Chalabi's road to victory?

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With only three months to go before L. Paul Bremer trades in his Iraqi proconsul baton for beach ware and a hard-earned vacation, the country's most controversial politician is already well positioned to become prime minister.

Ahmad Chalabi, the Pentagon's heartthrob and the State Department's and CIA's heartbreak, has taken the lead in a yearlong political marathon. Temporary constitutional arrangements are structured to give the prime minister more power than the president. The role of the president will be limited because his decisions will have to be ratified by two deputy presidents, or vice presidents. Key ministries, such as Defense and Interior, will take orders from the PM.

Mr. Chalabi holds the ultimate weapons -- several dozen tons of documents and individual files seized by his Iraqi National Congress (INC) from Saddam Hussein's secret security apparatus. Coupled with his position as head of the de-Ba'athification commission, Mr. Chalabi, barely a year since he returned to his homeland after 45 years of exile, has emerged as the power behind a vacant throne.

He also appears to have impressive amounts of cash at his disposal and a say in which companies get the nod for some of the $18.4 billion earmarked for reconstruction.

One company executive who asked that both his and the company's name be withheld said, "The commission was steep even by Middle Eastern standards."

Mr. Chalabi is still on the Defense Intelligence Agency's budget for a secret $340,000 monthly stipend. The $40 million the INC received since 1994 from the U.S. also covered the expenses of Iraqi military defectors' stories about weapons of mass destruction and the Iraqi regime's links with al Qaeda -- which provided President Bush a casus belli for the war on Iraq.

When Mr. Chalabi established the Petra Bank in Amman, Jordan, in the 1980s, he favored small loans to military officers, noncommissioned officers, royal guards and intelligence officers. He developed a close rapport with then Crown Price Hassan who borrowed a total of $20 million.

After Petra went belly up with a loss of $300 million at the decade's end, Mr. Chalabi escaped to Syria in a car supplied by Hassan -- minutes ahead of the officers who had come to arrest him for embezzling his own bank. The Petra fiasco debacle left him sufficient funds to launch INC a few days later.

Today, the mathematician, trained at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says he has the documents that will prove he was framed by two Husseins -- Saddam and the late king of Jordan -- who wanted to end his anti-Iraqi activities. Jordan used to get most of its oil needs from Iraq free or heavily discounted, which explains why King Hussein declined to join the anti-Iraq coalition in the first Gulf war.

Sentenced in Jordan, in absentia, to 22 years hard labor for massive bank fraud, Mr. Chalabi hints he also has incriminating evidence of a close "subsidiary" relationship between Jordan's King Abdullah and Saddam's depraved, sadistic elder son Uday, killed last year in a shootout with U.S. troops.