these sources. In the interagency battles over Iraq policy, the State Department and CIA have also stalled any decision to authorize INC activities inside Iraq. Danielle Pl
etka, 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. Washington is not about having your heart in the right place, it is about winning.” Posing the most immediate risk for Chalabi is the State Department’s insistence on closing down his information-collection program. Chalabi has refused to accept any U.S. money that requires him to forgo this intelligence work, and his position has left the matter deadlocked since last fall. 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. Liberty TV, the INC’s television station in London, shut down on May 1 for lack of funds. 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. 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. 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. Ricciardone went along with the plan, and the State Department secured the proper clearance. Soon after, INC officials told many in the media that the administration had finally approved their operations inside Iraq. In fact no decision had been taken on broader operations. 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. Under the proposal, Chalabi’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 this last area, the INC has been surprisingly effective. 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. One of these defectors is a civil engineer named Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Hadeiri. 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. An internal U.S. 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. 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. weapons inspectors but for war planners as well. Why go to the New York Times with such information, and not to the CIA? There is a long history of bad blood between Chalabi and the Agency. 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 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. 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. Saddam’s men had the names of all the officers involved. But the Agency did not heed the warning and went ahead with the plan, leading to a spectacular operational failure. 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. This CIA disaster left some in the Agency looking for a scapegoat. Chalabi, they say, is not to be trusted. The feeling is mutual. Randy Scheunemann, a former national security adviser to Trent Lott now working with the INC, was involved in negotiations with U.S. officials last year over access to the defectors and is familiar with the Agency’s numerous concerns about Chalabi. 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?” Another contentious issue is accounting. 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. 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. At one point the State Department offered a compromise. 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. 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. 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. “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. “What could reasonably be expected of them to be accomplished?” It’s a fair question, especially if you’re more concerned about effecting regime change in the INC than in Iraq. Eli J. Lake covers the State Department for UPI.
