....in 1991 he took a public-relations job with an American firm in London called the Rendon Group, which described its specialty as “perception management.” The company had been founded by John Rendon, a former executive director of the Democratic National Committee. It didn’t take long for Brooke to realize that the project he was assigned at Rendon was funded by the C.I.A. Brooke, who at the time was thirty years old, said that he was paid twenty-two thousand dollars a month.

Mayer explains the CIA backing of Chalabi, the Jordan affair, Chalabi's turning on the CIA, Chalabi and Brookes' hand in creating the 1998 Iraqi Liberation Act ahd how Chalabi's information became propoganda. She moves on to corruption in Baghdad, and Chalabi's endorsement of the Shiite faction in Iraq.

....at a moment when President Bush was struggling with multiple political burdens, Chalabi had become an inconvenient friend. “We got between a President and his reëlection,” Brooke, who was in Baghdad last week with Chalabi, said. Tamara Chalabi told me that her father’s problems could be traced to the fact that “a foreigner, and an Arab, had beaten the Administration at their own game, in their own back yard.”

As to Chalabi's future, don't count him out:

Peter Galbraith said, “Most likely, his legacy is that he is the Moses of Iraq: he got to see the Promised Land, but not to taste the fruit.” Yet the raid on his home may have given him an opportunity to recast himself once again, now as a dissenting voice on American policy in Iraq. “He’s extremely shrewd politically,” Danielle Pletka said. “His obit has been written many times before, and he keeps clawing his way out of the grave and coming back.”

Several bloggers have commented on Mayer's article--Billmon, Digby, and Steve Soto at Left Coaster. [links via Memeorandum]