Petra Bank
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Petra Bank was a Jordan-based bank founded by Ahmed Chalabi and used by the Iraqi refugee community in Jordan as its principal financial institution. Per John Kiriakou: "Petra Bank was the go-to bank for Iraqi refugees. All the Iraqis living in Jordan, they all banked at Petra Bank." People put their life savings into it, and it functioned for years, until the late 1980s.

Chalabi's background

Kiriakou introduces the bank through its founder, whom he describes flatly: "I really didn't like Ahmed Chalabi." Chalabi was, in his account, one of the very rare Shia Muslim Kurds, almost all Kurds being Sunni. His parents took him out of Iraq in 1965, when he was a child, and the family settled in Jordan.

His parents stressed education. Kiriakou's tellings differ on where it happened, one has him educated in the UK with degrees in finance, another has him schooled in the United States, with Kiriakou openly unsure whether it was Harvard or Yale, followed by a master's in finance in London. Either way he returned to Jordan and founded Petra Bank.

The night the money left

Per Kiriakou: "One night, Ahmed Chalabi [took] every single dollar, $36 million, transferred it to secret accounts in Switzerland, and escaped to Syria in the trunk of his girlfriend / secretary's car. He was found guilty and sentenced to death in absentia, but by then he was living in London wearing $2,000 suits and driving Rolls-Royces."

The details vary a little between tellings and Kiriakou does not smooth them. Elsewhere he gives the embezzled figure as $30 million rather than $36 million, with the funds wired to accounts in both London and Geneva. In a third telling he returns to $36 million, transferred to Switzerland and London, with the secretary driving him across the border into Syria before he flew from Damascus to London.

What he did with it is consistent across accounts: he lived, in Kiriakou's phrase, the high life on the money he stole, a townhouse in Mayfair in central London, right by Harrods, and another house in Geneva.

What it cost the depositors

Kiriakou states the consequence without qualification: Chalabi "literally bankrupted every Iraqi in Jordan."

He raises the human cost when arguing that Chalabi's record was no better than that of anyone with human-rights problems in their past: "People committed suicide because he stole their life savings from Petra Bank. So how's that any better?"

The pardon, and what followed

The Jordanian death sentence was set aside at the CIA's request. As the United States prepared to push Iraq out of Kuwait, Chalabi offered himself to the Agency as a future president of Iraq, his pitch, in Kiriakou's rendering, being "if you set me up, I love the United States, I could be the president of Iraq, I'll give you the oil", and the CIA's answer was "hey, we like the sound of that idea."

Washington then approached King Hussein to pardon him, so he could front the opposition umbrella group the CIA assembled at a conference in Vienna in the autumn of 1990. Kiriakou's account of the approach is unsparing about his own side: "the CIA very stupidly went to the King of Jordan" and said that although they knew Chalabi was a crook and knew he had been sentenced to death in absentia, they wanted him to be president of Iraq, and the king dropped the charges "only because we asked him to."

It did not hold. Chalabi began stealing from the CIA as well, reportedly some six million dollars, and was terminated in the mid-1990s, after which the Agency issued a burn notice against him: no CIA officer anywhere in the world was permitted to have any contact with him.

See also

- Ahmed Chalabi
- Burn notice
- Curveball
