Part 2: End of ‘golden age’ in Iraq

Aram Roston Investigative producer

“We have undertaken to liberate the beloved homeland,” announced the voice on the radio through the static one early morning in Baghdad in 1958. The calendar showed it was July 14, Bastille Day, the anniversary of the start of the French Revolution. Iraqis had slept on their rooftops to avoid the summer heat, and now, all over the city, people began to stumble out into the street. The radio crackled on, repeating a lengthy message. “We have undertaken to liberate the beloved homeland from the corrupt crew that imperialism installed. Power shall be entrusted to a government emanating from you and inspired by you.”

In the palace, the Crown Prince, the power behind the throne, got out of bed and turned on the radio to hear the news of his downfall, and then rushed out to surrender. The story goes that when the royals gathered in the courtyard, an Iraqi army captain slaughtered them, riddling their bodies with machine-gun fire in one long-sustained burst.

It was still the early hours of the morning when members of the wealthy Chalabi family, at their homes in the Baghdad neighborhood of Adhamiya, learned of the coup. Three majestic adjacent homes all belonged to the Chalabis, a close-knit clan. The Chalabis gathered hurriedly to consult on what to do in this new and sudden crisis. The children had slept on the roofs too, under the Baghdad sky, and now they watched the adults as they debated in fright. Children can sometimes sense these things, and the children there had a foreboding that this day was different, that it symbolized an ending of things as they had known them. The grown-ups quickly reached their decision, and then they acted.

Young Ahmad Chalabi, thirteen years old, black-haired and serious, was herded with his mother and the others into a convoy of big American sedans to flee their mansion. Ahmad left behind the basketball hoop he had helped to set up. He left behind the ping-pong table, which slid behind a specially constructed wall. Abandoned as well, just for a time that day, were the pet parrots in the massive cage — almost as big as an aviary — squawking away in the excitement. The brightly colored birds were just one of the delightful and distinctive things in their stately home that the Chalabis were leaving behind. The family split up. Some of the men, joined by the foreign minister of the country, Fadhil al-Jamali, and by Chalabi’s much older brother Rushdie Chalabi, fled from town to hide. The rest, including Ahmad and his mother and several siblings and nephews and cousins, drove to Khadimiya, back then just a suburb just north of Baghdad. Khadimiya, a Shiite stronghold, had been the Chalabi family’s main base going back for generations. In fact, Medina Abdul Hadi was an adjacent enclave named for Ahmad’s father. Luckily, on this day Ahmad’s father, Abdul Hadi Chalabi, was out of town; he was in Tehran when the revolution began.

But according to family lore, the Chalabis did not even venture into their compound in Khadimiya, called Seef, which had been a splendid place to play and hunt and celebrate in a well-tended orchard — a wonderland where Iraq’s royalty and elite held their parties and festivities. No, the family didn’t even go there; instead they crowded into the home of an ally in Khadimiya. They needed somewhere to hide from the soldiers and mobs. While the rest of Iraq was celebrating the bloody revolution, the Chalabis were targets, clustered in their host’s estate for shelter.

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Only on msnbc.com The Man Who Pushed America to War Read excerpts of Aram Roston's book on Ahmad Chalabi: Part 1: Iraq's master manipulator Part 2: ‘Golden age’ for young Chalabi Part 3: Collapse of a business empire Part 4: Saddam's airline hijacking school Part 5: Chalabi's Iran connection

Born October 30, 1944, toward the end of World War II, when the British still quietly pulled the strings in Iraq, Ahmad Chalabi was his parents’ ninth and final child. He was born nine years after his next oldest brother, Hazem, and their mother, Bibi, used to joke occasionally that Ahmad was a “mistake,” an “accident.” Yet she doted on her youngest son. And since some of his older brothers were old enough to be his father, it was as if he had a half-dozen parents tending to him. The Chalabis were a leading Shiite merchant family, entwined with the monarchist government of Iraq. Before the monarchy they had allied themselves with the British occupiers and before that with their Turkish overlords. In the context of the Middle East, they had converted to Shiism relatively recently. Family members say that Ahmad’s great-great-grandfather was a Sunni who adopted the Shiite faith. Perhaps the zeal of the convert impressed itself on his offspring, because they became pillars of the Iraqi Shiite community.

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