Dan Rather IN 1958, at the early height of the Cold War, the world met Jim Wormold, British vacuum-cleaner-salesman-turned-spy. Wormold lived the expatriate's life in pre-revolutionary Havana. He had bills to pay and a teenage daughter with expensive tastes. Then along came British intelligence, asking Wormold to keep his eyes and ears open and offering him money for his troubles.
Before long, Wormold had invented a whole network of "foreign agents" and passed off "secret drawings" of vacuum-cleaner schematics, which his handlers duly interpreted as a Soviet military installation.
Jim Wormold was a fictional creation, the anti-hero of Graham Greene's satirical novel "Our Man in Havana." Now, though, as the United States makes good its break with former banker, convicted (in absentia) embezzler and Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmed Chalabi, the details and allegations that are emerging are causing many to wonder if life is imitating art.
Call it 'Our Man in Baghdad.'If you do a news search, you'll find that any number of participants in the Iraq experiment have been given that title, including L. Paul Bremer, the United States' chief civilian in Iraq, and John Negroponte, who will become American ambassador to that country after the scheduled hand-over of governmental authority on June 30. But none seems to fit it as does Chalabi, a man whom some had warned about from the very beginning, and whose organisation now stands accused of passing highly secret U.S. information to Iran.
But first Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress passed secrets to the United States. He and his band of Iraqi exiles told harrowing stories of Saddam Hussein's weapons programmes. Stories the CIA and the State Department were reluctant -- at least -- to trust, but to which the Pentagon and Vice President Dick Cheney, by most accounts, gave a good deal of weight and credence. When the Pentagon airlifted Chalabi and hundreds of his supporters
into Iraq just days before the fall of Baghdad, top officials in the State Department were reportedly furious, seeing it as one in a series of Defence Department efforts to crowd out State's role in the eventual rebuilding process.
The CIA was similarly incensed. A flurry of books, articles and leaks that have come to light in the year since reveal that Iraq was, from the beginning, a point of division between these policy-making centres. Now Chalabi, once the Pentagon's and President Bush's favourite candidate to become Iraq's version of Hamid Karzai, has become a living symbol of those divisions.
Will he also become a symbol of the U.S. experience in Iraq? Even Chalabi's one-time supporters in the Pentagon now seemed to have disowned him, and the $340,000 of U.S. taxpayer money his Iraqi National Congress received every month has finally been cut off. But it is possible that the damage might have already been done, in a country where many Iraqis saw, in Chalabi, an American attempt to manipulate the Iraqi political process from the very start.
Questions about who was really manipulating whom will have to be sorted out in the future, along with questions about just who gave Chalabi's organisation the U.S. secrets that certain of its members are alleged to have passed on to the Iranians. In the meantime, there's a guerrilla war to be fought and new questions about the scheduled hand-over of Iraq's sovereignty.
And now that Our Man in Baghdad seems to have been selling vacuum-cleaner schematics to all sides, are the U.S. State Department and Defence Department on the same page? Unfortunately, we can't leaf ahead to the ending to find out. This book, in which fact is sometimes stranger than fiction, is still very much a work in progress.
Dan Rather is a television news anchor
