INFORMATION COLLECTION Early in the Bush 43 administration, actions began that clearly reflected a predisposition to place regime change in Iraq at the top of the foreign-policy agenda. Sometime in January 2001, the Iraqi National Congress (INC), the opposition group headed by Ahmed Chalabi, began receiving U.S. State Department funds for an effort called the "Information-Collection Program." Under the Clinton administration, some money had been given to Iraqi exiles for what might be called agit-prop activities against Saddam's government, but the INC (Chalabi) had not been taken very seriously. They had a bad reputation for spending money freely with very little to show for it. The CIA had concluded that Chalabi and his INC colleagues were not to be trusted with taxpayers' money. Nevertheless, Chalabi had longstanding ties to a group of well-established anti-Saddam American activists who were installed by the Bush administration as leading figures of the politically appointed civilian bureaucracy in the Pentagon and in the Office of the Vice President.
Those ties paid off. The Information-Collection Program, launched in the early months of the Bush administration, was aimed at providing funds to the INC for recruiting defectors from Saddam's military and secret police, and making them available to American intelligence. But what the program really did was to provide a steady stream of raw information useful in challenging the collective wisdom of the intelligence community where the "War with Iraq" enthusiasts disagreed with the intelligence agencies. If the president and Congress were to be sold the need for war, information had to be available with which to argue against what was seen as the lack of imagination and timidity of regular intelligence analysts. To facilitate the flow of such "information" to the president, a dedicated apparatus centered in the Office of the Vice President created its own intelligence office, buried in the recesses of the Pentagon, to "stovepipe" raw data to the White House, to make the case for war on the basis of the testimony of self-interested émigrés and exiles.
At the time of the first Gulf War in 1991, I was the defense intelligence officer for the Middle East in the Defense Intelligence Agency. This meant that I was in charge of all DIA substantive business for the region. In discussions at the time of the victorious end of that campaign and the subsequent Shia and Kurdish revolts in Iraq, it became abundantly clear that the same people who later made up the war party in the Bush 43 administration were not completely reconciled to the failure of U.S. forces to overthrow the Saddam regime. In spite of the lack of U.N. sanction for such an operation and the probable long-term costs of the inevitable American occupation of Iraq, the group later known as the neocons seemed deeply embittered by the lack of decisive action to remove the Iraqi dictator. Soon after the dust settled on Operation Desert Storm, the first Bush administration helped launch the Iraqi National Congress (INC). The INC was initially an umbrella of anti-Saddam groups largely composed of Kurdish and Shia organizations. In the beginning, the CIA provided seed money as a result of presidential direction, and a private consulting firm, the Rendon Group, provided the initial public-relations support. To this day, one of the Rendon advisors to the INC, Francis Brooke, serves as the INC's chief Washington lobbyist.
Chalabi's American connections played a dominant role in the INC's evolution over the next dozen years. At the University of Chicago, Chalabi had been a student of Albert Wohlstetter, a hard-line Utopian nuclear-war planner who had been the dissertation adviser to another University of Chicago Ph.D., Paul Wolfowitz. Wohlstetter had also been a mentor to Richard Perle. In the summer of 1969, Wohlstetter arranged for both Wolfowitz and Perle to work for the short-lived Committee to Maintain a Prudent Defense Policy, a Washington-based group co-founded by two icons of American Cold War policy, Dean Acheson and Paul Nitze. Wolfowitz and Perle remained close collaborators from that time forward.
Chalabi, an Iraqi Shia Arab, had fled Iraq in 1958, just after the overthrow of the royal Hashemite government. His father and grandfather had held cabinet posts in the British-installed Hashemite regime. Before coming to the United States to obtain a doctorate, Chalabi lived in Jordan, Lebanon and Britain. He returned to Beirut after obtaining his doctorate, but in 1977, he moved to Jordan and established a new company, the Petra Bank, which grew into the second largest commercial bank in the country. Twelve years later, the Jordanian government took over the bank and charged Chalabi, who fled the country, with embezzling $70 million. In 1992, Chalabi was tried and convicted in absentia and sentenced to 22 years at hard labor. One of the persistent stories concerning this scandal is that Chalabi's Petra Bank was involved in arms sales to Iran during the Iran-Iraq War, and that Saddam Hussein discovered this and pressured King Hussein of Jordan to crack down on Chalabi.
Shortly after his hasty departure from Jordan, Chalabi, with the backing of his neocon allies in Washington, most notably, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Professor Bernard Lewis of Princeton, helped launch the INC. Chalabi had first been introduced to Perle and Wolfowitz in 1985 by their mutual mentor, Albert Wohlstetter. Bernard Lewis met Chalabi in 1990 and soon thereafter asked his own allies inside the Bush 41 administration, including Wolfowitz's Pentagon aide Zalmay Khalilzad, to help boost the Iraqi exile. Another future Bush 43 Iraq War player also met Chalabi about that time. General Wayne Downing was first introduced to Chalabi in 1991, when Downing commanded the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
In November 1993, Chalabi presented the newly inaugurated Clinton administration with a scheme for the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime. Dubbed "End Game," the plan envisioned a limited revolt by an insurgent force of INC-led Kurds and Shiites in the oil regions around Basra in the south and Mosul and Kirkuk in the north. The "End Game" scenario: at the first sign of revolt against Saddam, there would be a full-scale insurrection by military commanders, who would overthrow the Saddam clique and install a Washington- and Tel Aviv-friendly, INC-dominated regime in Baghdad. The plan was based on a belief that Iraq was ripe for revolt and that there were no units in the armed forces that would fight to preserve Saddam's government. Since the same units had fought to keep Saddam in power during the Kurdish and Shia revolts of a few years before, it is difficult to see why the sponsors of End Game would have thought that. A limited effort to implement End Game ended in disaster in 1995, when the Iraqis did fight to defeat the rebels and the Iraqi Army killed over 100 INC combatants. From that point on, both the CIA and DIA considered Chalabi "persona non grata." The CIA also dropped all financial backing for Chalabi, as the INC, once an umbrella group of various opposition forces, degenerated into little more than a cult of personality, gathered together in London, where Chalabi and his small group of remaining INC loyalists retreated.
