Arrows of the Night: Ahmad Chalabi's Long Journey to Triumph in Iraq by Richard Bonin

Author:Richard Bonin
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: International Relations, Iraq War (2003-), Political, General, Middle East, Political Science, Biography & Autobiography, Military, History
ISBN: 9780385535038
Publisher: Doubleday
Published: 2011-12-06T00:00:00+00:00

FIFTEEN

Chalabi was on a roll. His march through Washington, however, was not without its share of difficulties and detours. For one, he was hurting financially. The attempt by Dewey Clarridge, the ex-CIA man, to raise money from Israel fizzled, while the Clinton administration put the kibosh on Bill Clark’s overture to Taiwan. The State Department’s third-ranking official, Thomas Pickering, told Taipei’s representative to Washington there would be no wink or a nod sanctioning off-the-books financing of the Iraqi National Congress. Instead, Pickering advised that Taiwan should steer clear of Chalabi and his friends. For Chalabi, that meant there would be no bridge money, so to speak, to tide him over until he ran out his string on Capitol Hill. His staff, though tiny, was forced to work without salaries while Chalabi had to pay all INC expenses out of his own pocket. In those days, he maintained an INC office in the United Kingdom and flew between London and Washington about once a month. No matter what it cost, however, he flew first-class only. That was the Chalabi way: work hard, live well.

While wooing the neoconservatives, Chalabi and his Kurdish aide-de-camp, Aras Habib Karim, pursued a second track, approaching Clarridge with a plan that had a whiff of Operation Valkyrie, the German resistance’s 1944 plot to kill Adolf Hitler. Neither Perle nor any of the other neoconservatives had anything to do with this scheme: a plan to assassinate Saddam. It was strictly limited to Chalabi, Karim, and Clarridge.

Chalabi and Karim told Clarridge they had recruited the chief of security of a building in Baghdad where Saddam sometimes attended high-level meetings. The building’s security chief gave them a sketch of the cabinet room Saddam supposedly visited. It showed the desk Saddam used, next to a large air-conditioning unit and a row of tall windows. Chalabi and Karim said it wouldn’t be easy, but they believed it was possible to smuggle a bomb into the room and hide it inside the air unit next to Saddam’s desk. They showed Clarridge the spot where they more or less wanted to plant the bomb.

“How much money do you think we’ll need to pull this off?” Clarridge asked.

“Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars,” Karim answered. The money, he said, would be used to purchase secured communications, rent safe houses in Iraq, and relocate the conspirators’ families outside the country.

Clarridge was no expert in explosives, but he knew enough to worry about the windows in the room. If the bomb wasn’t situated just so, the force of the blast would escape through the windows and not get the job done. So Clarridge showed the diagram to an old friend who was an expert in explosives. That friend showed Clarridge precisely where to place the bomb for maximum effect.

Clarridge then flew off to Geneva, Switzerland, to meet with the only people he knew who might finance something like this off the books. “Unfortunately,” he told Chalabi and Karim after he returned from the trip, “all I can raise from them is $50,000.

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