Ahmad Chalabi remembered

One of the great joys of my job is that I get to meet and spend time with a rogue's gallery of crooks, con men and spies who can be among the most charming and disarming people you'll ever meet. And without a doubt, the most extraordinary, fascinating and irresistibly likeable of them all was the Iraqi politician who died on Tuesday, Ahmad Chalabi -- the same Ahmad Chalabi who years before, from exile, had beguiled American politicians and journalists alike while making the case for war in Iraq.

I got to know Chalabi well during the 10 years I covered him for both 60 Minutes and for a biography of him that I would eventually write, "Arrows of The Night: Ahmad Chalabi's Long Journey to Triumph in Iraq." I spent weeks at a time interviewing Chalabi at his compound in Baghdad, and there -- over dinner at his home or in his study where he plotted his path to power in Iraq -- I was never bored for a moment. Chalabi could enthrall you with his vast knowledge of history, art and poetry.

Chalabi was a larger-than-life character, with an equally imposing resume of triumph and scandal: a degree in mathematics from MIT, a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, stints as a university professor and banker, a conviction for embezzling. And that was all before he became a C.I.A. operative and decided to devote his prodigious intellect full-time to what had always been his true obsession: overthrowing the murderous Saddam Hussein and returning home to Iraq in a blaze of glory.

Now, since his passing, when I think back on Chalabi -- his life and machinations, and his legacy -- I do so with a mixture of awe and anger, as well as sadness. Awe for what he pulled off. When he embarked on his long journey home, Ahmad Chalabi commanded no army, led no tribe and hailed from Iraq's lowest caste, the Shia. Sometimes, he had no money, either. All he had was his guile and his genius, and a single-minded determination to maneuver the world's last standing superpower into removing Saddam from power.

That was no easy task. In the beginning, in the early 1990s, Saddam was seen to serve vital U.S. interests in the region. We abhorred the way he treated his own people, as his secret police murdered, maimed, gassed, tortured or falsely imprisoned more than a million Iraqis, mostly Shiites and Kurds.

But Saddam was anti-Communist, which mattered a lot to U.S. policymakers in the late 1970s and '80s. He also was a secular strongman who kept the anti-American fanatics in Iran from spreading their Islamic revolution beyond their borders. Saddam was a murderer, but he kept the lid on.

Chalabi set out to get the United States to redefine its national interests in the region. He did so by targeting the important centers of power in New York and Washington: government, the news media -- including CBS News -- and the nation's foreign policy establishment, beguiling reporters, politicians and analysts alike.

At the same time, he attacked the Achilles heel of U.S. foreign policy: its focus on securing U.S. interests and the oil fields of the Middle East while ignoring the atrocities of Saddam Hussein. U.S. strategy may have been effective, but it was difficult to swallow as images of Saddam's ruthless repression appeared in the nation's newspapers and television news reports with photos and eyewitness accounts, often procured by Chalabi and his political action committee, the Iraqi National Congress.

In time, Chalabi became a fixture on Capitol Hill and in 1998 he all but authored what became the Iraq Liberation Act, which made regime change in Iraq official U.S. policy. President Bill Clinton signed the bill into law, but ignored it. Chalabi, however, was patient.

On January 21, 2001, the day after George W. Bush's Inauguration, he attended a gathering in Chevy Chase, Maryland, just outside the nation's capital. It was at the two-story home of Richard Perle, a leading figure in the neoconservative movement, which advocated using American military power to promote democracy abroad. Among those present were Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Zalmay Khalilzad and John P. Hannah. Within a few months, they would all hold influential positions in the new administration - with Wolfowitz and Feith landing the number two and three positions at the Pentagon and Perle becoming a top adviser to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Khalilzad a special assistant to President Bush and ambassador at large for Iraqi exiles, and Hannah a national security adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney.

"Well, we have won," Perle beamed as he opened the meeting. "And now we have to get our policy objective adopted by the administration."

That policy objective was both simple and audacious: to get the new president to back Chalabi in his long quest to overthrow Saddam. So, from day two of the Bush presidency, the push for a new Iraq was on - and Ahmad Chalabi was smack in the middle of it.

It was a few months after that meeting that I first met Chalabi and began to appreciate how well wired he was inside the Bush administration. My CBS News camera crew and I followed him around from Washington, D.C., to New York as he campaigned for war. He was the anti-John Lennon of the time, pressing policymakers and think-tankers alike to give war a chance.

Chalabi couldn't have anticipated how the attacks of September 11, 2001, would accelerate his agenda. But once 9/11 happened, he and his allies in Congress and inside the Bush administration kicked into high gear, making the argument that the U.S. could not tolerate the risk of Saddam giving terrorists a weapon of mass destruction. The consequences would be catastrophic, they argued.

Of course we learned that Saddam had no operational relationship with al-Qaeda, but that point was obscured and obfuscated. Chalabi and his supporters also encouraged the idea that Saddam would be easy to remove, and Donald Rumsfeld and the Defense Department planned accordingly - with disastrous results. People may disagree about the decision to invade Iraq, but most agree its execution has created the vacuum that has given rise to what is today a splintering nation-state that provides safe-haven to ISIS.

In the end, Chalabi wasn't the cause of the war in Iraq. Senior Bush administration officials arrived in office itching to take out the dictator. Nor can he be blamed for the botched U.S. intelligence assessments used to justify the invasion, though the Iraqi National Congress was guilty of procuring and coaching defectors to tell tall tales of nonexistent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Ultimately, those failures lie with the C.I.A. and its sister agencies.

But Chalabi did serve as the crucial vehicle for selling the war to senior officials in the Bush administration, allowing them to believe what they already wanted to believe: that the U.S. could go into Iraq as liberators and leave quickly. And it was those assumptions that lie at the heart of what became an ill-conceived and disastrously executed military operation, one that will haunt U.S. policymakers for years to come. In short, he was the catalyst, a pivotal figure in why we went to war and how it went badly so quickly.

In 2004, a year after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Lesley Stahl pressed Chalabi about the defectors he had procured and presented to the U.S. government -- and one of them to 60 Minutes for an earlier report. These defectors had since been deemed fabricators, but in our interview Chalabi didn't budge. Just because inspectors had failed to find evidence of weapons of mass destruction "doesn't mean they don't exist," Chalabi told Stahl. As for a link between Saddam and al-Qaeda, Chalabi said: "there are connections . . . there are documents."

Ultimately, while Chalabi can't be blamed for doing whatever it took to depose Saddam, what is unforgiveable is that after the invasion, Chalabi went on to become emblematic of the greed and corruption of the new Iraqi elite, the new Shi'a ruling class that inherited the mantle of power from Saddam and his army of Sunni henchmen. Chalabi used his position to gain enormous wealth and, worse, to fan his countrymen's ancient Sunni-Shia sectarianism while doing Iran's bidding for his own political gain.

As for the people of Iraq, Chalabi's triumph has come at a great cost as their suffering continues and is, in many ways, worse than ever before.