Tabassum Zakaria, Reuters

WASHINGTON, 24 May 2004 — Ahmad Chalabi, once a favored Iraqi exile of the Bush administration, yesterday denied accusations that he passed along US secrets to Iran and challenged the CIA director to a duel before Congress.

Some US government officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, have accused Chalabi of passing along US intelligence to Iran, which the United States considers to be part of an “axis of evil.”

“It’s not true. It’s a false charge,” Chalabi said on ABC’s “This Week” television program. “It’s a smear.”

Iraqi police and US troops last week raided the Baghdad headquarters of Chalabi, a council member. Chalabi said the CIA, which had viewed his group with skepticism for years, was trying to discredit him.

“Let Mr. Tenet come to Congress and I’m prepared to come there and lay out all the facts and all the documents that we have and let Congress decide whether this is true or whether they are being misled by George Tenet,” Chalabi said referring to the CIA director.

Chalabi denied that US officials shared classified information with him. “We shared classified information with them. They gave us no classified information at any time,” he told ABC.

Chalabi said he believed the Bush administration had turned on him because he opposed the US-led occupation. “I have become a person who is calling for complete sovereignty in Iraq,” he said.

Chalabi said Americans were initially greeted as liberators after toppling Saddam Hussein, but the occupation of Iraq has been a failure. “They did not listen on occupation, they did not listen that they should not do occupation because they would lose the moral high ground. And they did that and the trouble started then,” he said.

Chalabi also deflected criticism that he misled the US government before the war by introducing defectors who made a strong case that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, the main justification given by the Bush administration for launching the invasion against Iraq. No stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction have been found.

“We gave no information about weapons of mass destruction, we introduced the US government agencies to defectors at the request of the US government agencies — three defectors,” Chalabi told ABC.

“It was up to them to analyze this (information), and the responsibility for reporting to the president after analyzing the information is not mine,” he said.