Chalabi Aide is Suspected Iranian Spy

Knut Royce, Newsday

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.