WORLD BREAKING NEWS. Cont'd.

Chalabi Raid Marks U.S. Favorite's Fall from Grace.

PENTAGON PICKED UP TAB

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The raid on Ahmad Chalabi's headquarters in Baghdad on Thursday marks an ignominious fall for a man who helped make the U.S. case to topple Saddam Hussein but was seen as a duplicitous opportunist by U.S. diplomats and spies. Chalabi was a guest of first lady Laura Bush four months ago at the State of the Union speech, Washington's premier political event, and a favorite of the Pentagon, which paid his Iraqi National Congress $340,000 a month for intelligence. U.S. officials said this week they had cut off this funding, and U.S. forces and Iraqi police raided Chalabi's Baghdad home and party offices, seizing computers and files from the man once seen by the Pentagon as a potential post-Saddam leader. U.S. officials said the raid was to gather evidence of suspected "corruption" by INC members and Chalabi was not a target. An Iraqi judge, Hassan Muathin, said it was carried out under an arrest warrant for men wanted for stealing vehicles. But analysts said the raid seemed a political act against a man who fell from U.S. favor because of incendiary statements about allowing Baathists back into government, a long history of providing dubious intelligence, contacts with Iran that spooked Washington and a belief he was simply out for himself. 'OWN AMBITIONS': "He was seen as somebody who really pursued his own ambitions with very little real regard to any other goal," said Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "He basically was an outside opportunist."  A U.S. television network reported on Thursday that senior U.S. officials said Chalabi gave sensitive U.S. intelligence information to Iran, a country the Bush administration was part of the "axis of evil" with North Korea and Saddam Hussein's Iraq. CBS Evening News said the evidence showed Chalabi "personally gave Iranian intelligence officers information so sensitive that if revealed it could, quote 'Get Americans killed."'  CBS said it had reached a Chalabi aide who said the charges were "nonsense" and part of the CIA's effort to discredit him.  Chalabi's dealings with Washington go back more than a decade. The CIA had a relationship with him in the early 1990s but became disaffected after the INC failed to overthrow or weaken the Iraqi regime.

The CIA cut off funding to the INC in the mid-1990s because it did not trust Chalabi to be an honest broker and, in more recent years, the spy agency viewed Chalabi with suspicion amid "continued signs of his duplicity," said one U.S. official. PENTAGON PICKED UP TAB The State Department then funded the INC, but also cut off funds for a time because the group could not fully account for the money. The Pentagon eventually picked up the INC tab. A congressional report found the State Department paid the INC at least $33 million since March 2000. Chalabi was instrumental in making the case on Capitol Hill for the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, a U.S. law saying regime change should be U.S. policy toward Saddam. U.S. officials suggested Chalabi undermined support in the Pentagon and Vice President Dick Cheney's office by suggesting that a U.S. policy of allowing some Baathists back into public life was like putting Nazis in charge of postwar Germany. One said Washington increasingly saw Chalabi trying to "undercut some of the efforts that we are making to stabilize Iraq" to advance his personal interests. Critics say Chalabi contributed to the prewar U.S. view that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, the main justification for invading Iraq, by coaching defectors to tell the Pentagon what it wanted to hear. "As far as the value of the information that they have provided, you've got DIA and CIA folks saying that very little has been proven to be of much value," said one official. David Mack, an analyst with the Middle East Institute think tank and former U.S. diplomat with extensive experience in the Arab world, offered a rare kind word for Chalabi. "I find it hard to blame Ahmad Chalabi for doing what all emigre politicians do, which is exaggerate their support in their countries and exaggerate how easy it would be to change things for the better if we only gave them support," he said. (Additional reporting by Tabassum Zakaria, Will Dunham, Adam Entous, Charles Aldinger) . End of the article.