Brooke: "Going to war is not unknown in my family" © Forrest Stuart MacCormack

Francis Brooke was still asleep in Baghdad's Mansour neighborhood when one of his houseboys came running in, shouting about a commotion on the street outside. It was 10:30 on a Thursday morning, and Brooke had spent the previous night with Ahmad Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress. The two men had eaten a late dinner--a heaping platter of rice accompanied by roasted lamb, tomatoes, eggplant, and okra--before retiring to Chalabi's study to talk about the country's political future. The sun was already rising by the time Brooke left his friend's townhouse, crossed the street, and crawled into his own bed.

Chalabi owed his sandy-haired neighbor a lot. Brooke '83 had spent more than a decade promoting the legitimacy of Iraq's political dissidents, many of whom had fled the country after a 1958 military coup. Until recently, Chalabi had been considered the most promising of those dissidents--a likely successor to Saddam Hussein--by neoconservatives like Vice President Dick Cheney and former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. A U.S.-educated former banker, he had won allies within the Bush administration with his Western style, his support for Israel, and his prediction that Saddam could easily be toppled. Even after Chalabi fell out of favor, his American consultant Brooke maintained relationships with key officials like John Hannah '84, Cheney's national security adviser. "I was on the phone twice a day with the White House," Brooke says.

So when the houseboy barged into his bedroom in May 2004, "I assumed it was a screw-up," Brooke says. Leaving his pistol under the pillow, Brooke threw on some flip-flops and ran outside in his Duke basketball shorts and a T-shirt in time to witness a raid on Chalabi's house. With U.S. soldiers and contractors standing by, Iraqi police had swooped inside and rousted Chalabi from his bed. "The whole thing was just complete confusion," Brooke recalls. "I started screaming, 'Who's the commanding officer?'" Someone directed Brooke to a young American soldier. "The guy said, 'Hold on, sir, I'm on the horn to higher.' Then he disappeared with his Humvee, never to reappear again."

By morning's end, police had raided not only Chalabi's residence but also two offices of the Iraqi National Congress (INC). They pulled cables from walls and seized documents, computers, and rifles. According to members of Chalabi's staff, some of the contractors looted the politician's refrigerator, helping themselves to baklava and diet soda. Afterward, U.S. and Iraqi officials said the police were hunting down fifteen INC associates accused of kidnapping, theft, and torture. Chalabi himself was accused of passing U.S. intelligence secrets to Iran, a charge he vigorously denied.

Chalabi insisted he was being punished for criticizing the U.S.-led occupation of his country, particularly the slow transition to Iraqi self-rule and the decision to restore members of Saddam's Ba'ath Party to power. To disseminate that message, Brooke booked him on the next Sunday's talk shows. "I have become a person who is calling for complete sovereignty in Iraq," Chalabi told ABC's George Stephanopoulos during a live hookup from Baghdad. "I refuse to have Iraq become a state of terror run by covert action agencies under diplomatic cover. That is the reason that all this is happening."

Brooke spent the next two weeks in Baghdad, working with Chalabi on the transition to the new government. Then he returned to Washington, where his family lives. In the taxi back from Dulles Airport, he called his wife, Sharon Hogan Brooke '83. She broke the news: London's Sunday Telegraph had just published an article saying that a Baghdad judge had ordered his arrest. "The warrant is for interfering with the work of the Iraqi police in their legitimate business," Judge Zuhair Al-Maliky told the British newspaper. That day, Brooke protested his innocence to The Washington Post, saying he hoped for "a fair venue to defend myself." Privately, he found the notion of mounting a legal defense in Iraq unsettling: "They are a sovereign court. They were in the middle of [the abuses at] Abu Ghraib. That's where I would have gone if I had been found guilty."

The news of his impending arrest was an unusually public moment for Brooke. Since he first joined the effort to depose Saddam Hussein in 1991, the lanky Duke graduate has positioned himself squarely behind the scenes. He has lobbied for key foreign-policy legislation, helped broker the relationship between Chalabi and U.S. officials, and even commanded a battalion of Iraqi soldiers, all without calling attention to himself. A native Virginian descended from a prominent family of politicians and intellectuals ("From my point of view, my life begins many hundreds of years before I was born."), Brooke describes his work in terms of both religious calling and noblesse oblige. "Coming from a privileged enough background that I've had time to ruminate on existence, I ask, 'Why are we here?' " he says. "If you are Christian, the answer is clear: The golden rule is to love God above all things, and to serve others as you'd serve yourself."

For Brooke, this has meant helping Iraq make the switch from dictatorship to democracy. He considers Chalabi the politician most capable of spearheading that transition. It's a controversial viewpoint, to put it mildly: Chalabi has faced criticism by everyone from former Secretary of State Colin Powell to Senator Hillary Clinton, and the Iraqi's fellow citizens eye him with suspicion. "He is at his best working behind closed doors with a very small constituency of politicians," says Toby Dodge, a fellow at London's International Institute for Strategic Studies. "He's at his worst when he has to get democratic support, which he can't do."

On Capitol Hill, many of Brooke's fellow Democrats go further, calling Chalabi a shadowy opportunist who supplied the U.S. with faulty intelligence during the buildup to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. "Chalabi's crimes cannot go unanswered," Representative George Miller, a California Democrat, said on the House floor last November, calling for the Iraqi's arrest and interrogation. "Our idea of democracy is not propping up a bank swindler, kidnapper, and extortionist."

Brooke considers such rhetoric partisan and unfounded. He calls Chalabi a "fine man" whose values were forged as a Ph.D. candidate in mathematics at the University of Chicago during the social upheavals of the 1960s. "He loves the United States," Brooke says of his Baghdad neighbor. "He thinks the model by which it allows its people to express their political will is a good example for Iraq."

Brooke first met Chalabi in 1991. He had graduated from Duke eight years earlier with a major in Medieval and Renaissance studies. After college, he says, "most of my friends went off to Wall Street and turned into arbitrage managers. They got estates on Fire Island and townhouses on the Upper East Side. That was not my goal." Instead, he went into politics, working for Democratic Senate candidate Hamilton Jordan and helping the beer industry fight a beverage tax he calls regressive.

Finally, after the first Gulf War, Brooke landed a job with a public-relations firm headed by John Rendon, former executive director of the Democratic National Committee. His assignment was to mount a political offensive against Saddam Hussein. Rendon offered a salary of more than $200,000 a year, heady money for a thirty-year-old who hadn't even paid attention to the war. Brooke says his boss was "vague" about naming the client. "He intimated it was the Kuwaiti government, but he never said so directly." When Brooke called his father, a former military intelligence officer, the older man was more direct. "That's a CIA job," he correctly told his son. "You take it if you want it."

Brooke took it. Working from London, he spent his first month reading up on Iraq's recent history. "It became clear to me that the United States had made a grave mistake by not finishing the job the first time," he says. "President Bush the First had made a speech on Voice of America encouraging the people of Iraq to rise up against their dictatorship, and the Iraqi people had taken him at his word. Most of Iraq had gone completely out of control. The United States not only didn't support the rebellion--they actively inhibited its success. From a moral point of view, it was horrible." In his research, Brooke learned that the CIA had supported Iraq's Ba'ath Party in the 1950s and Sixties as an antidote to communism, paving the way for Saddam Hussein's ascension.