By Jim Popkin, NBC News Senior Investigative Producer
Former top aides of Ahmad Chalabi now admit in a new book that they believed that the defectors who Chalabi and his group introduced to Western media and to U.S. intelligence agencies were in some cases providing misleading information about Saddam Hussein and his access to weapons of mass destruction. Chalabi, the charming Iraqi exile who became the darling of American neo-conservatives, helped convince the Bush Administration that Saddam Hussein had WMDs and should invade Iraq.
The new book, “The Man Who Pushed America to War,” was written by NBC News Investigative Producer Aram Roston. Roston chronicles how Chalabi and his group, the Iraqi National Congress (INC), provided sketchy defectors to news media organizations and to US intelligence agencies who embellished their accounts of life under Saddam or lied for dramatic effect. "Chalabi's INC, even where it did not directly plant false information about Saddam's links to terrorists and WMDs, believed that, in many cases, it was false," Roston writes.
The book also reports that, after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Chalabi secretly met with an Iranian Revolutionary Guards general who was wanted by the U.S. A former senior U.S. intelligence official tells NBC News that the U.S. military was trying to arrest the insurgent leader, Gen. Ahmed Foruzandeh, at the time Chalabi secretly met with him in Iraq. About three years after that clandestine meeting, the U.S. Treasury Department designated Foruzandeh as a key insurgent leader and wrote that he “leads terrorist operations against Coalition Forces and Iraqi Security Forces, and directs assassinations of Iraqi figures.”
"American intelligence believed this general was responsible for organizing and arming insurgents that were out to kill Americans," Roston said.
Chalabi Reacts:
In a statement to NBC News, Chalabi said he didn't know the Iranian was wanted at the time, and that many Iraqi leaders met with that man. Chalabi wrote: “The US did not publish the names of any wanted Iranian for activities in Iraq in 2004. So there is nothing to the false implication that I knew this individual was wanted by the U.S. authorities at that time. Moreover, all top Iraqi leaders who visit Tehran meet regularly with Iranian revolutionary guards, including this individual. To illustrate this: some of the Iraqi leaders who met with President Bush as recently as 2007 have met with the man named in your question, and did so before and after their meetings with President Bush. Moreover, the U.S. itself has met with many individuals it has decried as having done something wrong. The object of any meetings I attend is to promote the stability that my country needs, and speaking to people from various points of view sometimes moves the process in a favorable direction.”
Chalabi also denied that he or his aides ever knowingly presented false information to the U.S. “The INC never provided information to the U.S. that the INC knew or suspected to be false,” Chalabi wrote. “None of my top advisors, current or former, said to Mr. Roston that they knew that key defectors were giving information to the US, which was, in some cases, untrue or embellished.”
