Le Monde — At first sight, the appointment of Ayad Allawi, 58, as interim prime minister of Iraq in May could not have been much to the liking of the country's two puppet-masters of the past 15 months, the United States and Britain. What counted against Allawi, a former hard-line Ba'athist, were his 32 years of exile outside Iraq, his murky reputation as a businessman, his political party, which had no grassroots backing, and above all his poor record as an MI6 and CIA agent. It was Allawi who early last year provided the British secret service with the information that President Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction that could become "operational within 45 minutes" - information that almost cost the Tony Blair his job.
As for the CIA, in 1996 it suffered the greatest fiasco in its history, greater even than the Bay of Pigs, according to a book, Saddam Hussein: an American Obsession, by Patrick and Andrew Cockburn. More of which anon.
Dr Haifa al-Azzawi knew Allawi well in his youth: "No one who studied medicine in Baghdad in the 60s could have forgotten that Ba'athist bully boy. He walked around the campus with a pistol in his belt and chased women students. His medical degree is bogus. The Ba'ath party gave it to him before sending him off to London, with a World Health Organisation scholarship grant, in theory to complete his studies, but in fact to spy on Iraqi students abroad."
At the end of the 60s, Allawi was European president of the Association of Iraqi Students Abroad. It was a job that allowed him to travel, get to know other young Arab nationalists and track down "traitors" who, according to al Azzawi, were "denounced and punished", sometimes summarily.
Allawi broke officially with Saddam in 1971. Like most young people in the Middle East at that time, he was an Arab socialist and nationalist. Ideological "deviations" and the take-over of the party by Saddam and his Tikrit clan were not to his liking. He went into exile, first in Lebanon and then in London. What he did thereafter is a mystery. He has declined to be interviewed by Le Monde. None of the interviews he has given throws light on that period.
According to a thumbnail biography put out by the coalition in Baghdad, he got his master's degree in medicine in 1976 and his doctorate three years later. He also worked as a consultant for the WHO and the United Nations Development Programme. Was he, as Patrick and Andrew Cockbourn claim, also secretly working for the Ba'ath party? Or was he already working as a double agent for MI6?
On February 4, 1978, three men broke into his London house and hit him with an axe behind the head, on the chest and on the thigh. The final blow almost severed his leg completely. His would-be murderers left him for dead, but he survived, resurfacing a year later. His family say they received anonymous threats. Allawi, who bears no scars and walks without the slightest limp, saw that as proof that his attackers were Saddam's henchmen, even though they were never identified.
Some have found the circumstances of the attack fishy. But Professor Sadoun al-Duleimi, who returned to Iraq from exile in 2003 to run the Iraq Centre for Research and Strategic Studies, does not question the official version. "Allawi was an important figure in the Ba'ath party. He knew a lot of things and passed them on to MI6. That's why agents from the Mukhabarat, the secret police, were ordered to kill him." However that may be, the future helmsman of the US's grand plan for democracy in Iraq then dropped out of the news. During the Iran-Iraq war (1980-88) Allawi, who by then had a British passport, spent most of his time shuttling between Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
The son of a doctor who was health minister when the king of Iraq was deposed in 1958 and the grandson of a leading Iraqi figure who took part in the negotiations that gave the former Mesopotamia its independence in 1932, Allawi has politics in his blood. He never completely severed his ties with Ba'athist army and intelligence officers who, like him, felt that Saddam was leading the country to disaster.
In 1980, with the help of the Saudi secret service, Allawi launched Radio Free Iraq, which broadcast out of Jeddah. It had little impact but enabled him to stay in the swim. At the same time, he became increasingly active in business (reportedly in the oil sector) and built up a considerable fortune.
In 1991, when Saddam was kicked out of Kuwait by the Americans and his regime looked shakier than ever, Allawi set up Al-Wifaq, or Iraqi National Accord (INA), whose aim was to enable him to jockey for position in the apparently imminent post-Saddam period. But Saddam hung on to power.
The following year, under pressure from the Saudis and their American and British allies, INA teamed up with a rival organisation, the Iraqi National Congress (INC), led by Ahmad Chalabi. Allawi knew him well: he was his cousin by marriage.
Both men belonged to the most secular wing of Iraqi Shi'ism but heartily detested each other. Chalabi's extremely rich family had left Iraq with their fortune as soon as the king was deposed. In 1992 Chalabi was charged with banking fraud in Jordan and sentenced in his absence to 22 years in prison. The two cousins' tactical alliance did not survive for long.
Chalabi was fundamentally anti-Ba'athist. He demonstrated that in 2003 when he pressed the Americans to make the biggest tactical blunder of their occupation of Iraq: an out-and-out de-Ba'athisation campaign and the dissolution of the army and the administration. Allawi strove on the contrary to recruit his former comrades in arms and did everything he could to oppose the suicidal policy of mass purges implemented by the American proconsul, Paul Bremer.
Back in October 1995 Chalabi had persuaded his American masters to finance and arm an Iraqi people's uprising based in Kurdistan. Allawi did not believe for one moment that Chalabi had any chance of success. He was right. It was a bloody debacle.
Four months later, after getting the go-ahead from President Bill Clinton, who was already campaigning for his re-election, the CIA prepared a second coup against Saddam. This time Allawi was given his chance. According to Samuel Berger, Clinton's security adviser, Allawi had succeeded, unlike Chalabi, in gaining the confidence of Arab powers in the region, was well considered by those who mounted the operation, and seemed less interested in self-aggrandisement than his cousin. By mid-January 1996 the operation was up and running. The CIA came up with $6m, as did Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Jordan provided the venture's rear base. The coup would be carried out by the army.
Allawi flattered himself that he had the support of several dozen high-ranking officers. This may be true, but we shall never know for certain. A month before the end of June, when the operation was due to take place, Allawi, who wanted to put down his markers, told the -Washington Post that a secret operation against Saddam was imminent. No one believed him except Saddam, who had already captured one of Allawi's envoys in Iraq - and persuaded him to talk. On June 20 the arrests began. Within 10 days some 30 disloyal generals were executed; 120 others were arrested and tortured. In all, almost 800 people are believed to have lost their lives in Saddam's bloody purge. The coup attempt was a fiasco, but no Americans died and it was swept under the carpet.
In July 2003 Allawi was appointed head of the security committee of the now defunct Iraqi Governing Council set up by Bremer. In the end, "for want of someone better", the mandarins in the US state department put their money on Allawi: on May 27 he was appointed prime minister of the interim government, to the annoyance of the UN and the French - whom Allawi despises.
Does he have a chance at the national elections scheduled for next January? "With him as PM, it's rather as if the CIA had been wedded to our country," says a hard-boiled local commentator. "But given the present chaos, where the absolute priority must be a return to law and order, Allawi is probably the best of a bad bunch. He's a Shia without being devout, and pro-Sunni while not a Sunni himself. He gets on well with the Americans, the British, the Saudis and all the regimes around us.
"The exception could be Iran, though the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani [an Iranian] has lent him timid support. In short, he's someone who has the advantage of arousing a roughly equal degree of mistrust in every camp. That could work in his favour."
A European diplomat remarks: "It has to be admitted that the way he elaborated his strategy for taking over power, first by infiltrating the remnants of the secret service and putting it back on its feet, and secondly by winning the support of former Sunni generals, was smart. It was an old-fashioned strategy that has proved its worth in the past."
Is Allawi the "Iraqi democrat" trumpeted by the White House? "Come on!" snorts Qais el-Azzawi, editor-in-chief of the socialist daily, Al-Hayat Al-Jaridah. "He's a former Mukharabat officer. In the newsroom he's known as 'Saddam without a moustache'."
Hazem Abdel Hamid an-Nueimi, a political sciences researcher at Baghdad University, says: "Of course he's a democrat - an Arab-style democrat. Or an Egyptian-style or Algerian-style democrat, if you prefer . . ."
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