For every C.I.A. case officer who glided urbanely under diplomatic cover, there was another who appeared to have just walked off a battlefield. John Maguire, who rotated to the Amman station in 1992, belonged to that subtribe. He was a profane, Spanish-speaking former Baltimore police officer, six foot three and about two hundred pounds, with a whitening walrus mustache. He had joined the agency in the early 1980s as a paramilitary officer. He served initially in Central America, where, among other things, he posed as an outboard motor repairman while helping Nicaragua’s anti-Sandinista guerrillas mine three of their country’s harbors. Later he enrolled in case officer school at Camp Perry to train in traditional espionage—recruiting agents and running these human sources, or “cases.” The Amman station was one of the C.I.A.’s largest in the Middle East, a listening and recruiting post wedged among Baghdad, Jerusalem, and Damascus. The station occupied a section of the U.S. embassy campus, which was centered around a hulking three-story beige building designed like a desert fort.
One of Maguire’s tasks was to manage Iraqi “walk-ins”—scientists, generals, spies, diplomats, tribal leaders, businessmen, clerics, farmers, bureaucrats—who made their way to Jordan and sought appointments at the embassy. Some volunteered to cooperate with the U.S. in exchange for money, protection, or resettlement. Hundreds of Iraqis lined up each day. The C.I.A.’s job at the customer-service window was to identify and interview the very small number of potential defectors or agents who really knew something about Saddam Hussein and his regime—particularly his weapons programs or his security services.
Iraq’s intelligence services correctly saw the parade at the U.S. embassy as a security threat and infiltrated spies into the long lines to chat up naive countrymen and search for high-ranking personalities who had no good reason to be there. To evade this surveillance, Maguire and his colleagues put out word in Amman’s enclave of Iraqi exiles that if you wanted a discreet appointment at the U.S. embassy, you should ask for “Mr. Max.” This would speed the applicant to a meeting with Maguire or another case officer, fully made up in an agency-supplied disguise. One after another, they each presented themselves as “Mr. Max,” assessed the walk-ins, and recruited new informants or paid agents who might be sent back into Iraq.[1]
Since the Gulf War’s end, C.I.A. recruiters had been reaching out to Iraqi military officers, looking for Brent Scowcroft’s imagined restive colonel who might strike against Saddam. The message was: “Saddam is our issue, and the inner circle around him,” as Maguire put it. “If you were not bloody”—meaning you had not participated in, say, the genocide against Kurds or the torture and murder of Baathist prisoners—“you would be okay in a post-Saddam government,” particularly if you could help bring such a government into being.[2]
Sifting walk-in sources for authentic defectors—and vetting each candidate against the possibility that they were a double agent—was time-consuming and treacherous. “It was a wilderness of mirrors,” recalled Robert Grenier, who was then working at the Iraq Operations Group in Langley. Early on, some of the best cases out of Amman involved sheikhs from semiautonomous tribes in western Iraq who had social and smuggling ties to Jordan, and who felt no great loyalty to Saddam. The Amman station also ran agents in and out of Baghdad using traditional Cold War–era tradecraft—sewing messages into travelers’ clothes before arranging for them to walk across the long desert border to avoid checkpoints and, later, paying couriers to shuttle between Amman and Baghdad, working as traders or drivers. These cases complemented reporting by Iraqi agents in Baghdad that Charlie Seidel had left behind when the U.S. embassy closed late in 1990, as America and Iraq again severed formal diplomatic relations. Yet apart from Kurdish servants working in the households of Saddam’s family members, none of the agents had access to Baghdad’s inner circle. “It was a very, very difficult environment to operate in,” Grenier recalled. “You never really knew exactly who you were dealing with or what they represented.”[3]
At headquarters, Frank Anderson, the head of Near East operations and Maguire’s ultimate boss, maintained a dutiful but unenthusiastic attitude toward President Bush’s instruction to foster a coup. To Grenier, Anderson seemed to have soured on the entire concept of C.I.A. covert action on the grounds that “people get hurt, things go wrong, it’s messy. . . . We’re here to do intelligence collection—let’s just stick with that.” Of course, Anderson had good reason to doubt the White House’s ambitions. Bush’s instructions violated the precept that covert action worked best when it was not used by presidents as a “silver bullet.” At the end of the Gulf War, George H. W. Bush had decided not to depose Saddam Hussein by military force. A popular uprising that Bush fomented had also failed. Saddam ran one of the tightest security regimes in the world. There were no C.I.A. career officers stationed permanently inside Iraq. The idea that a covert C.I.A. program mounted from headquarters and regional stations such as Amman would oust Saddam anytime soon seemed implausible to Anderson, and potentially a prescription for embarrassing failure.[4]
Bush’s covert-action finding—his official instructions—did not demand that Anderson immediately organize a violent coup attempt in Baghdad. Instead, it authorized attempts to foster such a political change by organizing opposition to Saddam and by mounting “information operations” to destabilize the regime. This exiles-and-propaganda effort constituted a kind of Covert Action 101, drawn from a playbook used repeatedly during the Cold War to pressure dictators and leftist regimes in the Soviet Union’s orbit. The standard elements included clandestine funding of anti-regime radio broadcasts; perhaps some deception operations designed to confuse the targeted dictator about whom he could trust; and inevitably, the organization and funding of exiled political groups, seemingly no matter how fractious or disconnected from their home countries these exiles might be. Anderson soon appointed Robert Mattingly, a former U.S. Marine officer, to run Iraq operations out of Langley. Near East case officers in London, where Seidel had now rotated, made contact with Iraqi exiles. By 1992, the C.I.A. had given a contract to a PR firm, the Rendon Group, to run a covert information campaign against Saddam. The firm spent $23 million in one year on such projects as an anti-Baathist comic book, videos and radio programs, and a photo exhibit that documented Saddam’s atrocities. The effort involved “some silly things,” Anderson conceded later, including, he recalled, once sending a drone to “leaflet-bomb” Saddam’s birthday party.[5]
The only territory inside Iraq’s borders where there was a chance for the C.I.A to set up a base was in Iraqi Kurdistan. The prospects for a C.I.A.-Kurd alliance were complicated by Kurdish memories of the C.I.A.’s betrayal of Kurdish rebels during the 1970s. In the skies over Kurdistan, however, the U.S. and Britain now flew warplanes from bases in Turkey and Saudi Arabia to enforce the no-fly zone established in 1991. Under this protection, large swaths of Iraqi Kurdistan had become a de facto autonomous region. Saddam had decided in late 1991 that holding on to the area was too costly. It was ruled now by the two main Kurdish political parties: the Kurdistan Democratic Party, led by Masoud Barzani, and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, led by Jalal Talabani. Barzani, a son of the legendary Kurdish guerrilla leader Mustafa, drew his support from their family’s eponymous tribe and region in Kurdistan’s far north. Talabani had been a communist in his youth—he translated Mao’s writings into Kurdish—but evolved into a “Falstaffian figure,” as one biographer described him, who “enjoyed nothing so much as a bountiful table and Cuban cigars.”[6]
Anderson authorized an exploratory mission. From London, Charlie Seidel flew to Turkey and drove into Iraqi territory to meet Barzani and Talabani. The C.I.A.’s initial message was: “We’d like to set up shop here; we’d like your support and assistance,” as a colleague of Seidel’s described it. The initial idea was to build a platform of agent recruitment and couriers moving back and forth to Baghdad, in cooperation with the two Kurdish parties’ security wings. This might lead in time to the identification of Iraqi Army leaders and units willing to move against Saddam. Mattingly, at Langley, wanted to establish a permanent C.I.A. base, protected by the Kurdish parties. Anderson refused, but he allowed rotating teams of C.I.A. career officers, soon dubbed Northern Iraq Liaison Elements, or NILE teams. They visited Kurdistan for about six weeks at a time. As it turned out, Anderson was right to be worried.[7]
The Gulf War and U.N. sanctions had devastated Iraq’s economy, yet Saddam and his closest family did not suffer greatly. Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, still in Geneva, now divided his time between diplomacy and sanctions-busting businesses. He financed the import-export company of an Iraqi-born Swiss citizen who specialized in delivering Mercedes-Benzes to Iraq through Jordan. These sorts of rackets kept cash and luxury goods flowing to Hussein Kamel and Uday, as well as to Saddam Hussein’s presidential office. (Meanwhile, ordinary Iraqi traders could have their hands cut off if they were convicted of financial crimes.) Yet for all its cross-border smuggling, Saddam’s regime, under constant surveillance and hemmed in by sanctions, was looking more and more like a poor sister beside the Swiss-banked kleptocracies of similarly oil-endowed regimes from the Persian Gulf to post-communist Russia to Africa. Go-go capitalism, resource stripping, and hidden offshore wealth held by political elites were becoming markers of the post–Cold War order, but Saddam—and the president’s close family members—were missing out on their potential.
Barzan’s opaque businesses occasionally carried him to Baghdad. Early in 1992, he joined Saddam for dinner, he recalled. Barzan noted that, since 1992 was an election year in the United States, “the Republicans and the Democrats would avoid” talking much about Iraq because each worried that the other might exploit the issue.
“When is this election?” Saddam asked.
Barzan explained that it was in November. Afterward, he marveled at how the “president of a country in the condition of war with the United States of America does not know the time of the election there, who the candidates are, and how the outcome will affect the fight between himself and America.”
To Saddam, America’s elections looked like phony rituals, window dressing on a pro-Israeli, neo-imperial deep state relentlessly undermining the Arab world. He believed that America would soon struggle with the demands of its post–Cold War quasi-empire: “It is incapable of satisfying its obligations,” he told colleagues. “I mean, America has promised countries of Eastern Europe and has not satisfied its promise. . . . Now Third World countries [say], ‘We are now Americans, make [us] happy.’ ”[8]
Saddam was right to think that the 1992 U.S. presidential election would not bring a drastic change in policy toward Iraq. Republicans and Democrats largely agreed on the need to challenge Saddam’s dictatorship. Still, Saddam was becoming unplugged from Washington, a major change from his position during the previous decade. Between the opening of the C.I.A. partnership in 1982 and the invasion of Kuwait eight summers later, Saddam’s regime had maintained regular contacts with the C.I.A.; operated a D.C. embassy led by a savvy ambassador, Nizar Hamdoon; and received ranking U.S. envoys in Baghdad, from Donald Rumsfeld to Bob Dole. Now the Iraqi embassy in Washington and the U.S. embassy in Baghdad were both shuttered. The only Americans eager to visit Iraq—besides U.N. weapons inspectors—seemed to be daredevil businessmen and political gadflies.
In May 1992, Tariq Aziz asked Nizar Hamdoon to return to America, this time as permanent representative to the United Nations in New York—the only senior diplomatic post on American soil that Iraq still maintained. Hamdoon moved with his wife and two daughters to an Iraqi-owned residence at 124 East Eightieth Street, a brick building between Lexington and Park Avenues, near the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The mission itself was just a short walk away, in a townhouse on East Seventy-Ninth. The ambassador remained both a loyal Baathist and a staunch advocate for improved U.S.-Iraq ties.[9]
That summer, Hamdoon watched as George H. W. Bush faltered in his campaign for reelection and Bill Clinton gained momentum. A recession gripped the U.S. economy in 1992, and Bush, a member of what passed for America’s aristocracy, seemed out of touch with the concerns of hard-hit citizens. “Message: I care,” Bush said at one campaign stop, inadvertently reading out notes intended as prompts. The race drew a strong independent candidate, the businessman Ross Perot, whose candidacy forced Bush to fend off attacks from two sides. By summer, Clinton led opinion polls by more than twenty points.
In August, America and Britain had announced a new no-fly zone to protect civilians in southern Iraq from aerial attack by Saddam’s regime. The new zone extended northward from Iraq’s borders with Kuwait and Saudi Arabia to the thirty-second parallel, south of Baghdad. Publicly, the Bush administration said the initiative would provide humanitarian protection to Iraq’s beleaguered Shia, but the greater purpose, recalled Bruce Riedel, then at the National Security Council, “was to create a buffer zone over southern Iraq so that we would know if he tried to move on Kuwait again.” Saddam responded by moving missile batteries into the southern zone to fire at patrolling U.S. and allied planes. America’s no-fly zones were becoming permanent low-grade sites of antiaircraft fire from the ground and counterattacks by patrolling planes.[10]
On November 3, Clinton won the presidency. When he learned that Bush had been defeated, Saddam appeared on a balcony in Baghdad and fired a celebratory shot into the air. He soon analyzed Bush’s exit with Tariq Aziz and Taha Yassin Ramadan. To avoid further aggravating Washington, Iraq “shouldn’t take a formal stand” about Bush’s defeat, Aziz cautioned. Still, they gloated in private. Bush lost to Clinton “because he didn’t succeed in removing Saddam Hussein,” Ramadan declared. “Now he is removed and Saddam Hussein [still] exists.”[11]
“Wasn’t the Mother of All Battles a basic reason for overthrowing Bush?” Saddam asked. Bush’s failure to “save the West from the regime in Iraq” had contributed to his defeat. In a later conversation, Saddam summed up how he thought the 1992 election had enhanced his own influence: “All the world is now saying, ‘Man, why are we afraid so much? Bush fell and Iraq lasted!’ ”
He did not expect that Bill Clinton would—or could—profoundly alter America’s conflict with Baghdad, however. “There are proven facts in the American policy that we shouldn’t ignore,” he said. “Among these facts are interests that meet with—in part—keeping the Zionist entity strong at the expense of the Arabs.” Because of this, “we’ll find ourselves clashing” with the United States “in one way or another.”[12]
Because of the daily skirmishes in the no-fly zones that Saddam provoked, it seemed possible that Bush might attack Iraq before Clinton’s inauguration in January. Saddam told the Revolutionary Command Council that an attack was just what he wanted. To fracture the American-led coalition arrayed against him, and to strengthen his position in the Arab world, he had to keep picking fights with the world’s sole remaining superpower—as long as they were fights that did not threaten his regime’s survival. “We test the enemy and we express ourselves,” he explained.[13]
He did not believe the United States would again mount a ground invasion of Iraq. Convinced that he only faced “this method of swift strikes” from the air, Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti observed, Saddam “became more stubborn and stuck to his own ways.”[14]
During the first days after the U.S. election, Tariq Aziz tried to open a channel to the new administration.
“Saddam has not the slightest idea of distracting Clinton” from his domestic policies, Aziz assured Samir Vincent, an Iraqi-born American scientist and businessman who offered to serve as an intermediary between Baghdad and Washington. “Saddam wants to work with Clinton and reach agreements.”[15]
Oscar Wyatt, the Texas oilman, also ferried messages from Saddam to the White House that winter. Texas Monthly once described the oilman as Houston’s “orneriest, wiliest, most litigious, most feared, most hated, and most beloved son of a bitch.” Wyatt flew into Iraq in January 1993, on his private jet, to lobby Saddam’s aides for a lucrative concession in Iraqi fields—U.N. resolutions be damned.
“He is going to carry letters to the new administration,” an adviser informed Saddam, speaking of Wyatt. The oilman was “not a sneaky person by any means because he is an old man.” Another adviser falsely noted that Wyatt had donated $5 million to Clinton’s campaign. Such was Saddam’s foggy window on Washington at a pivotal moment of political transition. Wyatt did speak to Clinton about Iraq. But Clinton was not about to risk political capital at the outset of his presidency by talking to Saddam.[16]
On Inauguration Day for America’s forty-second president, a chilly Wednesday in Washington, Bruce Riedel, the National Security Council’s director of Near East and South Asian affairs, huddled in the Situation Room, the secure conference room underneath the West Wing, to monitor firefights in the Iraqi no-fly zones. Just about every day now, “we were shooting at them, they were shooting at us,” he recalled. The incidents figured into Clinton’s first update briefings as president, as he prepared to celebrate that night at festive balls across Washington.
Early the next morning, Anthony “Tony” Lake, the president’s national security adviser, summoned Riedel to the White House and asked him to explain the “rules of engagement” in the no-fly zones, meaning the orders and restrictions given to American pilots by the Pentagon concerning when the pilots could shoot at Iraqi targets. Clinton’s aides wanted to know what sort of half war they now had to manage. Riedel said the engagement rules were “extremely complicated.” The basics were: If an Iraqi aircraft flew into a no-fly zone, an American plane would shoot it down. If an Iraqi aircraft flew into a zone and then escaped, an American plane would chase it and shoot it down. And if Iraqi ground forces fired at an American patrol plane, the U.S. would destroy the offending Iraqi unit or facility. But there were many subtleties and caveats. Lake and Sandy Berger told Riedel, in essence, “You’re leaning pretty far forward here.” Conflict could escalate without warning.
Yes, Riedel acknowledged, but the previous administration was trying to topple Saddam, and the no-fly zones were “part of the process.” He could tell that Clinton’s advisers were “very, very uncomfortable.” It soon became evident that Clinton’s principal goal in Iraq was making sure that Saddam didn’t become a problem for him. Clinton had been elected to address the faltering U.S. economy. Iraq was a Bush hangover he wished to avoid.[17]
At the C.I.A., Tom Twetten, the former Baghdad liaison and Near East operations chief, now ran all of the agency’s clandestine service as deputy director of central intelligence for operations. As Clinton took power, Twetten arranged to brief Warren Christopher, the new secretary of state, at his offices in Foggy Bottom. James Woolsey, whom Clinton had nominated to run the C.I.A., also attended. Woolsey was a smart oddball. Like Clinton, he was a former Rhodes Scholar and a graduate of Yale Law School. He had served as undersecretary of the navy during the Carter administration and as an arms control negotiator for President George H. W. Bush. But whereas Clinton was a remarkably gifted, empathetic politician, Woolsey proved to have a tin ear when he reached Washington’s highest echelons.
Woolsey had yet to be confirmed in office, so Twetten ran the briefing. He had heard that Christopher, an attorney who had served in the Carter administration, had serious doubts about the value of the C.I.A.’s covert actions. Twetten gave him a spiel about the agency’s qualified utility. Half of the spies in the clandestine service would vote against ever getting involved in covert actions, Twetten said. They preferred to stick with straight intelligence collection. But the C.I.A. was stuck with covert action anyway “because we can do it” under the law and have had successes. As an example, he pointed to the recently concluded C.I.A. program to arm guerrillas fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. “Covert action is a tool of foreign policy,” Twetten said. “It’s your tool, you and the president.” If you can execute foreign policy without it, that’s preferable, but if you think you need an operation “to supplement what your diplomatic efforts are, we’re there.”[18]
Lake and Berger ran a policy review on Iraq that largely ratified George H. W. Bush’s policy, including the covert-action plan to foment a coup against Saddam. Clinton also endorsed the U.N. sanctions regime and the no-fly zones. Colin Powell, still chairman of the Joint Chiefs, described the Iraqi dictator as a “toothache” that could be managed. Proclaimed policy would emphasize tough sanctions to weaken Saddam while secret actions would measure the regime’s vulnerabilities. “It was like bending a pencil by putting pressure on both ends—you could not predict exactly when it would snap, but at some point you could be certain it would,” a C.I.A. Middle East hand hypothesized.
Martin Indyk, Clinton’s senior aide on the Middle East at the National Security Council, soon coined a phrase: “dual containment,” meaning simultaneous pressure on Iraq and Iran. Indyk and Clinton had their sights set on other priorities in the region: above all, advancing back-channel peace talks between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization—talks that would soon produce the Oslo Accords, an agreement in principle to establish a Palestinian state. Clinton would only consider engaging with Saddam if the dictator opened his own back channel to Israel, following the example of Jordan’s King Hussein.[19]
Charles Duelfer, a defense and intelligence specialist who had worked mainly at the State Department, had replaced Robert Gallucci as deputy to Rolf Ekéus at the weapons-hunting U.N. Special Commission. Around this time, Duelfer joined Indyk for lunch at the White House mess, in the basement of the West Wing.
Indyk said that the Clinton administration wanted a new regime in Iraq, but it would have to come from within. To explain their strategy, he “put his two index fingers down on the tablecloth and slowly drew two parallel lines,” Duelfer recalled. One line represented international support for Saddam, the other support for the economic sanctions and oil embargo that kept Saddam under tight pressure. “The hope was that support for Saddam would crumble before support for sanctions did,” said Duelfer, summarizing Indyk’s explanation. Duelfer concluded that Clinton thought Saddam “was a problem that could be managed but not solved. . . . Perhaps we would get lucky and he would simply drop dead.”[20]
By early 1993, C.I.A. covert action and the Clinton administration’s passivity had produced an unintended result, one little remarked upon in Washington at the time. It had empowered a talented, ambitious, and ruthlessly deceptive figure destined to alter the courses of Iraqi and American history.
Ahmad Chalabi was then in his late forties. He kept a flat in London’s Mayfair district and a home in the mountains of Kurdistan. Chalabi had maneuvered his way onto the C.I.A.’s payroll—an organization he controlled received $340,000 a month from the agency—but he was not a controlled C.I.A. agent. He was more of a paid ally and agent of influence. Brilliant and self-regarding, he had “Gaullist aspirations and a nature Machiavellian to its core,” as a biographer, Richard Bonin, put it. Rather than acting as an arm of the C.I.A., Chalabi said later, “I saw them as an asset that I could use to promote my program.”[21]
Chalabi was a scion of one of the wealthiest families of Iraq’s royal era. His father was a minister of public works serving King Faisal II. The family acted as a local partner of a British firm that had monopolized Iraq’s agricultural exports, and the Chalabis owned tens of thousands of acres in the capital and its environs. They were distinctive in another way, too—they were Shia merchants and social notables in a Baghdad elite otherwise heavily influenced by the Hashemite royal family’s Sunni faith.
Born in 1944, Ahmad Chalabi had a boyhood that paralleled that of Jafar Dhia Jafar, who was just a year older, and whose father had also been a royal minister; Chalabi attended the same English boarding school, Seaford College, as young Jafar did. But after the royal family’s overthrow, the Chalabis quickly fled Baghdad for London.
While the Chalabis had stashed enough money abroad to live comfortably in exile, they lost much of their Iraqi fortune. Eventually, Chalabi’s father moved to Beirut and went into banking. Chalabi attended M.I.T., where he proved to be a precocious mathematician. He went on to earn a doctorate in mathematics at the University of Chicago. The family became actively involved in Iraqi exile politics. In 1969, after completing his doctorate, Chalabi briefly traveled to Iran and Kurdistan, where he served as a courier in an unsuccessful coup attempt against the Baath government by a group of Kurdish rebels, backed by Iranian intelligence. In that adventure, Chalabi acquired a taste for action and intrigue he would never relinquish. In 1975, now a math professor in Beirut, Chalabi watched from a distance as Iran and the C.I.A. abruptly withdrew support for Mustafa Barzani. The lesson Chalabi took from that episode, he said later, was that the C.I.A. “is completely prepared to burn down your house to light a cigarette.”[22]
Chalabi moved to Amman to establish Petra Bank, a new outpost of his family’s banking business, which now operated from Cairo to Abu Dhabi. Chalabi eased into Amman society—an aristocrat in his early thirties with a taste for Bach and Mozart, but also a backroom operator with a disconcerting habit of playing with knives in his office. In the manner of other unscrupulous bankers in the region, Chalabi used customer deposits to buy favor with powerful Jordanians by lending them millions without expecting repayment. He befriended King Hussein’s troubled eldest son and heir apparent, Prince Hassan, and reportedly lent him nearly $30 million. Chalabi himself borrowed millions to build a grandiose home in Amman, with a courtyard full of Greek statues. About 40 percent of Petra’s outstanding loans, worth about $175 million, were not being paid back, evidently because this was never expected. Petra was a house of cards awaiting a gust of wind. That came in 1989, when Jordan suffered an economic crisis and King Hussein’s government demanded that local banks provide a percentage of their reserves to rescue the country. Chalabi had no cash to give; Petra’s insolvency was exposed. On August 9, just after midnight, Chalabi snuck out of Jordan under a half-moon, hiding in a car driven by his brother.[23]
He returned to Mayfair and rented a flat overlooking Green Park. After Saddam invaded Kuwait, Chalabi reinvented himself as a political exile, networking his way into the fractious and ineffective Iraqi opposition. He invented a story that Saddam was responsible for Petra Bank’s troubles. In February 1991, under counsel from American friends, he placed an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal headlined “A Democratic Future for Iraq” and another, a month later, in The Washington Post titled “Democracy for Iraq . . .” The prospect of majority rule in Iraq unsettled some American policymakers, since most Iraqis were Shia, the faith of revolutionary Iran. But Chalabi dressed like a banker, not an aspiring ayatollah. When the C.I.A.’s Iraq Operations Group started to covertly organize opposition-in-exile to Saddam, Chalabi was an obvious recruit—visible, mouthing democratic slogans, connected in America, fluent in English, and with a background in administration. “He has a lot of the skills you would want if you’re creating a new political organization,” concluded Whitley Bruner, the case officer assigned to bring Chalabi on board.
That Chalabi’s tour at Petra Bank was shadowed by allegations of systemic fraud did not deter the C.I.A. The agency’s allies and agents were often rogues. A colleague of Bruner’s, Linda Flohr, saw a way to turn Chalabi’s dodgy escape from Jordan, and the pending charges against him there, into an advantage. His “reputation of corruption . . . is a good cover,” as Flohr put it, since Chalabi could funnel C.I.A. funds while creating the impression among fellow Iraqis that he was “financially independent.” Of course, another possibility was that the unscrupulous practices that had caused Petra to collapse might foreshadow Chalabi’s decision-making as an agency client.[24]
Working with the Rendon Group, the C.I.A.-funded PR firm, Chalabi helped form the Iraqi National Congress, or the I.N.C. In June 1992, with agency funds, he flew about two hundred Iraqis to a conference in Vienna. Some of Chalabi’s C.I.A. handlers saw him as merely a conduit and organizer, but Chalabi saw the I.N.C. as a vehicle to advance his own bid for power in a post-Saddam Iraq. Later that year, he set up shop in Salahuddin, Kurdistan, and staged a second conference there. Kurdistan’s instability and rivalries seemed to suit him. Rotating C.I.A. and Iranian intelligence officers now both operated there, eyeing one another warily. Chalabi unabashedly played both sides. With more than $4 million in annual funds from the C.I.A., deepening ties to Kurdish guerrillas, and access to Iran’s networks, he became a force on the ground.[25]
In Amman, John Maguire watched Chalabi’s rise with unease. He was “so loose in the way he ran things, he had all kinds of competing interests,” Maguire recalled. A sardonic colleague of Maguire’s once made him a metal wall hanging engraved with the C.I.A. seal and dubbed “The Six Phases of a C.I.A. Covert Action Program.” These were:
Euphoria.
Confusion.
Disillusionment.
Search for the Guilty.
Punishment of the Innocent.
Distinction for the Uninvolved.
In Chalabi’s case, by early 1993, the cycle was underway.[26]
The C.I.A. had little access to one important wing of the opposition to Saddam Hussein: the Shia parties aligned with Iran, including the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Largely hostile to the United States, the Shia religious parties had little interest in collaborating directly with the C.I.A.’s coupmakers—and vice versa. This estrangement would persist for years to come, exacerbating America’s blindness to the full contours of Iraqi opposition politics, including how competition for power was likely to unfold if America ever did knock off Saddam.
In the intelligence and national security sections of Saddam’s prisons, thousands of accused participants in the 1991 uprisings, mainly Shia, languished still. The secret police advanced prosecutions via memos and appeal letters that outlined specific instances of treason against the state:
“Theft of a car, with hostile slogans written on it.”
“Sitting with saboteurs at the mosque.”
“Transported saboteurs in his car, and carried a sign.”
“Bearing arms and repeated folk songs.”[27]
Unlike the regime’s Kurdish victims, these mainly Shia prisoners had little visibility in the West. When the nuclear scientist and former political prisoner Hussain Al-Shahristani arrived in Tehran after his prison escape, the Supreme Council invited him to join their cause. With his roots in Karbala, his credentials as a scientist, and his credibility as an Abu Ghraib survivor, Shahristani had become a respected figure in Shia opposition circles. But he was “disappointed” to discover in Tehran that exiled leaders there and elsewhere were “not working together. Their focus was not on bringing down the regime. There was just political rivalry among them.”[28]
He decided not to get involved. Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the reformist president of Iran, sought to revive the country’s science and technology sectors. His government provided the Shahristani family with a flat, free of charge. The president’s son Yasser offered Shahristani work in Iran’s nuclear program. Like Iraq during the 1980s, Iran had a civilian nuclear program as well as the beginnings of a clandestine bomb effort. Shahristani needed an income. Rafsanjani said nothing about weapons work; it was all but unthinkable that Iran would entrust vital state secrets to an Iraqi citizen, no matter his attitude toward Saddam Hussein. Shahristani accepted a part-time position working on the mining of natural uranium, a subject well removed from bomb development, and delivered occasional lectures in English on subjects in nuclear chemistry.
Urged on by Hussain’s wife, Berniece, the Shahristanis also ran humanitarian relief operations. Tens of thousands of Iraqi refugees still languished in camps inside Iran, where they had fled in 1991. The wetlands that straddled the far southern border between Iraq and Iran had long provided refuge to dissidents and smugglers, and some anti-Saddam Shia activists operated from there. Saddam dammed rivers to dry up the marshes, attacked villages, and created more refugees.
The Shahristanis initially set up a charity, Gulf War Victims, and later took charge of the Iran office of a British charity, the Iraqi Refugee Aid Council. They staged logistics from Tehran and shuttled to and from the Iraqi border, delivering food, clothing, and medical supplies. Hussain also continued a project he had started inside Abu Ghraib: creating records of political prisoners held by the Iraqi regime.
The Shahristanis worked in a largely hidden subworld of suffering and defacement caused by Saddam Hussein’s rule—the tens of thousands of camp dwellers near the marshes; the long lists of political prisoners and disappeared, as well as the families concerned about them; and the physical landscape along the Iran-Iraq border, scarred by two wars and littered with the detritus of combat. Saddam had “destroyed the good nature of the Iraqi people,” a colleague of Shahristani’s at the Aid Council, Abdul Halim, once remarked. “Material losses can be compensated; destroyed homes can be rebuilt, but what about the goodness of people?”[29]
The words stayed with Shahristani. In the Karbala he had known as a boy in the 1950s, he recalled his neighbors as devout, straightforward, poor but ready to help and protect one another. Now neighbors spied on neighbors, coerced by secret police who could make a person disappear overnight. Then came the wars, “people shoveled into mass graves, bodies mutilated.” The unthinkable became commonplace. “Everyone is so viciously for himself.”[30]
The cruelty and selfishness played out in ordinary lives but also in the struggle between Saddam and his internal and exiled Iraqi enemies—a dirty war now in its second decade, and soon to intensify.