The Los Angeles Times' Bob Drogin, who had one of the earliest stories back in August 2003 conveying US government suspicion that Chalabi may have been proferring false defectors or even been a Saddam agent, advances the Chalabi-spy story Sunday. Drogin informs us that Chalabi sent false defectors to at least eight countries' intelligence services, including the US, the UK, Italy, Germany, Denmark, France, Spain and Sweden. Drogin also gives us crucial information about the nature of the classified US intelligence that Chalabi and his intelligence chief Aras Habib Karem are believed to have passed to Tehran.

Officials said other evidence indicated that Chalabi's intelligence chief had furnished Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security with highly classified information on U.S. troop movements, top-secret communications, plans of the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority and other closely guarded material on U.S. operations in Iraq.

The U.S. investigation into the suspected spy operation was a key reason behind Thursday's raids on Chalabi's Baghdad house and the offices of his Iraqi National Congress. Several INC members were accused of kidnapping, robbery and corruption.

This sounds much broader than what the LA Times reported was passed to Iran by Chalabi et co on Friday. But it seems to include both operational and highly technical components. I am assuming that the nature of the intelligence Chalabi/Aras Karem Habib are alleged to have given to Tehran is one important clue to determining who from the US side had access and might have given it to them.

Was the INC acting at Iran's behest when it fed disinformation via defectors and false documents to western intelligence services about Iraq's alleged WMD? On this point, Drogin says, US counterintelligence believes the INC may have been acting on its own.

It is not clear whether Iran had any role in the alleged use of the INC to provide disinformation to the West. U.S. officials say the INC may have been acting on its own when it sent out a steady stream of defectors from 1998 to 2003 with apparently coordinated claims about Baghdad's purported weapons of mass destruction.

The whole piece is available here.

Meantime, on the subject of the INC's fugitive intelligence chief, Aras Habib Karem, and the nascent Iraqi intelligence services he was growing from the Pentagon-funded Information Collection Program, the New York Sun's Eli Lake has a useful, Baghdad-reported backgrounder on the ICP published March 1, 2004. The piece details what the ICP program was tasked to do, what it looked like, how the US military and intelligence agencies liaised with it, etc.

But most interesting to me given current developments is the part I have underlined below, which indicates that by March, the CIA was preparing to take over from the Defense Intelligence Agency in overseeing and sponsoring the Information Collection Program. Is it in this transition review process from the DIA to CIA control of the ICP that some of the alarming revelations about what INC officials like Karem were allegedly passing to the Iranians was uncovered? The timing makes sense.

Here's the Sun piece.

One of the most significant battles going on here is one that hasn't yet hit the newspapers--the maneuvering over who is going to inherit the intelligence agency run by the Free Iraqi movement under Ahmad Chalabi.

The intelligence operation, known as the Information Collection Program, was
founded by the Iraqi National Congress and the State Department. In
subsequent years it has been largely funded by the Pentagon's Defense
Intelligence Agency and has racked up a string of intelligence successes.

The CIA station here has started negotiations with Mr. Chalabi's group in a
bid to take over the operation, which has come under scrutiny from Senator
Clinton, a Democrat of New York, and others for peddling false information
to the Bush administration before the war. But the intelligence unit, known
as the Information Collection Program, has also led to the capture of U.S.
Central Command's 55 most wanted Baathists, uncovered Saddam Hussein¹s
illegal intelligence stations, and captured documents that uncover the role
of foreign corporations in busting United Nations sanctions and trading with
Iraq's military, according to a draft summary of the program's activities,
obtained by The New York Sun.

That summary says that between May 2003 and January 2004 the INC's
operatives provided more than 1,300 intelligence reports to the Defense
Intelligence Agency's Defense Human Sources unit. Today, the ICP has evolved
from its modest beginnings in the fall of 2000 as a State Department program
to document war crimes against Kurds to an embryonic intelligence agency and
counterterrorism strike force...

Questions surrounding Mr. Chalabi's intelligence arose last month after the
Knight Ridder newspaper chain published a story claiming that the DIA had determined a defector made available to American intelligence agencies in
2002 had lied about his knowledge of mobile biological weapons labs...

Since the war, the task of the program has focused more on counterinsurgency. The summary of the program's activities says, Specifically, the mission of the office is to provide precise, timely, sensitive, actionable information to Coalition Forces. "The Information Collection Program has saved American lives," one Pentagon official told the Sun last week. "They have worked closely with the military."

At a tour of the ICP bureau in Baghdad Thursday, uniformed Army officers
were meeting with members of the bureau. Since May of 2003, the ICP has
cooperated with the 1st Armored Division of the Army, the 82nd Airborne
Division and special forces units in Baghdad "to exchange intelligence
information regarding the security issue in Iraq," according to the summary.

The ICP arranged for coalition forces to first contact General Kamal Mustafa
Abdullah Sultan al-Tikriti, Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, where he was first
interrogated at the INC's compound at the Hunting Club in May. The INC's
Free Iraqi Forces, which worked on ICP intelligence, also arrested Muhammad
Hamza al-Zubaydi, Saddam's former deputy prime minister and member of the
Baath regional command. ICP operatives also helped arrange for the surrender
of the governor of Basra, Walid Hamid Tawfiq al-Tikriti, on April 29.

To be sure, a number of Iraqis have provided coalition forces with information on former Baathists. It is rumored still in Iraq that the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan came up with the tip that led to the capture of Saddam Hussein in December. But no other organization has detailed the organization or activities of Iraq's intelligence services in as systematic way as the ICP.

The summary says the ICP has documents which prove that the Iraqi Mukhabarat served as a liaison with Qaeda-sponsored organizations in northern Iraq...

In addition to providing information on Iraqi agents abroad, the program has
also interviewed a number of officials affiliated with Saddam's organization
responsible for deceiving U.N. weapons inspectors. It also has debriefed
scientists working with Iraq's Military Industrial Corporation, the
principal agency the regime used to obtain prohibited materials during the
U.N. sanctions...

Since December, the ICP is turning into what may be the intelligence service
for a sovereign Iraq, tentatively being dubbed either the Iraqi Military
Intelligence Request or the Iraqi Security Service.

Under the leadership of longtime INC spy chief, Aras Habib Karem, the
organization has expanded its ranks to include intelligence operatives from
the two major Kurdish parties, the INA and Sciri. Mr. Karem is an acting
deputy at the Ministry of Interior, but his post has yet to be approved by
L. Paul Bremer...

The CIA station in Baghdad this month has started talks with the INC on
taking over responsibility for the program from the DIA, according to
American and ICP officials. One ICP official told the Sun last week, "The
CIA has expressed an interest in the program and taking it over. We are now
discussing it."

Worth pondering and following up on.

Finally, a note on media coverage on this issue. Like many of you, while obsessively following news reports on all developments Chalabi the past few days, I am struck by how totally lacking the New York Times' coverage has in general been on this issue. They would do well to poach the likes of the Sun's Lake or Newsday's Royce or Knight Ridder's formidable Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay. Perhaps I have somehow just missed their key investigative stories on this issue. But I've been looking and doubt it. The Times has been totally put to shame by coverage in several other publications with far fewer resources than scrappy journalists with incredible gumshoe and dedication.

UPDATE: Knight Ridder's Warren Strobel and John Walcott have more details on what INC intelligence chief Aras Habib is believed by US counterintelligence to have given to Iranian intelligence in their Saturday piece.

...A U.S. intelligence official said the evidence of Habib's ties to Iran includes both intercepts and some documentation. The official said Habib provided sensitive information, some of it classified above top secret, to the Iranians..."The bottom line here is that much of the information the administration had about Iraq may have come from an Iranian agent," said the intelligence official. "If that's true, this is a huge scandal."

Posted by Laura at May 23, 2004 03:07 AM