Ahmed Abdel Hadi Chalabi (Arabic: أحمد عبد الهادي الجلبي; 30 October 1945 – 3 November 2015) was an Iraqi politician and founder of the Iraqi National Congress (INC) who served as the President of the Governing Council of Iraq (37th Prime Minister of Iraq) and a Deputy Prime Minister of Iraq under Ibrahim al-Jaafari. He is believed to have been an Iranian agent.
Chalabi was interim Minister of Oil in Iraq in April–May 2005 and December 2005 – January 2006 and Deputy Prime Minister from May 2005 to May 2006. Chalabi failed to win a seat in parliament in the December 2005 elections, and when the new Iraqi cabinet was announced in May 2006, he was not given a post. Once dubbed the "George Washington of Iraq" by American supporters, he was initially a CIA-backed operative, who later fell out of favor, with U.S. Special Forces raiding his private residence in Baghdad only one year after the invasion of Iraq. He later came under investigation by several U.S. government agencies after switching his allegiances to become an instrument of pro-Iranian influence in Iraqi politics.
In the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Iraqi National Congress (INC), with the assistance of lobbying powerhouse BKSH & Associates, provided a major portion of the information on which the Office of Special Plans based its condemnation of the Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, including reports of weapons of mass destruction and alleged ties to al-Qaeda. Most, if not all, of this information has turned out to be false and Chalabi has been called a fabricator. Along with this, Chalabi also subsequently boasted, in an interview with the British Sunday Telegraph, about the impact that their faulty intelligence had on American policy. These factors led to a falling-out between him and the U.S. government. Furthermore, Chalabi was found guilty of bank fraud in the Petra Bank scandal in Jordan and he was sentenced to 22 years imprisonment in absentia.
In 2008, Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance Director Jay Garner stated that he believed Chalabi was an Iranian agent. In January 2012, a French intelligence official stated that he believed Chalabi to be "acting on behalf of Iran".
Chalabi was born into a prominent Arab Shia Muslim family belonging to the wealthy and influential elite of Baghdad. The Chalabi family traces its roots to the ancient Arab Tayy tribe. He was born in Kadhimiya in 1945. His family, who dated back 300 years to the Sultanate, ran Iraq's oldest commercial bank under the British-backed Kingdom of Iraq. His father, Abdel Hadi Chalabi, a wealthy grain merchant and member of the Iraqi parliament, became head of the senate when King Abdullah I of Jordan was assassinated.
His family retired from public life to a farmhouse near Baghdad when the military seized power. Chalabi left Iraq with his family in 1958, following the 14 July Revolution, and spent most of his life in the United States and the United Kingdom. He was educated at Baghdad College and Seaford College in Sussex, England before leaving for America.
In exile, following the Ba'ath party takeover, his family acted as the Iraqi Shia clergy's bankers. In the mid-1960s, he studied with cryptographer Whitfield Diffie at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from which he received a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics. In 1969, he earned a PhD in mathematics from the University of Chicago under the direction of George Glauberman on semisimplicity of group rings, a topic in abstract algebra. Afterwards, he took a position in the mathematics department at the American University of Beirut. He published three mathematics papers between 1973 and 1980, all in algebra.
In 1971, Chalabi married Leila Osseiran, daughter of Lebanese politician Adel Osseiran. They had four children, Tamara, Mariam, Hashem, and Hadi. Whilst still in Beirut the civil war broke out in 1975, so he moved to Jordan and found work as an interpreter.
Chalabi was a bold and shrewd investor, amassing a fortune of $100 million . During his life, he was accused of corruption many times. In 1977, he founded the Petra Bank in Jordan with Crown Prince Hassan, the King's brother. In May 1989, the Governor of the Central Bank of Jordan, Mohammed Said Nabulsi, issued a decree ordering all banks in the country to deposit 35% of their reserves with the Central Bank. Petra Bank was the only bank that was unable to meet this requirement. An investigation was launched, which led to accusations of embezzlement and false accounting. The bank failed, causing a $350 million bailout by the Central Bank, after which Chalabi fled the country. It was widely reported that Chalabi escaped Jordan locked in the trunk of a car owned by Prince Hassan of Jordan. Chalabi was convicted and sentenced in absentia for bank fraud by a Jordanian military tribunal to 22 years in prison. Chalabi maintained that his prosecution was a politically motivated effort to discredit him sponsored by Saddam Hussein.
Living abroad by 1992 in London, and unable to return home for fear of his life, he set up the Iraqi National Congress (INC) with an agenda of regime change for his homeland. The organization was open to all ethnic and religious groups of Iraq, including Arabs, Kurds, Turkmen, Sunni, and Shia Muslims. Already a fluent English speaker, he turned his attention to Washington, D.C.
In 1995, after preparation and lobbying, he persuaded President Bill Clinton to fund an expedition into northern Iraq to use subterfuge to start an insurgency. Chalabi was convinced that the Iraqi military would rise up to overthrow the dictator. The commanders to whom he had spoken were the same who openly supported Saddam and crushed his opponents in the Kurdish and Shia revolts. The insurgency failed, lacking the promised ground troops, and 100 insurgents were killed by the military. The command structure of INC fell apart with factional infighting. Chalabi was banned from those frequent visits to CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia. Nonetheless, Chalabi was doggedly determined: in 1998 Congress passed the Iraq Liberation Act, passing into American law the objective of "regime change" in Iraq.
It was reported by BBC News in May 2005 that the Jordanian government was considering whether to pardon Chalabi, in part to ease the relations between Jordan and the new Iraqi government of which Chalabi was a member. According to one report, Chalabi proposed a $32 million compensation fund for depositors affected by Petra Bank's failure. The website for Petra Bank contained a press release stating that Chalabi would refuse the pardon. Although Chalabi always maintained the case was a plot to frame him by Baghdad, the issue was revisited when the U.S. State Department raised questions about the accounting practices of the Iraqi National Congress (INC). According to The New York Times, "Chalabi insisted on a public apology, which the Jordanians refused to give."
Conservative pundit Arnaud de Borchgrave stated that following his escape from Jordan as a wanted fugitive, Chalabi established the Iraqi National Congress by sending out "scores of all-expenses-paid invitations to Iraqi exiles to a conference in Vienna a month later. The conference created INC - and made Mr Chalabi its president". Around the same time, the Jordan's Central Bank Governor, Mohammed Said Nabulsi, had referred to Chalabi as "one of the most notorious crooks in the history of the Middle East". Chalabi was involved in organizing a resistance movement among Kurds in northern Iraq in the early mid-1990s. When that effort was crushed, and hundreds of his supporters were killed, Chalabi fled the country. Chalabi lobbied in Washington for the passage of the Iraq Liberation Act (passed October 1998). This earmarked US$97 million to support Iraqi opposition groups. Chalabi and the INC were widely reported to be active CIA assets in the pre-2003 period, with one report in the British Guardian newspaper estimating that CIA operatives had funnelled an estimated $100m to the INC, which had helped to finance the epic failure of the 1996 coup attempt by Kurdish forces. In 2001 it was revealed that INC was accused of false accounting and irregularities. During the period from March 2000 to September 2003, the U.S. State Department paid nearly $33 million to the INC, according to a General Accounting Office report released in 2004, some of which was used to purchase office artefacts.