The New York Sun Editorial & Opinion May 24, 2004 Behind the Raid on Chalabi Laurie Mylroie traces the roots of the Central Intelligence Agency's feud with one Iraqi
The American campaign against the head of the Iraqi National Congress, Ahmad Chalabi, is symptomatic of a long series of missteps on Iraq. When George W. Bush became president, he inherited an accumulation of intelligence failures going back to the 1991 Gulf War. The Iraq War reflected a radical change from the earlier "containment" policy, but this policy change was not matched by any major change in the way the American intelligence community viewed Iraq. In that mismatch--a radically new policy implemented without intelligence reform--lies the basic reason for the campaign against Mr. Chalabi. Although the intelligence community's understanding of Iraq remains fundamentally flawed, the White House has never come to terms with what it means to operate in an environment in which the CIA seriously misunderstands a critical issue. When this happened in the 1980s regarding the Soviet Union, the Reagan administration took steps to correct it, and then succeeded in bringing the Soviets down. Nothing similar occurred regarding Iraq. The INC ran a highly successful intelligence program, called the Information Collection Program, headed by Mr. Chalabi's long-time aide, Arras Karim, a 38-yearold Shi'a Kurd, whose father had been an official in the Kurdistan Democratic Party. Mr. Karim himself has fought against Saddam's regime since he was a teenager. He is very smart and very dedicated. Just last week, General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the U.S. Congress that the ICP "has saved [U.S.] soldiers' lives." The CIA has a long-standing grudge against Mr. Chalabi and it has made these charges before.The source of the agency's animus is two-fold. The long-term cause is its Arabist orientation (shared by State's Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs). The agency reflects the perspective of the Sunni Arab regimes--a preference for authoritarianism over democracy and an animus against the Shi'a. Back in 1991, the agency believed that Saddam would be overthrown in a coup. Indeed, the current White House envoy on Iraq, Robert Blackwill, himself a figure from Bush 41, recently disclosed the startling information that the CIA told the White House then that Iraq's helicopter squadrons would oust Saddam and that is why the White House let them fly after the cease-fire. Of course, the helicopters played a key role in suppressing the widespread popular uprising that erupted against Saddam then. In 2003, America operated on an expanded version of this notion: the way to get rid of Saddam was to work through the supposedly dissident members of his regime. Probably, that is why none of the 50-some decapitation strikes against regime figures, including the strike against Saddam that began the war, was successful. At best, it was simply poor information; at worst, it was fed to the agency by Iraqi intelligence. The CIA advocated, and the White House accepted, the notion that it would be possible to govern a postwar Iraq through the prewar bureaucracies: Baathists without blood on their hands. That has proved a failure. Iraqis so hated the Baathists that the institutions of the old regime simply collapsed. Now as America casts about for a way to create an Iraqi government, it has fixed on the United Nations and its Algerian envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi. Mr. Brahimi represents the old Sunni order, and his plans, such that they are, are unlikely to work. Mr. Chalabi has said as much, and the White House decided it was necessary to marginalize him, though American officials in Baghdad probably went further than anticipated. A second cause of the animosity toward Mr. Chalabi is grounded in the failure of a CIA-backed coup plot in 1996.In the mid-1990s,the agency ran two programs to overthrow Saddam. One was the INC, established by Bush 41 with the aim of overthrowing Saddam through a popular insurgency. It operated out of Northern Iraq, in Kurdish-controlled territory. The other program was a coup. President Clinton's administration--where George Tenet was NSC adviser on intelligence--actually favored the coup option. It seemed a less risky way to get rid of Saddam than an insurgency. The agency worked with a former Iraqi general, resident in Jordan (whom Paul Bremer recently appointed Iraq's national security adviser). Mr. Chalabi warned that Saddam had penetrated the coup, but was ignored. In July 1996, Saddam wrapped up the conspirators, arresting several hundred officers and executing a number of them. Using the CIA's own communications equipment, the Iraqi mukhabarrat contacted the CIA station chief in Amman and told him to pack his bags and go home. The next month, in August, the Clinton administration watched as 40,000 Iraqi troops marched north toward Irbil, just inside Kurdish territory, where the INC was headquartered. Although opposition leaders, including Jalal Talabani, had been led to believe America would attack those forces, nothing happened and the lightly equipped INC force was routed. The Clinton administration wouldn't supply them arms. ABC News produced a documentary on that debacle. Arras Karim was in Irbil then and explains, "Everybody was waiting for the American fighters. It was 6,7,8, they will come at 9.We are waiting for the Americans. We are waiting for their promise. And there was no answer." Mr. Karim is from Baghdad. With the help of a local Kurd, a driver for the INC, Karim and a handful of others succeeded in a dangerous, daring escape across the mountains into Turkey, where they were met by Turkish intelligence. When Mr. Chalabi subsequently went public with the CIA's Iraq fiascos, he became the agency's enduring enemy. Among other things, the CIA charged that Mr. Karim was an Iranian agent, although no knowledgeable person believed that. In 2002, as America prepared for war with Iraq, the Defense Intelligence Agency assumed responsibility for the INC's intelligence program. It had previously been handled by the State Department, which was more interested in killing the program than learning from it. The DIA polygraphed Mr. Karim, including on whether he worked for Iran. Mr. Karim passed with flying colors. With all the problems in Iraq, how can Washington turn against a figure who is essentially a political ally and shut down an intelligence program praised by the most senior American military officials? Mr. Bush is getting faulty information about Mr. Chalabi, because he never took the steps necessary to correct earlier intelligence errors. Nor, most probably, does Mr. Bush understand the prevailing ethos. Mr. Clinton did not want to address the threat posed by Saddam, as it emerged in the 1990s, and he certainly did not want to do what Mr. Chalabi advocated: support an insurgency to overthrow Saddam. So people adjusted themselves to the president's view, and with time, Mr. Clinton's view became the overwhelmingly dominant perspective among those dealing with Iraq. Mr. Bush seems to think that now these people will provide accurate assessments regarding the situation in Iraq. Their personal interest, however, is otherwise. It is to not acknowledge error. Ms. Mylroie was adviser on Iraq to the 1992 Clinton campaign and is the author of "Bush vs. the Beltway: How the CIA and the State Department Tried to Stop the War on Terror" (HarperCollins).
