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.[1][2]
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.”[3][4]
The 1991 CIA arrangement and the burn notice
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.”[5][6]
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.’”[6]
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.”[7]
Per Kiriakou, during the run-up to the 2003 Iraq invasion the Pentagon began transmitting cables claiming reliable Iraqi WMD sourcing — “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.”[8][9][10]
Chalabi, never known inside Iraq itself, was briefly made Minister of Oil and died of a heart attack.[10]