Ahmed Chalabi

Ahmed Abdel Hadi Chalabi (أحمد عبد الهادي الجلبي; 30 October 1945 – 3 November 2015) was an Iraqi politician, dissident, a founder of the Iraqi National Congress (INC) who served as the President of the Governing Council of Iraq (37th Prime Minister of Iraq) and a Deputy Prime Minister of Iraq under Ibrahim al-Jaafari.

He was born in Kadhimiya in 1945.

His family, who dated back 300 years to the Sultanate, ran Iraq's oldest commercial bank under the British-backed Kingdom of Iraq.

His father, Abdel Hadi Chalabi, a wealthy grain merchant and member of the Iraqi parliament, became head of the senate when King Abdullah I of Jordan was assassinated.

His family retired from public life to a farmhouse near Baghdad when the military seized power.

Chalabi left Iraq with his family in 1958, following the 14 July Revolution, and spent most of his life in the United States and the United Kingdom.

He was educated at Baghdad College and Seaford College in Sussex, England before leaving for America.

In exile, following the Ba'ath party takeover, his family acted as the Iraqi Shia clergy's bankers.

In the mid-1960s, he studied with cryptographer Whitfield Diffie at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from which he received a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics.

In 1969, he earned a PhD in mathematics from the University of Chicago under the direction of George Glauberman on the Theory of Knots.

after which he took a position in the mathematics department at the American University of Beirut.

In 1971, Chalabi married Leila Osseiran, daughter of Lebanese politician Adel Osseiran.

They had four children, Tamara, Mariam, Hashem and Hadi.

He published three mathematics papers between 1973 and 1980, in the field of abstract algebra.

Whilst still at Beirut the civil war broke out in 1975, so he moved to Jordan and found work as an interpreter.

Chalabi was a bold and shrewd investor, amassing a fortune of $100 million.

During his life he was accused of corruption many times.

In 1977, he founded the Petra Bank in Jordan with Crown Prince Hassan, the King's brother.

In May 1989, the Governor of the Central Bank of Jordan, Mohammed Said Nabulsi, issued a decree ordering all banks in the country to deposit 35% of their reserves with the Central Bank.

Petra Bank was the only bank that was unable to meet this requirement.

An investigation was launched which led to accusations of embezzlement and false accounting.

The bank failed, causing a $350 million bail-out by the Central Bank.

Chalabi fled the country, in the trunk of a Jordanian prince's car, before the authorities could react.

Chalabi was convicted and sentenced in absentia for bank fraud by a Jordanian military tribunal to 22 years in prison.

Chalabi maintained that his prosecution was a politically motivated effort to discredit him sponsored by Saddam Hussein.

It was widely reported that Chalabi escaped Jordan locked in the trunk of a car owned by Prince Hassan of Jordan.

Living abroad by 1992 in London, and unable to return home for fear of his life, he set up the Iraqi National Congress with an agenda of regime change for his homeland.

The organization was open to all ethnic and religious groups of Iraq, including Arabs, Kurds, Turkmen, Sunni and Shia Muslims.

Already a fluent English speaker, he turned his attention to Washington DC.

In the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Iraqi National Congress (INC), with the assistance of lobbying powerhouse BKSH & Associates, provided a major portion of the information on which U.S. Intelligence based its condemnation of the Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, including reports of weapons of mass destruction and alleged ties to al-Qaeda.

Most, if not all, of this information has turned out to be false and Chalabi has been called a fabricator.

Along with this, Chalabi also subsequently boasted, in an interview with the British Sunday Telegraph, about the impact that their faulty intelligence had on American policy.

These factors led to a falling out between him and the U.S. government.

Furthermore, Chalabi was found guilty in the Petra Bank scandal in Jordan.

He was interim Minister of Oil in Iraq in April–May 2005 and December 2005 – January 2006 and Deputy Prime Minister from May 2005 to May 2006.

Chalabi failed to win a seat in parliament in the December 2005 elections, and when the new Iraqi cabinet was announced in May 2006, he was not given a post.

Once dubbed the "George Washington of Iraq" by American supporters, he was initially a CIA-backed operative, who later fell out of favor, with US Special Forces raiding his private residence in Baghdad only one year after the invasion of Iraq.

He later came under investigation by several U.S. government agencies after switching his allegiances to become an instrument of pro-Iranian influence in Iraqi politics.

In January 2012, a French intelligence official stated that he believed Chalabi to be "acting on behalf of Iran".

Chalabi was the son of a prominent Shia family, one of the wealthy power elite of Baghdad.