Political survivor with connections to Republican right

Ahmed Chalabi is one of the great survivors of Iraqi opposition politics. He has a controversial past, a long list of enemies but is also politically agile, tough and persistent.

He comes from a wealthy Iraqi Shia banking family, who moved to Lebanon in 1958. From Beirut he went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and then to the University of Chicago where he acquired a PhD in mathematical knot theory.

He moved to Jordan in 1977 where he founded Petra Bank, which became the third-largest bank in the country. In 1989, however, the bank closed and Mr Chalabi was convicted, in absentia, of embezzling $60m (£40m), a charge he has always denied as politically motivated. He is reputed to have left Jordan in the boot of a car.

He became seriously involved in politics in 1991. He was favoured by the CIA, which liked his organisational skills and the fact that he did not have a political past that would alienate other potential opponents of Saddam Hussein. Later in the same year the Iraqi National Congress (INC) was founded, with Mr Chalabi as one of its leading lights, as an umbrella organisation for the opposition.

In the mid-1990s, he operated from the Kurdish area in northern Iraq. The INC, funded by the CIA, sought to foment a mutiny in the army or an uprising against the Iraqi regime.

It also acted as a mediator between the two main Kurdish parties which were fighting a civil war. In 1995 the INC launched a small offensive that failed and was not supported by Washington. In 1996 the Iraqi army marched into Arbil, the Kurdish capital, and many INC members fled or were killed.

Mr Chalabi cultivated journalists and congressional leaders, especially those on the Republican right. He kept the overthrow of Saddam Hussein alive as a political issue. With the election of PresidentBush, many of his friends were in office.

He also mended his fences with the Kurdistan Democratic Party, with whom he had quarrelled after the slaughter of his followers in 1996.

Mr Chalabi's weakness is that there is no evidence the INC has any support among Iraqis. He will find it difficult not to be seen as an American pawn if he has a prominent position in any interim administration.

The writer is the co-author, with Andrew Cockburn, of 'Saddam Hussein: An American Obsession'