The controversial Iraqi politician Ahmad Chalabi, a former favourite of the Pentagon who has recently fallen out with Washington, was on Wednesday embroiled in allegations that he tipped off Tehran that United States agents had cracked the secret codes of its intelligence service.
CBS News was the first to report the claims on Tuesday, which were quickly picked up by the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post. All had similar stories, citing anonymous US intelligence officials.
The US officials were quoted claiming that Chalabi had told the Baghdad chief of the Iranian spy service that the United States was reading its communications.
It is alleged that the Iranian spy then described the conversation in a message to Tehran, which was subsequently intercepted by US intelligence.
Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), reportedly told the Iranian spy that he had obtained the information from an American who had been drunk. FBI agents were reportedly now questioning US defence department officials to try to find out who gave the information to Chalabi.
Any such disclosure to Tehran would have been a significant blow to US intelligence efforts. Some reports in US media described the claims as amounting to a charge of ”betrayal” by Chalabi, who for years has enjoyed close ties with Washington.
As recently as last month, the INC was on the US government payroll, receiving around $332 300 a month from the defence department for intelligence under a specific authorisation from Congress.
The New York and Los Angeles papers said they had learned some details of widely reported US assertions last month that Chalabi had given classified material to Iran, but had agreed not to publish those details at the request of US officials who said to do so would endanger an ongoing investigation.
Chalabi spoke out against the US last month after his home in an upmarket district of Baghdad was searched by Iraqi police, accompanied by US troops, who seized papers and computers. Two INC offices in Baghdad were also searched.
The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times said the requests to withhold the information they had gathered were withdrawn today when other news accounts began appearing. A CIA official declined to comment on the reports last night.
The New York Times said that after Chalabi tipped them off, Iranians in Tehran sent a bogus message to Baghdad purportedly disclosing the location of an important weapons site in an apparent attempt to test whether what they were hearing was true.
The idea was that if the United States was able to intercept such transmissions, Americans would react by going to the weapons site. They intercepted the message, according to the New York Times, but did not take the bait by going to the weapons site.
Chalabi was an exile during the Saddam Hussein era and spent a considerable amount of time in the US; some of his allies at the Pentagon even pushed him as a potential future Iraqi leader.
But Chalabi’s relationship with the US has soured. He provided intelligence to the Bush administration about weapons of mass destruction, which was used to justify the US war against Iraq — but that information has since attracted severe criticism after no weapons were found.
The CIA has reportedly long been suspicious of Chalabi’s INC, but he had maintained strong supporters in other government agencies. – Guardian Unlimited Â