Following up on an item from yesterday, it may seem like inside poll that former interim Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi has hired a powerhouse Republican lobbying firm with close ties to the White House, but the more details that emerge, the more interesting this story gets.
Christina Davidson reports today that Robert Blackwill, president of the Barbour, Griffith, & Rogers firm (BGR) and the former Iraq coordinator at the Bush White House, signed a contract with Allawi for $300,000. This will cover six months of “strategic counsel” for the former interim P.M., which will also apparently include Allawi’s “moderate Iraqi colleagues.”
So, how can Allawi afford $300,000 for six months of DC lobbying services?
Experts said Allawi does not have the resources to pay $50,000 a month plus expenses for Washington representation.
“He doesn’t have that kind of money,” said Bruce Reidel, who spent 25 years with the CIA and the National Security Council, covering the Middle East. “Somebody’s paying for it, and it’s not him.”
A former U.S. intelligence community Middle East expert who left the government in 2005 said that while the agency backed Allawi financially for many years, he doubted BGR’s bills would be paid with agency money.
“Obviously, if there were any trace of [CIA] funds into this sort of thing it would be illegal,” said Paul Pillar, the national intelligence officer for Near East and South Asia from 2002 until his retirement in 2005. “But I’d be extremely surprised if that had happened.”
I’d be a little surprised, too, but I can’t help but chuckle a little at the notion that the Bush administration would be swayed by whether or not something is “illegal.”
As it turns out, there are other funding possibilities here.
Ackerman notes an alternative.
[Allawi] may not need the agency’s cash. One member of his coterie is suspected of participating in what an Iraqi public-corruption judge calls “possibly the largest robbery in the world” — the theft of approximately $1 billion from the Iraqi treasury.
In mid-2004, Hazem Shaalan had it all: he had risen from being a small businessman in London before the war to becoming Ayad Allawi’s defense minister. (Shaalan had been a member of Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress, but the relationship between Shaalan and Chalabi became acrimonious, with the INC accusing Shaalan of being a Baathist spy.) The defense ministry was Allawi’s single biggest priority, as he owed his appointment — made jointly by the U.S. and the United Nations — to his promise of restoring stability to the insurgency-wracked country. Shaalan came through for him, fully backing the joint U.S.-Allawi decision to fight the Mahdi Army in the Shiite holy city of Najaf in August 2004.
But that wasn’t all Shaalan did at the defense ministry.
Shortly after the January 2005 elections left Allawi and Shaalan out of power, a wide-ranging audit of the defense ministry found nearly $1 billion missing. Iraq’s finance minister, Ali Allawi — Allawi’s cousin — discovered that Shaalan had taken practically the entire defense procurement budget from Iraq’s Central Bank and had little to show for it aside from obsolete Polish and Pakistani weaponry. A “charitable” accounting found that perhaps $200 million worth of usable equipment for the Iraqi Army resulted from the $1.3 billion fund.
What happened to the rest of the fund and other missing defense-ministry cash remains a mystery.
Isn’t international intrigue interesting?