As an Update

In my post earlier this morning regarding the latest Baghdad car bomb, I referred to Allawi as a former CIA agent. In fact, his ties to the CIA are well known. This story in the NY Sun (which I came across by way of Laura Rozen's excellent blog) adds some furhter clarity to our picture of Allawi and his relations.

The decision to cut salaries also coincided with the CIA’s decision to end its stipend to Dr. Allawi’s organization, which stopped subsidizing the Iraqi National Accord in August of last year. Later that summer,the Wifaq relocated its headquarters in Baghdad from the building that housed the Iraq Survey Group, the umbrella of American intelligence agencies ostensibly analyzing information on the insurgency and weapons of mass destruction, to an old Ba’ath Party training academy bordering Baghdad’s largest public park. Within three months of the April communiqué, five members of Dr. Allawi’s inner circle resigned from the organization in a private memorandum issued on July 23, 2003....

...Unlike Mr. Chalabi, who surrounded himself in opposition with humanrights figures such as Kanan Makiya and Shiite exiles, Dr. Allawi’s exile base came from former members of the Ba’ath Party, the national socialist political party which to this day still controls Syrian politics and was the party of Saddam Hussein. Dr. Mu’allah boasts of having been one of the founders of Iraq’s Ba’ath party. As a medical doctor, he operated on Saddam Hussein in 1958 when he suffered a leg injury in a failed political assassination, and says he knew the ideological founder of the Ba’ath party, Michel Aflaq, quite well in the early years.

There's more. Very informative and illustrative. Give it a read.