U.S. Gen. Ray Odierno, the senior U.S. commander in Iraq, recently unleashed an extraordinary attack on Iraqi politician Ahmed Chalabi, accusing the one-time darling of U.S. neoconservatives of attempting to "hijack" the country's March 7 parliamentary elections in an effort to promote the interests of Iran.
Odierno's charge that Chalabi is "clearly influenced" by Iran caused a stir in Baghdad, but was no surprise to the U.S. intelligence community. Odierno's comments echo more than a decade of private warnings by CIA officials that, even while he was being embraced by Paul Wolfowitz and others in the Bush administration, Chalabi was secretly aligned with the regime in Tehran.
Chalabi "is doing the bidding of Iran," said John Maguire, formerly one of the CIA's top Iraqi operations officer who served as a deputy station chief in Baghdad following the U.S. invasion in 2003. "He's getting specific instructions
, and he's responding to them. This has been going on since 1996, but there's no hiding it anymore."
For his part, Chalabi─once hailed by some neocons as the "George Washington of Iraq"─adamantly denies that he is anything but an Iraqi patriot looking after the interests of his country. "These accusations resurface every time we take a course of action that is contrary to the political agenda of the U.S." Chalabi wrote in an e-mail last week to Washington Post columnist David Ignatius.
edit for link...http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/declassified/archive/2010/02/28/iraqi-election-watch-chalabi-once-darling-of-bush-administration-neo-cons-is-doing-the-bidding-of-iran-says-former-top-cia-officer.aspx