Just had the second surreal meeting of the past eight days. This one involved drinking beer in the afternoon at Kramerbooks with the Iraqi National Congress's Washington advisor Francis Brooke, his wife Sharon, and my colleague Spencer Ackerman, of the New Republic. [Ackerman is guest blogging at Talking Points Memo this week while its boss slacks off on a tropical paradise somewhere.]

What was surreal about it? Well, Francis Brooke is an unusually open, pleasant and forthcoming person for someone whose long time political partner Ahmad Chalabi is facing US allegations of spying for Iran, and who himself is facing an Iraqi arrest warrant for allegedly obstructing the US-Iraqi raid on Dr. Chalabi's compound last month. Brooke says the charges are ridiculous, and he intends to return to Baghdad next week, surrounded by as many members of the US press corps and TV cameras as he can round up to accompany him. As Spencer points out, Brooke says his preferred route may have him flying to Tehran [to whom his boss Dr. Chalabi and his business partner, INC intelligence chief Aras Habib Kareem are accused of passing US intelligence] and then convoying into Baghdad. A provocation not lost on Brooke.

Brooke was telling me in some detail about the corporation he, Kareem, and US accountant Margaret Bartel, set up as a vehicle to receive first State Department and later Pentagon money to operate the Information Collection Program. [A "gentleman's agreement" between the Pentagon and them prevented them from previously discussing it much earlier - but Brooke promises much transparency about such mechanisms in the coming days. After all, their Pentagon funding runs out at the end of the month.] Brooke detailed for me the organization chart of the ICP, its funding mechanisms, number of agents and activities. He insists that the ICP's director Aras Habib Kareem, who has been reported to have fled to Tehran, is in fact in Iraq, although "he travels", and that Brooke has spoken by phone with Kareem more than once since the charges were brought against him. That Kareem has gone into hiding to evade an arrest warrant Brooke does not deny.

Brooke told me he was aware as early as March about the possible espionage charges coming down the pike [he first heard whispers of it from other journalists well briefed by US intelligence sources, shortly after Chalabi made another public visit to Tehran where he was greeted by a color guard, met with Khatami, Khamenei, and others]. Brooke is the first to admit that Chalabi and he himself have met with the Iranian intelligence official in charge of operations inside Iraq, Suleimani, to whom Chalabi is alleged to have passed the information that the US had broken the Iranian intelligence's communications code. [Brooke denies Chalabi passed any such intelligence to the Iranians, or indeed, that Chalabi even had access to sensitive US intelligence.] That Chalabi and Kareem had such liaison relationships is no secret, Brooke says, and indeed, was ostensibly part of what they were paid by the US to do. [The INC had such liaison relationships with many countries, Brooke asserts, including Syria, Jordan, Kuwait, and Turkey.]

Brooke himself says he has talked with US intelligence officials who have parroted back to him recordings of conversations of his the NSA had "ping'ed."

He adamantly denies that Chalabi or Kareem would have been spies for Iran, I should point out. He also says that the INC's intelligence was so good that they knew days before the raid on Chalabi's compound that it was coming, informed their DIA colleagues to relocate, and stored elsewhere much of the sensitive information they had collected.

Brooke's cell phone rang from Baghdad throughout the meeting. He says he talks to Dr. Chalabi every day, who is doing very well. [He also revealed that NSC Iraq envoy Bob Blackwill lives across the street from him in Georgetown, and that Brooke has been disappointed in his performance in Iraq, as well as with Blackwill's memo on sidelining Chalabi.]

Brooke tells me that he hopes to finish up his work in Iraq soon, and to work in the future in the US, with perhaps the US government as his client. What would he like to do? Perhaps show them how to set up more innovative intelligence operations in other places on the cheap, as he feels he and the INC have done in Iraq. [He mentioned India-Pakistan, or Korea, as being places where Washington is desperately in need of more such HUMINT. We laugh over Iran.] He points out that US intelligence for all its budgets and heft had almost no human intelligence coming from Iraq except that provided by the INC, and that what the ICP managed to do for $340,000 a month, including helping enable the capture of Uday Hussein [who went to college at Baghdad University with fugitive INC intel chief Aras Habib Kareem, 36, Brooke says] and half of the 55 people on the US's most wanted list, shows what can be done with such an operation. [As for the three Iraqi defectors the INC provided to US intelligence who allegedly had information on Iraq WMD, Brooke went into some detail about two of them, can't remember the third, and I will report it out in a forthcoming piece.]

More soon.

Posted by Laura at June 17, 2004 07:17 PM