Iraqi gets a red-carpet welcome in US

WASHINGTON -- Leading US officials welcomed Ahmad Chalabi, Iraq's deputy prime minister, as he began an eight-day visit yesterday. The trip marked a stunning political comeback for a man who is accused of supplying now-discredited information on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Chalabi, who is still under FBI investigation for allegedly telling Iran that the United States had broken a secret Iranian code, met for about a half-hour with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and planned to meet the national security adviser, Stephen Hadley.

He has meetings this week and next week with Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, and other Cabinet officials.

Chalabi is touring at a time when Capitol Hill is churning with calls for vigorous investigation into prewar intelligence in Iraq.

Yesterday, Senator Richard Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, and Representative George Miller, a Democrat from California, urged the Senate and House Intelligence Committees to subpoena Chalabi to testify about intelligence that he may have provided to the administration as the war approached.

In a separate move, Representative Henry A. Waxman, a California Democrat, urged Representative Christopher Shays, Republican of Connecticut, to open to the public a private briefing that Shays is scheduled to hold with Chalabi today.

If the allegations against Chalabi are true, Waxman wrote to Shays, ''Mr. Chalabi has betrayed US interests, caused incalculable damage to our national security, and contributed to the death of more than 2,000 of our troops."

At a news conference yesterday, Chalabi denied that he had given Iran classified information or that he had deliberately misled the administration on issues involving Iraq.

''We are sorry for every American life that was lost in Iraq," he said. ''As for deliberately misleading, this is an urban myth."

Earlier in the day, he told reporters outside the State Department that ''it's more important to look to the future than to the past."

Chalabi also told reporters that he was prepared to answer questions before the Senate, although he has not been called to testify before the Intelligence Committee. An FBI spokesman confirmed yesterday that the bureau is investigating who supplied Chalabi with classified information.

''Numerous current and former government employees have been interviewed," said an FBI special agent, Richard Kolko. ''We have no comment on the status of Mr. Chalabi, but in general the FBI interviews witnesses when an investigation indicates it is best to do so, not necessarily at the beginning of an inquiry.

Some Middle East specialists in Washington who have followed the twists and turns of Chalabi's career -- from Pentagon favorite, to persona non grata, to respected envoy of a new Iraqi government -- say the reception he is being given shows that many US officials still appreciate his forceful advocacy for toppling Saddam Hussein's regime.

''The fact that he is being received at high levels here means there is still a strong reservoir of people in the administration who believe that the Iraq invasion was the right thing to do," said Kenneth Katzman of the Congressional Research Service, the policy research arm of Congress.

''The key questions remain unanswered," Katzman said. ''Was he stoking some sort of effort to misportray the urgency of the threat from Iraq?"

Even Chalabi's critics marveled at his ability to come back from the brink of political death over and over again.

''It's like a bad movie," one Democratic aide said on Capitol Hill. ''I almost don't believe it."

Over the years, Chalabi and his group of Iraqi exiles, the Iraqi National Congress, received tens of millions of dollars from the US government for intelligence about Hussein's regime. Much of the information has been discredited, including the assertion that Iraq had a biological weapons program with mobile weapons labs, according to a Senate Intelligence Committee report.

In 2003, the US invasion allowed Chalabi to return to Baghdad for the first time since his family fled in 1956 when the Ba'ath Party came to power. He returned with the US military and was widely thought to have been Washington's pick to be the next leader of Iraq.

In the early months, he was relatively unknown among Iraqis and considered by many to be too close to Americans to be successful politically in the midst of an unpopular occupation. But Chalabi, a media-savvy political player skilled at building coalitions, remade his image and allied himself with the powerful Shi'ite cleric Ali al-Sistani.

''He read the body language very well when he got back into Iraq," Katzman said. ''He saw who was powerful and who was not going to be powerful, and he got himself a deputy prime minister-ship."

Chalabi is credited with brokering deals to end fighting between US forces and resistance fighters at a shrine in Najaf. Like many Iraqi politicians, he also kept close ties with Iran.

But his reputation plummeted about 18 months ago, when US forces raided his Baghdad home in search of evidence that he had given US secrets to Iran. In August, an Iraqi judge issued an arrest warrant against him for counterfeiting and theft, but dropped the case weeks later.

Yesterday, administration aides said the high-level meetings were given to Chalabi because of his position in the new government, not his past relationships with administration insiders. Adel Abdul Mahdi, an Iraqi vice president, is also touring the United States and will meet with Cheney and Hadley.

A State Department spokesman, Adam Ereli, said Rice's half-hour conversation with Chalabi focused on building up Iraq's oil-refining capacity and financial sector. Ereli said that the intelligence inquiry and the FBI investigation were not discussed.

Chalabi also met with Hadley yesterday, and is due to meet Cheney on Monday. Yesterday, about two dozen protesters stood outside the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank where Chalabi spoke to about 250 guests. Some protesters held up a pink banner that read, ''Chalabi lied. Innocents died."