May 21, 2004
NEW YORK NEWSDAY
Chalabi aide is suspected Iranian spy
BY KNUT ROYCE
WASHINGTON BUREAU
May 21, 2004, 7:29 PM EDT
WASHINGTON -- The Defense Intelligence Agency has concluded that a
U.S.-funded arm of Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress has been used
for years by Iranian intelligence to pass disinformation to the United
States and to collect highly sensitive American secrets, according to
intelligence sources.
"Iranian intelligence has been manipulating the United States through
Chalabi by furnishing through his Information Collection Program
information to provoke the United States into getting rid of Saddam
Hussein," said an intelligence source Friday who was briefed on the
Defense Intelligence Agency's conclusions, which were based on a review of
thousands of internal documents.
The Information Collection Program also "kept the Iranians informed about
what we were doing" by passing classified U.S. documents and other
sensitive information, he said. The program has received millions of
dollars from the U.S. government over several years.
An administration official confirmed that "highly classified information
had been provided [to the Iranians] through that channel."
The Defense Department this week halted payment of $340,000 a month to
Chalabi's program. Chalabi had long been the favorite of the Pentagon's
civilian leadership. Intelligence sources say Chalabi himself has passed
on sensitive U.S. intelligence to the Iranians.
Patrick Lang, former director of the intelligence agency's Middle East
branch, said he had been told by colleagues in the intelligence community
that Chalabi's U.S.-funded program to provide information about weapons of
mass destruction and insurgents was effectively an Iranian intelligence
operation. "They [the Iranians] knew exactly what we were up to," he said.
He described it as "one of the most sophisticated and successful
intelligence operations in history."
"I'm a spook. I appreciate good work. This was good work," he said.
An intelligence agency spokesman would not discuss questions about his
agency's internal conclusions about the alleged Iranian operation. But he
said some of its information had been helpful to the U.S. "Some of the
information was great, especially as it pertained to arresting high value
targets and on force protection issues," he said. "And some of the
information wasn't so great."
At the center of the alleged Iranian intelligence operation, according to
administration officials and intelligence sources, is Aras Karim Habib, a
47-year-old Shia Kurd who was named in an arrest warrant issued during a
raid on Chalabi's home and offices in Baghdad Thursday. He eluded arrest.
Karim, who sometimes goes by the last name of Habib, is in charge of the
information collection program.
The intelligence source briefed on the Defense Intelligence Agency's
conclusions said that Karim's "fingerprints are all over it."
"There was an ongoing intelligence relationship between Karim and the
Iranian Intelligence Ministry, all funded by the U.S. government,
inadvertently," he said.
The Iraqi National Congress has received about $40 million in U.S. funds
over the past four years, including $33 million from the State Department
and $6 million from the Defense Intelligence Agency.
In Baghdad after the war, Karim's operation was run out of the fourth
floor of a secure intelligence headquarters building, while the
intelligence agency was on the floor above, according to an Iraqi source
who knows Karim well.
The links between the INC and U.S. intelligence go back to at least 1992,
when Karim was picked by Chalabi to run his security and military
operations.
Indications that Iran, which fought a bloody war against Iraq during the
1980s, was trying to lure the U.S. into action against Saddam Hussein
appeared many years before the Bush administration decided in 2001 that
ousting Hussein was a national priority.
In 1995, for instance, Khidhir Hamza, who had once worked in Iraq's
nuclear program and whose claims that Iraq had continued a massive bomb
program in the 1990s are now largely discredited, gave UN nuclear
inspectors what appeared to be explosive documents about Iraq's program.
Hamza, who fled Iraq in 1994, teamed up with Chalabi after his escape.
The documents, which referred to results of experiments on enriched
uranium in the bomb's core, were almost flawless, according to Andrew
Cockburn's recent account of the event in the political newsletter
CounterPunch.
But the inspectors were troubled by one minor matter: Some of the
techinical descriptions used terms that would only be used by an Iranian.
They determined that the original copy had been written in Farsi by an
Iranian scientist and then translated into Arabic.
And the International Atomic Energy Agency concluded the documents were
fraudulent.
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