Ahmed Chalabi
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Ahmed Chalabi was an Iraqi exile and the founder of the Iraqi National Congress. Per John Kiriakou, Chalabi was "one of those very rare Shia Muslim Kurds", born in Iraq in the 1940s, emigrated as a child to Jordan in 1965, educated in finance at Harvard and in London, and the founder of Petra Bank in Jordan.

The Petra Bank fraud

Petra Bank was the principal bank for the Iraqi refugee community in Jordan. 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 tried in Jordan and sentenced to death in absentia. By the early 1990s he was living in London "wearing $2,000 suits and driving Rolls-Royces," on the stolen money buying a townhouse in Mayfair, central London, near Harrods.

The 1991 CIA arrangement and the burn notice

In a separate telling, Kiriakou traces the Iraqi National Congress's origin to the State Department, not the CIA: after Iraq invaded Kuwait, the State Department asked the CIA to build a unified Iraqi opposition group, which the CIA assembled at a conference in Vienna, Austria in the fall of 1990. Jordan objected to Chalabi's role over his death sentence, so the CIA arranged for the King of Jordan to pardon him; the CIA then began transferring INC funding that went directly into Chalabi's pockets, prompting the CIA to issue its 1991 burn notice barring all officers from contact with him.

In 1991 the CIA, looking for a face for post-Saddam Iraq, persuaded King Hussein of Jordan to pardon Chalabi from his death sentence. The CIA assembled 35 Iraqi opposition groups at a hotel ballroom in Vienna and consolidated them into the Iraqi National Congress, with Chalabi as its head. Per Kiriakou: "We allocated $6 million to get the Iraqi National Congress running, and then the $6 million disappeared. And then Chalabi was showing off his new house in Mayfair London that he just paid cash for, because he [had taken] every single dollar of the six million."

The CIA then issued "a burn notice, a cable that went to every CIA officer in the world, and it says, 'There's this guy Ahmed Chalabi, he's an Iraqi, and all CIA personnel are forbidden from dealing with him.'"

The Cheney resurrection and the WMD fabrications

"Dick Cheney, nine years later, decides, 'What about this Chalabi guy? I like this guy.' And we said, 'No, we issued a burn notice on him, we won't work with Chalabi.' And he said, 'Oh, but I will.' And so they set up a new division at the Pentagon, the intelligence division, there had never been one before, and they created an Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, and his sole job was just to work with Chalabi."

Per Kiriakou, during the run-up to the 2003 Iraq invasion the Pentagon began transmitting cables claiming reliable Iraqi WMD sourcing, running alongside the German-handled fabricator Curveball as one of the war's two central fabrication pillars, "and they're here located in the garden of Saddam's palace, which of course we can't search." The CIA was barred on classification grounds from knowing the source's identity. "We're like, 'We know who the source is. The source is Chalabi, and he's making the whole thing up, we've known that for a decade. You guys are being suckered.' And so he just kept with these reports. Weapons, weapons, weapons, weapons. Bush goes on TV, says they have weapons of mass destruction. We invade Iraq. We never find anything."

In a separate telling, Kiriakou says that eleven years after the burn notice, Dick Cheney insisted on working with Chalabi anyway, wanting to install him as Iraq's president after the 2003 invasion; CIA Director George Tenet refused, so Cheney funded Chalabi through a new internal intelligence unit inside the Office of the Secretary of Defense, headed by a newly created under secretary of defense for intelligence. In this telling, Chalabi fed the Pentagon fabricated intelligence about Iraqi chemical-weapons locations, pocketing Pentagon money each time a team was sent and found nothing, and the Iraqi National Congress itself had been heavily infiltrated by Saddam's intelligence services. Separately, Kiriakou also says Chalabi fabricated the claim of a Saddam,9/11 connection, after neoconservative Richard Perle pushed for war on Iraq at the White House the day after the attacks and no real intelligence tying Saddam to 9/11 existed, Chalabi invented the connection and passed it to the Pentagon, which passed it on to Dick Cheney.

Chalabi, never known inside Iraq itself, was briefly made Minister of Oil and died of a heart attack, in London, two or three years before Kiriakou recounted the story in a 2023 interview. In another retelling, Kiriakou describes the post more vaguely as "like minister of transportation or some silly thing like that" in the immediate aftermath of Saddam's overthrow, saying Chalabi never amounted to anything politically and died of a heart attack shortly after. None of the other Iraqi National Congress figures ever gained real power; the exception was the Kurds, particularly Jalal Talabani, head of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, who became president of Iraq. The other Kurd who later became Iraq's president, Barham Salih, was Kiriakou's own main Kurdish counterpart during the Iraq War; he lived nearby in Annandale, Virginia, and their families socialized regularly, which Kiriakou says made the news of Salih's presidency feel unreal, "it's like wow, Baram really made it, makes me feel like an underachiever."

In a separate, near-identical retelling, Kiriakou frames the CIA's original position on the 2003 invasion in terms of "battle lines": roughly eight months before the invasion, a senior officer told him the pro-war faction was the Office of the Vice President, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the National Security Council, against an anti-war faction of the State Department, the CIA, and the Joint Chiefs, concluding, "we've lost." Responsibility for the invasion decision, in this telling, rested squarely on Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, with Condoleezza Rice a lesser factor because she was "easily pushed around." Chalabi himself, in this account, is again described as a rare Shia Kurd born in Iraqi Kurdistan who fled the country before Saddam Hussein's rise, and someone the CIA and U.S. officials favored over rival exile candidates largely because he spoke fluent, unaccented English and dressed well, "$2,000 Italian suits," per Kiriakou. Kiriakou also gives a $40 million figure for the CIA's Iraqi National Congress seed funding in this telling, spent on a London house, a Geneva house, and a Mercedes S600, with the rest unaccounted for, and confirms that Cheney, despite the CIA's burn notice, had the undersecretary of defense for intelligence secretly reopen a channel with Chalabi, explicitly instructing him not to tell the CIA.

"A dirty used-car salesman"

Per John Kiriakou on the Dalton Fischer Podcast: "I always hated this guy from the minute I met him. I was like, this guy is a dirty used-car salesman."

The Petra Bank Ponzi scheme

Kiriakou's framing of the Petra Bank collapse is sharper than the standard account: it was not just embezzlement, it was a Ponzi scheme. "He opened a bank in Jordan that was specifically meant to cater to the needs of Iraqi refugees. In fact, it was a Ponzi scheme. And he stole all their money, by one account, \$36 million worth of deposits. He escaped in the trunk of his secretary's car across the border into Syria, and then from Syria made his way to London. In Jordan they filed charges against him and found him guilty in absentia and sentenced him to 30 years in prison."

The Defense-Intelligence-Report laundering channel

After the CIA issued its Burn Notice and refused to deal with Chalabi, Dick Cheney's office routed him through a new channel. Per Kiriakou: "They told Chalabi to start reporting through the U.S. defense attaché in Amman. So we started getting these classified cables called DIRs, Department of Defense Intelligence Reports. And they're like, 'weapons of mass destruction were found at such-and-such coordinates,' and we're like, 'oh my god, what's the source of this report?' So I'd call over the Pentagon, 'hey, I'm looking at DIR 12345, who's the source?' 'We're not at liberty to share that with you.' 'What do you mean, I'm the CIA, you got to share it with me.' 'It's a particularly sensitive source.' We're like, 'fuck, this is Chalabi.'"

Kiriakou had given the same account five years earlier, in terms that add the approach and the consequence. The informant, he says, went to Dick Cheney and told him not to pay attention to the CIA, "I have my own network of informants and I'll just pass that information straight to you through the Pentagon", and that is what happened: they went around the CIA. The reports came in as DoD IRs, Department of Defense intelligence reports, strikingly specific about Iraqi weapons; every time his office called the Pentagon asking to talk to the source with follow-up questions, the answer was that the source was too sensitive to share. The result he states plainly: the agency took itself out of it.

In that telling he also reverses the direction of the approach as commonly told, saying the informant did not go to Cheney, Cheney found him, and then set up a separate intelligence-gathering capability outside the intelligence community, which is how the reporting came to be stovepiped.

Caption artifact: in the automatic transcript of that 2018 interview the name is rendered "Ayman Televi" at first mention and "Tel Aviv" at second. Neither is a person or a place Kiriakou introduces anywhere else in the exchange, and the surrounding detail, the approach to Cheney, the private network of informants, the routing through the Pentagon, and his dating of it to fifteen or sixteen years earlier, matches the Chalabi channel he describes by name in later interviews. The transcript wording is recorded here rather than silently corrected.

The precedent for Pahlavi

Closing his 2026 profile of Reza Pahlavi, Kiriakou reached for Chalabi as the template: "I would liken him to Ahmed Chalabi. For those of you who don't remember Ahmed Chalabi, he was a similar clown that was in the pay of the CIA, the American government. And we made this really stupid plan to make him the president of Iraq as soon as we overthrew Saddam Hussein. And the Iraqi people said, 'Oh, no, you don't.' Well, it's happening again."

He attaches it to a broader failure of American self-understanding: "We have so convinced ourselves that we're the good guys. We just can't fathom the notion that when we cross a border, we're not going to be seen as liberators. We're going to be seen as invaders and occupiers. It happens time and time again. We couldn't defeat the Taliban. They didn't even have shoes. And they beat us. We couldn't defeat the Iraqis. Iraq is still in a state of chaos."

The comparison restated (2026)

Closing his August 2026 profile of Reza Pahlavi, Kiriakou reached for Chalabi as the exact precedent: "I would liken him to Ahmed Chalabi." His compressed account of the episode is that Chalabi was "a similar clown that was in the pay of the CIA, the American government", that Washington "made this really stupid plan to make him the president of Iraq as soon as we overthrew Saddam Hussein", and that the plan died on contact with Iraqis: "the Iraqi people said, oh no you don't." His warning is that the same thing is under way again.

See also

- Curveball
- Saddam Hussein
- Dick Cheney
- Jalal Talabani
- John Kiriakou
