The United States and Iraq are currently engaged in “tense” negotiations regarding the future of the U.S. military presence in Iraq after the U.N. mandate expires at the end of the year. Just yesterday, the Iraqi Cabinet proposed changes that the U.S. has yet to approve.

But now, CQ’s Jeff Stein reports that according to NBC investigative reporter Aram Roston, former Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi — the White House’s favorite Iraqi in the run-up to the Iraq war — has been helping the Iranians stand in the way of the agreement:

Roston calls Chalabi a “key figure” in Iranian efforts to scuttle the status-of-forces agreement that is under fierce negotiation between Baghdad and Washington.

“He is seen more and more by the U.S. as a foreign agent, an Iranian agent,” Roston told me by telephone from Mexico, where he is vacationing. What Chalabi says is “equated” with the Iranian position on the status-of-forces agreement, Roston said, which it opposes.

Chalabi told Iran’s state media last month that the U.S. wants secret military bases in Iraq and Stein notes that yesterday, a Shiite newspaper in Baghdad featured his opposition to the security agreement. In fact, last May, U.S. officials cut off all contact with Chalabi because of “unauthorized” contacts with the Iranian government.

But Chalabi’s renewed meddling puts a spotlight on the fact that he has palled around with some of John McCain’s most senior campaign advisers:

–Randy Scheunamann, top foreign policy adviser: As president of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq before the Iraq invasion, Schuenamann promoted Chalabi as the “new Iraqi Ataturk,” and his Iraqi National Congress (INC) group as a “government in exile.”

–Charlie Black, top political adviser: Black and his lobbying firm BKSH and Associates represented Chalabi and the INC, giving Chalabi access to high-powered officials in Washington.

Just last week, McCain told a local New Hampshire reporter that “we just achieved” a security agreement with the Iraqis, while at the same time, Chalabi — whom McCain once called “a patriot” with Iraq’s “best interests at heart” — was undermining the deal. Indeed, as Roston observed, Chalabi “is a genius at staying relevant.”

NBC News reports “that as of this week American military and civilian officials have cut off all contact with controversial Iraqi politician Ahmad Chalabi” due to “‘unauthorized’ contacts with Iran’s government, an allegation Chalabi denies.” Chalabi has been a darling of the administration’s neocons, drumming up reports of WMDs during the lead-up to the Iraq war and, more recently, promoting the surge. As recently as October, administration officials were promoting Chalabi as “a central figure in the latest U.S. strategy” and “an important part of the process” in Iraq.

In his new book, former CIA Director George Tenet reveals that Vice President Cheney and Pentagon officials pressed for the installation of an Iraqi government led by Ahmed Chalabi, an exile who provided bad information on Iraq’s supposed weapons programs.

Tenet says Cheney and company broke with the recommendations of the State Department, CIA, and the National Security Council, who “favored a more inclusive and transparent approach, in which Iraqis representing the many tribes, sects, and interest groups in the country would be brought together to consult and put together some sort of rough constituent assembly that might then select an advisory council and a group of ministers to govern the country.” Tenet writes:

Rather than risking an open-ended political process that Americans could influence but not control, they wanted to be able to limit the Iraqis’ power and handpick those Iraqis who would participate. … You had the impression that some Office of the Vice President and DOD reps were writing Chalabi’s name over and over again in their notes, like schoolgirls with their first crush.

The plan never was implemented, according to Tenet, because the administration couldn’t reach a consensus on Chalabi. Yet Tenet highlights the episode as deeply revelatory of how neoconservatives planned to “help Iraq achieve democracy and freedom“:

The vice president himself summed up the dilemma: The choice, he said, was between “control and legitimacy.” [Undersecretary of Defense] Doug Feith clearly stated his belief that it would not be necessary for the Iraqi exiles to legitimize themselves: “We can legitimize them,” he said, through our economic assistance and the good governance the U.S. would provide. They never understood that, fundamentally, political control depends on the consent of the governed.

Tenet wrote that by early 2004 President Bush asked Condoleezza Rice at a White House meeting to stop using Chalabi for intelligence. “I want Chalabi off the payroll,” Tenet quotes Bush as saying. In a subsequent meeting, the Defense Intelligence Agency said it was paying Chalabi’s organization $350,000 a month to provide information. “Somehow the president’s direction to pull the plug on the arrangement continued to be ignored,” Tenet wrote. Today, Chalabi oversees the implementation of the escalation strategy on the Iraqi end.

The Wall Street Journal reports this morning that Ahmed Chalabi, the darling of neoconservatives in the lead-up to the Iraq war, has been given a prominent position to oversee the implementation of the escalation strategy on the Iraqi end:

In his latest remarkable political reincarnation, onetime U.S. favorite Ahmed Chalabi has secured a position inside the Iraqi government that could help determine whether the Bush administration’s new push to secure Baghdad succeeds. …

Chalabi will serve as an intermediary between Baghdad residents and the Iraqi and U.S. security forces mounting an aggressive counterinsurgency campaign across the city. The position is meant to help Iraqis arrange reimbursement for damage to their cars and homes caused by the security sweeps in the hope of maintaining public support for the strategy.

Chalabi, who once famously said of his Iraq involvement, “we are heroes in error,” has had a sordid history with the United States. A review of Chalabi’s nefarious activities:

PENTAGON FUNDED CHALABI TO PROVIDE RATIONALE FOR WAR: The Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency paid the INC $335,000 a month in the lead-up to the Iraq war to gather intelligence. In all, the Bush White House has given the INC at least $39 million over the past 5 years. [IPS, 5/23/04; New Yorker, 6/7/04]

CHALABI’S IRAQI NATIONAL CONGRESS WAS MAJOR SOURCE OF DATA FOR PENTAGON OFFICE OF SPECIAL PLANS: According to a report in the New Yorker, analysts based in the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans “relied on data gathered by other intelligence agencies and also on information provided by the Iraqi National Congress, or I.N.C., the exile group headed by Ahmad Chalabi.” [New Yorker, 5/12/03]

CHALABI WAS SOURCE FOR FALSE JUDY MILLER STORIES: Chalabi was the source for discredited news stories about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction which were penned by New York Times reporter Judith Miller. In 2001, Miller wrote a front-page story about claims that Saddam had twenty secret WMD sites hidden in Iraq. The information turned out to be bogus. [New York Times, 2/26/04; The New Yorker, 6/7/04]

CHALABI ACCUSED OF PASSING U.S. SECRETS TO IRAN: In June 2004, Chalabi came under investigation for allegations that he passed secret intelligence to Iran. Chalabi was accused of telling the Iranian government that the U.S. had broken the code it used for secret communications. [Washington Post, 6/3/04; WSJ, 11/7/05]

More here.

Commenting on Chalabi’s political resurgence, a senior American official told the WSJ: “The question is whether he is really doing this to help, or whether he’s trying to build himself a new political base in Baghdad or carry water for the Shiites. And we simply don’t know the answer to that yet.”