Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi politician who from exile helped persuade the United States to invade Iraq in 2003, and then unsuccessfully tried to attain power as his country was nearly torn apart by sectarian violence, died at his home in Baghdad on Tuesday. He was 71.
The cause was heart failure, Iraqi officials said.
Chalabi is the Iraqi perhaps most associated with President George W. Bush's decision to invade Iraq and topple its longtime dictator, Saddam Hussein. A mathematician with a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, Chalabi, the son of a prominent Shiite family, cultivated close ties with journalists in Washington and London; U.S. lawmakers; the neoconservative advisers who helped shape Bush's foreign policy; and a wide network of Iraqi exiles, many of whom were paid for intelligence about Saddam's government.
Chalabi's relationship with the Americans stretched over decades. In 1998, he helped persuade Congress to pass the Iraq Liberation Act, which was signed by President Bill Clinton and declared it the policy of the United States to replace Saddam's government with a democratic one.
His group, the Iraqi National Congress, would get more than $100 million from the CIA and other agencies between its founding in 1992 and the start of the war. He cultivated friendships with a circle of hawkish Republicans — Dick Cheney, Douglas J. Feith, William J. Luti, Richard N. Perle and Paul D. Wolfowitz — who were central in the United States' march to war, Cheney as vice president and the others as top Pentagon officials.
Chalabi's contention, broadly shared by U.S. intelligence agencies, was that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction. Saddam had fatally gassed Kurds and slaughtered Shiites and other Iraqis, and he had refused to fully cooperate with U.N. weapons inspectors. But most of the case for war was predicated on faulty intelligence, including the testimony of defectors. As it became clear that Iraq did not have an active chemical, biological or nuclear weapons program and as the occupying U.S. forces did not receive the welcome that the Iraqi opposition had predicted, the Bush administration distanced itself from Chalabi.
One year after the invasion, U.S. special forces raided his home in Baghdad, apparently searching for evidence that he was sharing intelligence with Iran. (Although Chalabi kept close ties to Shiite Iran's clerical leadership and had lived in Tehran before the invasion, no such evidence was found.)
He was the target of an assassination attempt at least once, in 2008, when a suicide bomber narrowly missed him, killing six of his bodyguards. Spurned by the Americans, Chalabi allied himself with Muqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shiite leader and ally of Iran whose Mahdi Army led two bloody uprisings, and who remains a significant force in Iraqi politics.
"Chalabi's life work, an Iraq liberated from Saddam Hussein, a modern and democratic Iraq, is spiraling toward disintegration," Dexter Filkins wrote in The New York Times Magazine in 2006, after interviewing Chalabi at his home in London, where he was on vacation. "Indeed, for many in the West, Chalabi has become the personification of all that has gone wrong in Iraq: the lies, the arrogance, the occupation as disaster."
As recently as last year, Chalabi's name was floated as a candidate for prime minister, and at the time of his death he was the head of the finance committee in Parliament.
On Tuesday, Iraqi leaders issued statements that emphasized Chalabi's role in ousting Saddam, who was captured in 2003 and executed in 2006.
"We mourn regretfully the death of Dr. Ahmad Chalabi," President Fouad Massoum said in a statement. "Chalabi had a pivotal role with many Iraqi leaders in fighting the dictatorship."
Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said in a statement, "He dedicated his life to opposing the dictatorial regime, and he played a great role in building a democratic process in Iraq."
Ahmad Abdul Hadi Chalabi was born in Baghdad on Oct. 30, 1944. His family was part of a tiny, secular Shiite elite that had prospered under the Ottoman Turks and then, after World War I, the Hashemite monarchy installed by the British. Chalabi attended an elite Jesuit high school, Baghdad College, where his schoolmates included fellow Shiites like Ayad Allawi, who would later become a relative by marriage and serve as an acting prime minister, and Adel Abdul Mahdi, who would later become a finance minister, a vice president and, now, the oil minister.
In 1958, the same year that army officers overthrew King Faisal II, the Chalabi family went into exile. Chalabi studied math at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before receiving his doctorate from the University of Chicago, in 1969. (His dissertation was in an area of algebra known as group theory.) He later taught at the American University of Beirut and published several mathematical papers. During his time overseas, the Baath Party staged a coup, in 1968, and by 1979, Saddam had managed to consolidate power.
The disastrous Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88, Saddam's invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the U.S.-led war that ousted his forces from Kuwait in 1991 galvanized Iraqi exiles. In 1992, Chalabi and other exiles founded the Iraqi National Congress, a London-based umbrella coalition for groups seeking to oust Saddam.
By now, Chalabi was in regular contact with the Americans, though his actions were often unwelcome. In 1995, while receiving pay from the CIA in the Kurdish city of Irbil, Chalabi began an unauthorized — and unsuccessful — attack on Saddam's forces.
The fiasco led to nothing except a decision by Turkey to send troops into northern Iraq. The next year, Chalabi interfered with a CIA plot to topple Saddam. The coup attempt failed, about 150 fighters for the Iraqi National Congress were killed and Chalabi's relationship with the CIA never recovered.
In 2001, Chalabi again came under fire. A State Department audit found that the group had misspent $113,794, including $2,000 on membership fees for a Washington gym and $6,314 for oil paintings to decorate its offices. (A follow-up audit last year found that the group had made considerable progress in tightening controls.)
The U.S.-led overthrow of Saddam's government in 2003 gave Chalabi a chance to re-enter politics. The Americans named him to the 25-member Iraqi Governing Council. But images of toppled statues and cheering Iraqis quickly gave way to scenes of violent resistance to the occupying authorities, led by former members of the government, and to increasing sectarian violence.
Within a year of the war, the Americans cut off Chalabi. In May 2004, they stopped $335,000 monthly payments to the Iraqi National Congress, and days later they raided his Baghdad home.
Chalabi, for his part, attributed the problems in Iraq to the Americans for staying too long and for failing to immediately turn over power to Iraqis — even though most observers doubted that exiles like Chalabi, who had been away for 45 years, could have kept the country together on their own.
Moreover, Chalabi never developed a significant political base. In the December 2005 parliamentary elections, the first held under the country's new constitution, his Iraqi National Congress received about 30,000 votes, one-quarter of 1 percent of the 12 million ballots cast — not enough to put even a single lawmaker in the new Iraqi Parliament.
Chalabi was never widely trusted nor liked by ordinary Iraqis, for whom it was common knowledge that he had been convicted in absentia for fraud in Jordan in 1992, and sentenced to 22 years in prison, for embezzling almost $300 million from Petra Bank, which he had founded. (Chalabi, who fled Jordan before he could be arrested, said the charges were concocted by the Jordanian government under pressure from Saddam.)
Chalabi, who is survived by his wife, Leila Osseiran, and four children, may be remembered above all for a certain quality of relentlessness. As The Times journalist Michael R. Gordon and a retired general, Bernard E. Trainor, related in their 2012 book, members of the Iraqi Governing Council traveled to Washington in January 2004 for Bush's State of the Union address, his first since the invasion. Seated in the gallery, near the first lady, Laura Bush, was Chalabi.
The next morning, at a meeting of the National Security Council, Bush turned to Richard L. Armitage, the deputy secretary of state, and asked how Chalabi had managed to get in. No one could say.