Writer Aram Roston, Parsing Ahmad Chalabi's Past

DATE March 17, 2008 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Writer Aram Roston discusses book "The Man Who Pushed
America to War: The Extraordinary Life, Adventures and Obsessions
of Ahmad Chalabi"
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

This week marks the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. "The Man Who
Pushed America to War" is the title of the new book by my guest Aram Roston.
It's about Ahmad Chalabi. He's the Iraqi exile who affirmed the Bush
administration's case that regime change was necessary. Chalabi lobbied
Congress to support the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and he provided the Iraqi
sources to journalists and congressmen who said that Saddam Hussein was
developing weapons of mass destruction and had links to al-Qaeda. Chalabi led
the Iraqi exile group the Iraqi National Congress. Who funded Chalabi's work?
The CIA, then the State Department.

Aram Roston is an investigative journalist with the "NBC Nightly News." He's
covered Iraq, Chalabi and the reconstruction of Iraq for NBC. He's also
written for the New York Times magazine, Mother Jones, Washington Monthly and
The Nation.

Aram Roston, welcome to FRESH AIR. Before we get into the details describing
what Chalabi did to help get the United States to invade Iraq, let's just get
to a brief overview of what his role was in the invasion of Iraq.

Mr. ARAM ROSTON: A lot of people think the war in Iraq wouldn't have even
happened without Ahmad Chalabi. Whether that's true or not, that's what a lot
of people believe who are supporters of his and that's what a lot of people
believe who are really resentful of him. And that is what he's claimed in the
past. He's had a tremendous influence on what America did when it chose to go
to war in Iraq.

GROSS: When did the CIA start funding him?

Mr. ROSTON: They first approached him in the spring of 1991, when they were
looking for somebody to organize this opposition group. It was really
important for them to find somebody who was a credible Iraqi, they thought,
who could bring together lots of different Iraqi opposition members, and they
found him. They looked to him because they knew his reputation as a, well, a
fixer really.

GROSS: Would you say that Chalabi, with the help of the CIA and CIA funding,
built a genuine, credible group of Iraqi exile opposition leaders? Or did he
just give the appearance of doing that?

Mr. ROSTON: Some people think in the early '90s, when the Iraqi National
Congress first started, it may have been something like a legitimate umbrella
group that could bring together the Iraqi opposition, the people who were
outside Iraq, because, obviously, inside Iraq they couldn't do anything. So
they thought maybe this is something real. But in the end, towards the end, I
think very few people saw it that way.

It's had several lives, the Iraqi National Congress has. It's had several
lives over the last, well, well over a decade; but it was the only group that
existed, in any case. If it didn't exist, there wasn't any that did exist.

GROSS: You said the dynamic changed between the CIA and Chalabi. Instead of
Chalabi being dependent on the CIA, the CIA became dependent on him. In what
way were they dependent on Ahmad Chalabi?

Mr. ROSTON: In the early '90s, the CIA wanted Chalabi to be, well, under
their control, of course; an agent of influence, one could call it. But he
didn't become that. He seemed to just get along with them wonderfully. The
officers who handled him in the beginning were very pleased. But then
suddenly, when he controlled the purse strings, when he seemed to have
influence, they felt it was clear he began pursuing his own agenda. And he
felt he was perfectly in the right to do that. His feeling was he was never a
CIA asset at all. He never was a CIA agent, in his mind. He was doing what
he wanted. And so the CIA lost control of him because once he began to really
take control of the Iraqi National Congress, the CIA began to really lose
control of the Iraqi National Congress that they were paying for, that the
American taxpayer was paying for.

GROSS: Well, were Chalabi's goals with the Iraqi National Congress different
from the CIA's goals?

Mr. ROSTON: It's a key question. The CIA's goals are actually not that easy
to define, either. The CIA was tasked with trying to come up with the plan to
overthrow Saddam Hussein. The Iraqi National Congress was one component of
that plan; but in officers' minds there's no way the Iraqi National Congress
could have overthrown Saddam Hussein on their own. It just was inconceivable.
But for Ahmad Chalabi, that was his mission, to overthrow Saddam Hussein. He
really began using the Iraqi National Congress as a means to lobby and a means
to propagandize the world so that the world would eventually invade Iraq and
topple Saddam Hussein, doing what they hadn't done in the first Gulf War.

GROSS: How credible was he? I mean, he had left Iraq--was it 1958?

Mr. ROSTON: It was.

GROSS: Yeah. After the monarchy was overthrown. And then his family was a
banking family. They owned banks in Lebanon. Correct me if I'm wrong on any
of this here.

Mr. ROSTON: That's all right. It's true.

GROSS: And after the CIA started funding him, he was charged with
embezzlement and other charges, as well, I think, in the Petra Bank, a family
bank in Lebanon. What was he charged with exactly in relationship with this
bank?

Mr. ROSTON: The Petra Bank was a major Jordanian bank that he founded, he
ran, and he ran it virtually on his own. In 1989, it collapsed. The
Jordanians took it over. The next year they began liquidation proceedings
against it. There was a huge investigation by Jordan into what happened
there. And he was charged with, in essence, embezzlement and fraud; and then
there were a lot of other charges. He was eventually convicted of a number of
them. Chiefly he was convicted of fraud and embezzlement. And, in essence,
what Chalabi was accused of doing, the major cases against him, involved
lending money to businesses that were associated with his family, and then
those businesses didn't pay the money back. That's the way I read the
judgment of the Jordanian court.

GROSS: And this didn't trouble the CIA, who was giving him millions of
dollars?

Mr. ROSTON: You know, it's odd. They have--there's no institutional memory
of it anymore at the CIA, of course. But the people who were involved, the
people who were involved said, `Well, you know, the CIA always works with
complex people. We don't work with angels, and we didn't expect him to
be--you know, we wanted somebody we can work with.' So, you know, that was one
attitude. The other attitude was, you know--in other words, they didn't
really care.

The other thing, it hadn't really come to a head yet. It makes no sense, as
you point out. It's hard to understand what the CIA was doing. The CIA works
very closely with the government of Jordan on the one hand, very closely with
the royal family of Jordan, and yet here they funding somebody who was really
on the other side of the government of Jordan, and who the government of
Jordan had accused of a crime. So it really made no sense, and yet it
happened. It's hard to explain how that happened, but it's one of the curious
things about Ahmad Chalabi.

GROSS: When he was getting millions of dollars from the CIA, was that money
laundered? I mean, it wasn't writing checks on CIA checkbooks. Like, how...

Mr. ROSTON: It's a really key question, right. The CIA doesn't just hand
out money saying CIA on it. And he didn't want it to appear that he was
getting money from the CIA. He was really mysterious to his Iraqi colleagues.
It was almost very--well, it was clearly very important to him that nobody
knew he was getting money from the CIA, that nobody knew the agency, that his
operations were funded by the CIA. And so there were all these sort of myths
he propagated amongst his fellow Iraqis early on, you know, where he said he
was getting money from Iraqi businesses or such, or he implied that he was
donating the money. But everybody knew, you know, what had happened--or the
Iraqis knew what had happened with Petra Bank and his other family businesses
so they didn't believe that. But they had to hide the source of the funding,
which was of course the CIA.

One way the funding came early on was through a company called the IBC, the
Iraqi Broadcasting Company, which he in part owned. And CIA officers told me
that as well as Iraqi National Congress people, they told me that, too. So
that's one way. It was just a broadcasting company, so to speak, and that's
one way the agency got funding to the Iraqi National Congress.

GROSS: So the CIA started funding Chalabi in around '91, and they cut him off
in around '96, '97. Why did they cut him off?

Mr. ROSTON: There was a huge split in the CIA at first, and then there was
just anger at Chalabi. There were a number of things that went wrong in
Kurdistan, things that went very wrong. First, he would try to launch sort of
these uprisings on his own. He would try to launch these--who knows if he was
sincere about it, but they were trying to launch these sort of quasi-invasion
or quasi-coup against Saddam Hussein; and sort of against the knowledge and
against the wishes of the CIA.

And then later on, the CIA moved its funding towards another effort. They
started supporting basically a rival of Ahmad Chalabi, somebody who was a
former Baathist named Ayad Allawi. He was very bitter about that. By then
they no longer trusted him. They began inspecting and auditing where their
money was going, in the radio stations and newspapers and other operations
that they thought they were funding him, they began to realize, you know,
maybe he wasn't spending their money as they thought it was being spent. They
hadn't really checked on where the money was going.

And then, by then, the split got tremendous. The split was just a huge chasm
between Chalabi, who they were funding, and the CIA. And they finally ended
it. They basically decided to cut all ties with them, basically cauterizing
the wound, just cutting him off, as opposed to sort of gently weaning him off.
They simply cut off all of his funding, and clearly he was quite bitter about
that.

GROSS: So explain this to me. The CIA cut off funding for Chalabi. The CIA
didn't trust Chalabi. And yet eventually the State Department started giving
money to Chalabi. How did the State Department end up funding him after the
CIA cut him off?

Mr. ROSTON: It's really fascinating. Once the CIA had really abandoned him,
cut him off, his friends in Congress, over time, began to really push for
funding for him. They specified millions would go to the Iraqi opposition,
meaning the Iraqi National Congress. They targeted millions of dollars for
him and it would all have to go through the State Department, often as
economic support funds or something like that; but it would go through the
State Department. And the State Department was not fond of him, necessarily,
and they didn't think this was a good idea. They were resistant. So they
created these other structures. They created obstacles. But the money wasn't
getting to the Iraqi National Congress, to Chalabi, the way the Congress
wanted it to during the Clinton administration. They were sort of paying heed
to Congress, but they weren't passing the money on. So he was very
frustrated. That was under Clinton. And the Democratic administration simply
didn't want to fund the Iraqi National Congress, it seemed. But Congress was
pushing for it. Capitol Hill was pushing for it. And it was this really
weird dynamic in Washington.

GROSS: Did that change when President Bush was elected?

Mr. ROSTON: Yeah, it certainly did. It certainly did. Because obviously
when President Bush came in, there were--well, he brought in a lot of people
who were very, very supportive of Chalabi and of the Iraqi National Congress.
The problem was, even that couldn't free up the funding from the State
Department. The State Department still, a lot of them were still--they were
trying to do it the way that their laws said they had to. You know, they had
accountability, they had to give it to incorporated entities. They had to
often fund things in certain ways that US law required. And, you know, the
Iraqi National Congress just wanted the funding. They wanted the funding to
start, you know, they were very busy, you know, they wanted to get to work,
and they could start toppling the regime if they just got their money. They
were promising these things. And the State Department still continued to sort
of resist. But the money did start to flow eventually. The money really did
start to flow in the millions, in the millions and millions through--the
proper mechanisms finally were put in place, the State Department funding
started, and everything seemed to be going well.

GROSS: It's interesting that the CIA didn't spread the word on Capitol Hill,
`We don't trust this guy, Ahmad Chalabi. We've worked with him, we've cut him
loose. We don't trust him anymore. Be careful.' I mean, the CIA would have
ways of doing that, wouldn't they?

Mr. ROSTON: They would. They tried. Here's his, to a certain degree,
genius. He was able to use his animosity to the CIA and their animosity to
him to his advantage. There were a large number of people at Capitol Hill who
hated the CIA. A lot of people really mistrusted it. They felt it was, well,
too liberal or it was coddling Middle East dictators or it was intervening and
it wasn't allowing sort of a firm, muscular US foreign policy. And Chalabi,
to a certain degree, could be used to their advantage just as he could use
these opponents of the CIA to his advantage. So it really worked well for
him. He used the CIA's animosity to his advantage to an incredible degree.

GROSS: During the period leading up to the war in Iraq, how did Chalabi
operate on Capitol Hill? How did he use his influence? What was his
technique?

Mr. ROSTON: In part it was sheer force of personality. And in part it was
dividing his enemies and creating friends that way. But a lot of it was sheer
force of personality. He had an American who was very useful to him, an
American ally named Francis Brooke who was sort of his lobbyist, his
advocate--undeclared lobbyist, but he--they were very informal. They would
call up a senator, call up an aide and they would visit the office and they
would make friends that way.

He also had this brilliance where he knew he didn't have to just get to a
senator, a congressman, to the real powerful figures, he had to get to the
people who were really aides, the staffers, who do a lot of the work here in
Washington. And so he was very good at creating allies and friends there.

GROSS: Now, something else that Chalabi did after the CIA cut him loose was
he got together with the neoconservatives and helped give them their rationale
for pushing to invade Iraq, or helped supply them more rationale, strengthen
their rationale. Who are some of the neoconservatives that Chalabi was in
with?

Mr. ROSTON: It's almost a notorious group of people now, or a very well
known group. You know, you've got Feith and you've got Harold Rove and you've
got Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz. They're a well known group, really, and
they stuck together. And obviously the neoconservatives are not monolithic.
There's a large--well, a bit of a diversity amongst them. But one of the
commonalties they had, one of the similarities they shared was their fondness
for Ahmad Chalabi and his goal. And how he got into that circle was
interesting. He'd known Perle for a long time, but there really--in the
mid-'90s, he really did manage to inject Iraq as a key issue that would, he
thought and they became to think, that would change the Middle East. Now, he
really had a lot to do with that, and he really influenced the
neoconservatives on that. Some of them told me that.

GROSS: Talk a little bit more about which part of the neoconservative plan
came directly from Chalabi.

Mr. ROSTON: Well, this ideology, this sort of strategic vision that they
had, this idea that once you topple Saddam everything sort of lines up to work
fine. I think Chalabi helped establish it as sort of a strategy in the Middle
East to topple Saddam. Toppling Saddam became this overriding solution to the
Middle East to them. And it's not necessarily logical or illogical, but
that's what their strategy became. Toppling Saddam would then lead to these
other good things. Good things would result: peace, other countries would
see that dictators could be toppled, and the Palestinian/Israeli conflict
could be solved somehow. And that's what they began to see, and they saw that
in part because of what Chalabi was telling them.

GROSS: And I guess also that Chalabi was an Iraqi exile who could be a public
face and say, `This is true. This is what's going to happen.'

Mr. ROSTON: They really bought into him. And perhaps, you know, they really
saw him--well, you know, were they using him? Was he using them? Did
everybody believe what everybody else was saying? I think, to a certain
degree, they really, really liked him. It was just genuine. They
thought--and they all say this--they thought he was a, quote, "democrat" with
a small D, somebody who would bring democracy to the Middle East. Whether
they really thought that, they speak enthusiastically about that. They
thought his values were their values. His values, he was not anti, you know,
Zionist. He was not anti-American. He would be pro-US. And when he brought
that perspective to them, they thought, `Wow, we've got somebody who we can
really work with.'

GROSS: So Ahmad Chalabi made the argument that if you overthrow Saddam
Hussein, then peace spreads, Israel and the Palestinians are able to make
peace, you know, peace spreads all the way through to the Middle East, and a
lot of people believed that. But you know, it's interesting--and we were
talking about how the CIA cut him loose and distrusted him. You write that
Israel's intelligence service, the Mossad, they distrusted him, too. And even
though Chalabi, for a lot of Americans he became to be seen as a kind of
pro-Israel figure, Israeli intelligence didn't trust him. Why didn't the
Mossad trust him?

Mr. ROSTON: It was really interesting for me to learn that the Mossad didn't
trust him because he'd had so much support from pro-Israel people here in the
United States. But the Mossad didn't trust him for a number of reasons, but
chiefly it had to do with something that happened in the past, supposedly. I
don't know exactly what it was, but they had some interaction with him and it
hadn't been positive.

There was also, you know, their alliance with the US, with the CIA, and they
simply knew what the CIA's experience was with him. And apparently they had a
lot of experience with the Jordanians and were very familiar with what his
history in Jordan was. But what was true was the Mossad was simply--at that
point, in '98 and onwards, '97 and onwards, they would not work with him. It
was contradicting what a lot of his supporters in the United States were
saying. But the Mossad, Israeli intelligence, they had no interest whatsoever
in dealing with him.

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross, back with Aram Roston, author of
the new book, "The Man Who Pushed America to War: The Extraordinary Life,
Adventures and Obsessions of Ahmad Chalabi." Chalabi was an Iraqi exile who
organized fellow exiles to push for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. He
lobbied Congress to support regime change and worked with the neoconservatives
who advocated regime change. He was funded by the CIA, then the State
Department. Aram Roston is an investigative journalist who works as a
producer for the "NBC Nightly News."

One of the things that Chalabi is famous for now is having supplied
misinformation, or some might say disinformation, to people in Congress, to
journalists. What is some of the misinformation that he spread?

Mr. ROSTON: Well, there's a number of things. There were specific stories
that began to come up after 9/11 that addressed Saddam Hussein and alleged he
had ties to Osama bin Laden. There were other stories that came up about
Saddam Hussein's ties to WMD and his WMD programs and nuclear programs and so
forth. These were the issues that Chalabi and his people really began to push
after the tragedy of 9/11. They really tried to bring attention to Saddam
Hussein. They tried to tie him to Osama bin Laden. It was a major effort on
their part, by using these stories that they began to bring before the press,
before intelligence if they could, and before Congress.

But the other major part of information that they brought forward was they
provided--a lot of people got all their information about Iraq from Ahmad
Chalabi and his people.

GROSS: You write in your book that after September 11th, Chalabi and his
people pushed four major storylines about Iraq and September 11th. What were
those four major storylines?

Mr. ROSTON: Just in the weeks after 9/11, the first big storyline that
Chalabi and his people were pushing, were bringing to the US, to the media and
intelligence services, was this idea that Saddam Hussein's Iraq had trained
hijackers in how to hijack planes without weapons at a place called Salman
Pak. This idea just started coming out just maybe weeks after 9/11, and
obviously it had a lot of resonance, of course, right? If Saddam Hussein was
training hijackers, you can only let your imagination run wild on what that
would mean, what that could've meant. So that was their first big--you could
call it a propaganda push--to get that story out. And supplying that story
were mainly two officials, who both came through the Iraqi National Congress,
too, so-called defectors, two Iraqi military people who were saying--well,
they had different stories, but they alleged that they'd been at Salman Pak
and they'd been at this site and had seen this, at some point, this training
going on. That really had some resonance in some places. It seemed like it
was a very important story, if it was true.

GROSS: What were the other storylines?

Mr. ROSTON: So then the other story, the next big story was--one we're all
familiar with was this sort--the story that Judith Miller did famously in The
New York Times. It was an engineer who came forward. He was a defector,
allegedly, who came forward and he said, `I worked in Baghdad, and I was
building these underground chambers.' And he described what was going on. He
was sealing things underground. And they were wells, and they were sealing
things. And he's described all these sort of scary things he saw that he
thought were WMD, nuclear or biological. There were not many specifics about
what they were, but they seemed to be terrifying, very secretive programs that
he said he was burying.

So this guy talked to Judith Miller and others, and he told his story. He was
an interesting character. He was an engineer. It seems he really was an
engineer, and he may very well have worked on underground things, but on the
face of it, there really wasn't that much that was incriminating. It just
seemed he was doing things underground, but he didn't--he had no information,
apparently, about WMD. That somehow, it sort of just all seemed suspicious,
and that's the story that eventually came out, although it seemed to indicate
they've got this secretive program; they're hiding something. And his
importance just grew and grew and grew.

GROSS: So the story was there seems to be a secretive program; they're hiding
something. He didn't say, `Oh, they were definitely working on WMD'?

Mr. ROSTON: He never--well, he said that he thought they were working on it,
but he had no qualifications to know that. He didn't know--he would talk
about things that--he would talk about what he thought were sort of biological
weapons, but he had no way of knowing what they were, what they would have
been. He just had--there was no basis for his knowledge, even if he was
telling the truth.

GROSS: Can you briefly run through a couple of the other storylines that
Ahmad Chalabi was putting across after September 11th?

Mr. ROSTON: Another big one was one called "Saddam's Mistress." They found a
woman who they believed had had a relationship with Saddam Hussein, a romantic
or sexual relationship with Saddam Hussein. And eventually he, well, they
introduced the woman to ABC News, and, well, through a long process,
eventually she went public. And she talked about Saddam Hussein in ways that
are very graphic. You know, it was very interesting; it was titillating. But
she also alleged that Saddam Hussein, in her knowledge, was supporting Osama
bin Laden, had given him cash, and that she'd seen Osama bin Laden.

It was a very unlikely story. Everybody discounts it now, but it was
fascinating, had huge amounts of news, and it got huge amounts of attention
even from American intelligence. The DIA began looking into it and they began
exploring it. They gave her polygraphs. They went to visit her. And in the
end, there was no credence to it. But it gathered a lot of public attention,
so people suddenly began sort of again, in their minds, perhaps, seeing a link
between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

GROSS: Now, are you suggesting that Chalabi told her to say this?

Mr. ROSTON: No. I don't think there's evidence that Chalabi actually
personally dealt with these defectors. He knew what was going on. There was
pretty much no doubt because one INC official told me he'd written e-mails and
letters about the defectors that he was handling to Chalabi, and Chalabi knew.
There's no doubt he knew who these people were. But no, there is, to this
day, no evidence that Chalabi himself told defectors what to say.

GROSS: You spoke to a lot of journalists who printed things that you describe
as Ahmad Chalabi's storylines. Tell us one of the stories that a journalist
told you about how they feel they were suckered in.

Mr. ROSTON: There's a fantastic journalist, a really interesting man
called--and his name is David Rose. He writes for Vanity Fair, and he was
writing for The Observer of London. And he--after 9/11, he was looking for a
way to cover terrorism really well, and he ended up linking up with Ahmad
Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress and his people; and, as he describes
it, he really fell under their sway. He really began to feel they were very
credible. His doubts disappeared. He became just convinced that what they
were saying was true and their cause was good. He became a partisan for them.
He really became steeped in them. Because now he no longer is, but it was
just fascinating to hear the way he describes he was involved. He says that
when he first met Ahmad Chalabi, Chalabi sort of flattered him on his work,
flattered him on how moral he was. Gradually, these stories that they
would--these tidbits they would give him, they would pan out in some way or
another, he thought. Months after 9/11, suddenly this journalist was pushing
for a war against Saddam Hussein, all because of...

GROSS: How was he pushing?

Mr. ROSTON: He would write op-ed pieces. Yeah, he wrote an op-ed piece
calling for war.

GROSS: Oh.

Mr. ROSTON: And he just sort of completely come to absorb this idea. And he
was confused when he would talk to Chalabi. He said one time, he asked him
how come other progressive journalists don't get it, they don't understand the
morality of the war. And Chalabi sort of said, `Well, you know, they don't
have the morality that you do,' sort of calmed him down, he said, `They don't
see it. You're more moral than they are.' And later on the guy went on to do
a whole bunch of these stories for Vanity Fair, for The Observer of London.
He sort of helped get a lot of the Iraqi National Congress information out
there into the public, and it had a great impact.

GROSS: How did David Rose come to think that he was misled by Chalabi?

Mr. ROSTON: Oh, he didn't realize it, really, until after the invasion of
Iraq. Sometime after the invasion of Iraq, David Rose says, he began to
realize, `Wait a second, there really were no weapons of mass destruction,'
and these stories he'd written seemed to just fall apart at the seams. Now,
it was clear to him that much of what he'd written was not true, all these
stories he'd written about weapons of mass destruction, about links to terror,
about training hijackers. Suddenly he realized, wait a second, he was wrong.
And he had this incredible crisis of conscience. He was just--suddenly he was
torn because, you know, he began to see the horrors of war.

And Chalabi's people continued to try to feed him stories. He said Chalabi,
even after the war, gave him a story about how a major al-Qaeda figure had
been in Iraq just a year before 9/11 and had gotten money from Saddam Hussein.
And Chalabi was trying to get him to do the story, and he said now he had some
suspicion. Now he was not as--he didn't have the same willingness to believe
everything that Chalabi said, till finally he sort of began to investigate his
own reporting and thinking to himself he'd made an awful mistake.

GROSS: Would you describe Chalabi as having been a key source for a lot of
the pre-war reporting that reported on weapons of mass destruction being
developed in Iraq, about the link between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden?

Mr. ROSTON: There's no doubt that Chalabi and his people were a major source
for a lot of this information, for reporters of every sort. They were very
good with reporters. They were wonderful with reporters, really, and they
were a major source for a lot of the information about Saddam's alleged links
to terrorism, about Saddam's links to WMD, and also about Saddam's human
rights violations, too, which they were very vocal on.

GROSS: A lot of questions have been raised about the relationship that
Chalabi had with Iran. So let's go there. You know, he brought this Iraqi
Shiite group into alliance with the United States before the invasion. Iran
is a predominantly Shiite country. Chalabi is Shiite. So what do you know
about the relationship he had with the Iranians before or after the invasion?

Mr. ROSTON: It's really complex. And it goes to ideology, it goes to
necessity, it goes to geography--he had to get in and out of Kurdistan and
Iraq somehow, and he couldn't go through a lot of countries because he was
obviously wanted in Jordan, he couldn't go through there, he couldn't go
through other places. So he was close to Iran for a number of reasons, but
his relationship before the war was complex, and his relationship after the
war was complex. When the CIA cut him off, he certainly worked with Iran.
Even when he was getting funding from the CIA, he worked with Iranian
intelligence. He had contacts with them. There's no doubt about it. Later
he had contacts with them.

One question is, some people have alleged he was sort of an Iranian agent.
There I think it's probably not the case. The best analysis I've heard is
that he was an Iranian agent of influence. He and Iran had similar, perhaps,
goals vis a vis Iraq, you know, the toppling of Saddam Hussein and Shiite, you
know, predominance and Shiite empowerment. You know, so similar goals, but
not that he was getting paid or controlled by them, because most people think
no one controls him.

He also had ties to the very top of Iranian intelligence as it concerned Iraq.
After the war, according to intelligence sources, he met with the higher level
Iranian Revolutionary Guards' general. That general was supposed to be in
charge of all the Iranian operations in southern Iraq. He was allegedly
running very important operations against American interests and against, you
know, other interests in Iraq. US intelligence believed he was very much an
enemy. They believed he was involved in operations that have ended up killing
Americans. And they were very disturbed that, they believe, Chalabi had met
with him. That general's name was Ahmed Foruzandeh. And actually, more
recently, this year that general was actually designated by the Treasury
Department as somebody who had supported terrorists in Iraq. But at the time,
it sort of went to who really was Chalabi dealing with, and this general was a
very significant figure in the Iranian influence in Iraq.

GROSS: So we know that Chalabi met with this Iranian general. We don't know
exactly what they said to each other or what promises they made to each other.

Mr. ROSTON: Indeed we don't. We do not know what happened there.
Intelligence community was very suspicious about that. And now, from
Chalabi's perspective, it's important to remember, you know, his view is
there's no reason to think of Iran as an enemy or negatively in any way. You
know, he simply--there's no reason for him, from his perspective, to be
hostile towards Iran just because America is, just because Iran may be hostile
to America. So he feels perfectly fine meeting with them.

The main problem from an American perspective, though, comes because he, you
know, his group was still receiving US funding and was receiving so much US
support, you know, who's had such close ties to American intelligence figures
and so much access to Americans. So that's where sort of maybe interests
diverge between the two.

GROSS: So what is Chalabi doing now?

Mr. ROSTON: Chalabi he's back. To one degree or another. He was always
sort of at this de-Baathification committee, but he's back in a strong way in
what they call services. He's a key part of Baghdad reconstruction. He works
with Americans, he works with all the Iraqi ministries that deal with
reconstruction. He runs something called the services committee, which is
remarkable because he was on the outs, he was sort of trying to struggle to
find new allies, he's allied himself with so many people then made enemies of
so many people in Iraq, but yet he's back. Malaki's government, the current
government, has appointed him to run this committee to help coordinate, you
know, help reviving services in some way, getting electricity and water and
other services to the citizens of Baghdad. And it's a weird thing, but some
American officials, they say, you know, at least he's competent. He may be
tough to work with, and he may serve his own interests, but at least he's
organized and competent. Maybe he can get something done.

GROSS: An interesting thing about that Chalabi story is that, you know, he
worked with the CIA, he worked with the State Department. They both gave him
money. He encouraged people on Capitol Hill to pass legislation in '98,
making it part of the law to overthrow Saddam Hussein, you know, a law that
advocated regime change in Iraq. But now he's blaming the United States for
everything that went wrong in Iraq. He's saying, you know, the United States
basically blew the occupation. And I don't think a lot of people are arguing
that, but he's not accepting any of the credit for the things that went wrong
in Iraq, as far as I can tell.

Mr. ROSTON: No, that's true. No. He does not accept any blame. It's all
somebody else's fault. It's all the US's fault. But it's never--he's very
good at blaming people. He doesn't really blame Bush, he blames Bush's
appointees, you know, like Bremer, but he doesn't blame Bush, you know, and so
it's very smart.

GROSS: So he survived, right? I mean, he's alienated a lot of people. He's
a really shadowy figure. He apparently was behind a lot of misinformation
about Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction. But he survived. He
still has a really powerful and probably lucrative position in Iraq that
allows him to make a lot of deals and be a real player.

Mr. ROSTON: He does. And he's still--it's remarkable, he still works with
American officials there. He's great to talk to. He speaks English, he's
clever, he's smart, he's familiar with lots of, you know, what needs to be
done. He's a man to whom you can turn. And he feels like he's, you know, for
Americans there, for the Iraqis there, you know, maybe they're turning to him
again. No one thinks he's going to run the country--very few people think
he's going to run the country--but he's back, like you say.

GROSS: So bottom line here, do you see Chalabi as an opportunist who's out
for his own power, power in Iraq and power and influence within the United
States? Or do you see him as somebody who genuinely wanted the overthrow of
Saddam Hussein for the good of his own country?

Mr. ROSTON: I think he definitely wanted the overthrow of Saddam Hussein,
and he definitely is an opportunist. He's both. He's a very complex figure.
I think it's indisputable that he was passionate about overthrowing Saddam
Hussein. It's also indisputable that he worked very, very hard to manipulate
lots of people to get what he wanted beyond the invasion of Iraq. He
definitely opposed Saddam Hussein and was sincere about that. Now, whether he
would've committed his life to that if he hadn't lost his job as a banker, I
don't know. But after he lost his job as a banker because his bank was taken
over and he was convicted of fraud, he did commit his life to overthrowing
Saddam Hussein. There's no doubt about it. And he seemed to have been very
sincere about it. I don't think there was a doubt that he opposed Saddam
Hussein, who was of course a very sadistic guy.

And there's also no doubt that Chalabi was very manipulative and very
opportunistic, and manipulated a lot of people and got them to do things that
he wanted them to do, which didn't always benefit them and definitely didn't
always benefit the United States of America.

GROSS: Well, I want to thank you so much for talking with us.

Mr. ROSTON: Thank you so much.

GROSS: Aram Roston is the author of "The Man Who Pushed America to War."
Roston is a producer at the "NBC Nightly News."

(Announcements)

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Profile: Linguist Geoff Nunberg on William F. Buckley's language
TERRY GROSS, host:

When William F. Buckley died on February 27th, the obituaries focused as much
on his distinctive verbal style as on his political influence. Our linguist,
Geoff Nunberg, explains why Buckley could get away with using words that
would've made anyone else sound insufferably pretentious or buffoonish.

Mr. GEOFF NUNBERG: The death of William F. Buckley last month sent the
writers of obituaries and appreciations to their dictionaries, searching for
Buckleyisms they could drop in by way of homage. The New York Times led the
way when it headed its page one obituary "William F. Buckley Jr., 82, Dies,
Sesquipedalian Spark of Right." Not surprisingly, that header mystified quite
a few readers, particularly since the article underneath it didn't give the
game away until paragraph 24, when it finally let on that sesquipedalian means
"characterized by the use of long words." Still, if you're going to have
people scratching their heads over a word in somebody's obituary, who better
than his?

I counted more than a dozen of those stories that used the word
sesquipedalian, though most weren't as coy as the Times about explaining the
word. In Newsweek, Evan Thomas described Buckley as "a lover of big words, a
sesquipedalian, as he might say." Actually, Buckley did call himself that on
occasion, though he knew that you can only use sesquipedalian as an adjective
to describe someone; it's not a noun like Episcopalian. But one way or
another, the word is particularly apt for him. And not just because of his
fondness for polysyllables. It was coined by the Roman poet Horace, who
referred to poets who use sesquipedalia verba, which literally means words a
foot and a half long. The word was Horace's little joke, an example of the
very thing it was ridiculing, and has been tinged with mockery ever since. So
it accords nicely with a slightly self-mocking persona that Buckley fashioned
for himself: the slouch, the drawling, patrician voice, the arching eyebrows
and the darting lizard tongue, not to mention the overcooked language itself.
It all served to avert the irritation that his high-fallutin' vocabulary might
otherwise have engendered. We Americans tend to be tough on erudition that's
untempered by humor, or at least when it comes from one of our own. Unfairly
or not, we'll tax George Will with pedantry for using a word that we'll
receive with an indulgent smile when it comes from Christopher Hitchens. Use
a fancy word in public and you risk being accused of affectation, elitism or
simply what people used to call "putting on the style."

With the exception of Senator Pat Moynihan, I can't think of any modern public
figure but Buckley who could charm away those impressions while still getting
people to take him and his language seriously. David Frye and Robin Williams
could get his voice dead on, but his verbal style proved surprisingly hard to
capture--even for those who are close to him. In his appreciation of Buckley,
National Review's Jonah Goldberg described him affectionately as the
peripatetic proselytizer of polysyllabism. But that doesn't sound like
Buckley. What it brings to mind is Spiro Agnew disgorging one of those
prefabricated chunks like "nattering naybobs of negativism" that his
speechwriter William Safire used to cook up for him.

It's the same sort of thing that Bill O'Reilly's doing when he overenunciates
words like "bloviate" and "opine," a big-word buffoonery that actually implies
a disdain for language. These are people who choose their words as if they
were shopping for lawn ornaments. There are people who do this polysyllabic
word play more engagingly--Safire, for example, ever since he's been filing
under his own byline. But this is just a weekend avocation for Safire,
whereas Buckley's devotion to recondite words was profound and passionate, and
sometimes maybe a little immoderate. Word collectors always have to tread a
fine line between flattering their readers' erudition and basking in their
own. And Buckley didn't always keep his balance. He had a weakness for what
the critic H.W. Fowler described as Warder Street words after the street in
Soho where Londoners used to shop for decorative bric-a-brac. He couldn't
resist using catechize in place of question or grill, vaticination for
forecast, and eo ipso for in and of itself.

Of course, he would've said that those words had nuances that were absent in
their everyday synonyms, and that using them encouraged people to stretch
their vocabularies. He wrote once that asking somebody to avoid uncommon
words is like advising a composer that he may not use diminished chords in his
next symphony. That's fair enough, but reading Buckley, you sometimes wish
that he'd confined his composing to the white keys. Take the time he worked
"albescent" into a description of the sea in an account he wrote for People
magazine in 1980 about crossing the Atlantic in a sailboat. It was an elegant
touch, particularly for readers whose Latin was up to recognizing that the
word meant "whitish." But even for them, albescent doesn't conjure up a
specific shade of white, the way a concrete word like chalk or frost or ivory
does.

That's the price you pay for using sesquipedalian words: The higher they
soar, the further removed they are from the world of feeling and sensation on
the ground below. And as Horace said, you have to set them aside if you want
to touch the heart. Buckley had trouble renouncing that language, and the
failure came at a cost. His penchant for lexical bling-bling helped make him
a cultural personage, but it also left him a lesser writer than his gifts
might've allowed him to become. Still, the woods are full of gifted writers,
and there was only one of him.

GROSS: Geoff Nunberg is a linguist who teaches at the School of Information
at the University of California at Berkeley.

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