Ahmad Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), came under further pressure from Washington on Friday when it was reported the US intercepted an Iranian intelligence cable nine years ago which discussed a meeting with him in northern Iraq.
Chalabi, who was supported by the Pentagon during the Iraq invasion, has been accused by US intelligence officials of passing secrets to Tehran this year.
Former intelligence officials have pointed to the intercept as evidence the INC leader had longstanding ties to Iranian intelligence. They say the CIA informed the Pentagon of its suspicions but was ignored.
In the 1995 incident Chalabi is reported to have met Iranian agents in northern Iraq and let them see a forged document falsely suggesting the US was pursuing a plan to assassinate Saddam Hussein.
The story was first told by Robert Baer in his 2001 book, See No Evil: the True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism. Baer was the CIA case officer assigned to work with Chalabi in northern Iraq in the mid-1990s.
According to his account, Chalabi put the document, printed on US national security council stationery, on his desk during a meeting with Iranian intelligence agents and left it there when he left the room to take a telephone call, knowing the Iranians would read it.
But Baer did not explain in the book how US intelligence had found out about the forged document. On Friday the Washington Post said Iranian agents in Iraq had sent an encrypted message about the meeting to Tehran which was intercepted and decoded by the US. Baer said he could neither confirm nor deny that part of the story.
Chalabi fell from grace with his American backers last month, after being accused by US officials of passing secrets to Iranian intelligence six weeks ago, informing Tehran that its internal codes had been cracked by the US national security agency. He has rejected the charge as a CIA smear.
The assassination of foreign leaders in peacetime is prohibited by US law and presidential orders and the 1995 incident triggered an FBI investigation.
Baer and his team in northern Iraq were questioned about their role in forging the document but were eventually cleared of involvement. Baer said the document was forged by the INC, in the hope of attracting Iran's support for his fight against Saddam.
Baer said that before George Bush won the 2000 election he had told Douglas Feith and Richard Perle, two prominent INC backers, about Chalabi's unreliability and his ties to Iran.
"I told Feith and Perle this, but it did not make any difference," he said. "They're like Jesuits. They believed and they didn't check around."
Vincent Cannistraro, a former chief of operations at the CIA's counterterrorism unit, said George Tenet, the agency's chief who resigned on Thursday, had arranged for the Pentagon to be informed about Chalabi in 2002 but the CIA had been "blown off" by the Pentagon.
A French-Algerian man went on trial in France on Monday for burning to death his wife in 2021, a case that shocked the public and sparked heavy criticism of police for failing to take adequate measures to protect her. Mounir Boutaa, now 48, stalked his Algerian-born wife Chahinez Daoud following their separation, and even bought a van he parked outside her house near Bordeaux in southwestern France, which he used to watch her without being detected. On May 4, 2021, he attacked her in the street, shot her in both legs, poured gasoline on her and set her on fire. A neighbor hearing
DEATH CONSTANTLY LOOMING: Decades of detention took a major toll on Iwao Hakamada’s mental health, his lawyers describing him as ‘living in a world of fantasy’ A Japanese man wrongly convicted of murder who was the world’s longest-serving death row inmate has been awarded US$1.44 million in compensation, an official said yesterday. The payout represents ￥12,500 (US$83) for each day of the more than four decades that Iwao Hakamada spent in detention, most of it on death row when each day could have been his last. It is a record for compensation of this kind, Japanese media said. The former boxer, now 89, was exonerated last year of a 1966 quadruple murder after a tireless campaign by his sister and others. The case sparked scrutiny of the justice system in
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
RSS