No wonder Ayad Allawi thinks he can get the Bush administration to propel him back to power in Iraq. The two men see eye to eye on the public's right to see into their operations.

Asked by Mark Hosenball and Michael Isikoff of Newsweek to disclose who's funding his $300,000-over-six-month lobbying effort by GOP firm Barbour, Griffith and Rogers, Allawi said:

“Of course not. They may be killed by the Iranians, they may be killed by the sectarian people … These are details I am not interested in answering.”

Shades of Mike McConnell's statement that "some Americans are going to die" because of the public Congressional debate over revising FISA!

Only Allawi's not alone. After Allawi's comment on CNN Sunday that he's getting funded by unnamed "supporters," Justice Department officials told BGR that it needed to be more forthcoming about who's paying Allawi's legal bills. BGR tells the magazine that it intends to fully comply with its legal obligations, but that may not mean much for actual disclosure. The firm has the option of changing its listed client from Allawi to his political party, the Iraqi National Accord: "Under the law, lobbying firms are usually permitted to list foreign political parties as their clients without identifying the financial sponsors of those parties."

Yesterday we raised an eyebrow at Ayad Allawi's Sunday statement that he's "not party to the exact amount" of his lucrative lobbying contract with GOP power-firm Barbour Griffith Rogers. Now, Christina Davidson of IraqSlogger, who broke the story in the first place, adds an interesting wrinkle: If Allawi is, as he said on Sunday, getting his money from an anonymous "supporter," he's legally obligated to disclose his benefactor's identity.

Watching Allawi's interview with Wolf Blitzer, it seems that Allawi only mentioned his patron as a way of dispensing with a distraction from his core message that he has a "six-point plan" to save Iraq. But that admission comes with a host of legal complications, Davidson writes, if Allawi and BGR want to stay on the right side of the Foreign Assets Registration Act.

FARA requires persons representing foreign principals in a political or quasi-political capacity to publicly disclose their relationship, as well as activities, receipts and disbursements in support of activities on behalf of that principal.

In filing papers with the Department of Justice, required for compliance with FARA, BGR's Dan Murphy registered Allawi as the sole foreign principal the firm would be representing, checking of the appropriate box to confirm that he was not being “financed by a foreign government, foreign political party, or other foreign principal.” If an Iraqi is indeed paying for Allawi’s US activities, BGR is required by law to disclose the identity of the financier.

Looks like we might be step closer to learning where Allawi's money is coming from -- whether from former Defense Minister (and probable crook) Hazem Shaalan; from Mashal Nawab, who paid for Allawi's last lobbying contract in Washington; or someone else.

Last week, after IraqSlogger's Christina Davidson broke the news that Iyad Allawi has hired a GOP lobbying powerhouse to persuade the U.S. to back his efforts at becoming Iraqi prime minister again, we took a look at which other Iraqis have taken out Washington-based representation.

What we found was an imbalance: Allawi and the Kurds have taken out the lion's share of Iraq lobbying contracts, while the leading Sunni organizations -- the Iraqi Islamic Party and the broader coalition of which it's a member, the Tawafuq -- have comparatively modest arrangements. The "lobbyist" for the Tawafuq, in fact, told us that he had stopped doing any work on his informal contract, which he had taken on a "volunteer basis." That's just as well: the Tawafuq's rep, Mohammed Alomary, is based in Michigan, a far cry from the corridors of power.

Now, we've just learned that the Iraqi Islamic Party canceled its contract months ago with the Focus on Advocacy & Advancement of International Relations.

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It's not just Barbour Griffith & Rogers, and it's not just Ayad Allawi. Ten different U.S. firms are registered through the Department of Justice's Foreign Agents Registration Act database as having active contracts with various Iraqi factions.

BGR isn't even making most of its Iraq-related money off Allawi: for the six-month period between January 1 and May 31, the Kurdistan Regional Government -- the political entity ruling the three Kurdish provinces of Iraq -- paid the firm $381,487.71 for its various services, which, from its mandatory reporting, includes a lot of phone calls to BRG President Bob Blackwill's old friend at the National Security Council, Meghan O'Sullivan.

A BGR lobbyist described as the point person on the Iraq contract, Loren Monroe, did not return TPMmuckraker's phone calls.

BGR is by a large margin the powerhouse firm representing Iraqi clients. Holding a contract that will be worth $100,000 come September 9 is the much smaller Focus on Advocacy and Advancement of International Relations, run by a certain Muthanna al-Hanooti out of Dearborn and Washington D.C. Since September 13, 2006, Hanooti has represented the Iraqi Islamic Party, the largest constituent part of the larger Sunni parliamentary bloc, known as the Tawafuq. In its filing, the IIP lists its "suggestions for how to make Iraq a success story for democracy" -- which include not arbitrarily detaining Sunnis and negotiating with "the Iraqi Armed Resistance (not foreign fighters)" -- but the IIP is further away from power than ever. Last week, Nouri al-Maliki unveiled a new governing coalition that left the IIP, the rest of the Tawafuq and another Sunni faction in the cold. Attempts to contact Hanooti were unsuccessful.

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Alleged billion dollar thief Hazem Shaalan isn't Ayad Allawi's only infamous friend. Allawi is also a close ally of the head of Iraq's largest intelligence service -- a man who takes his billions from Washington, not Baghdad.

On the ground in Baghdad is a sprawling intelligence operation called the Iraqi National Intelligence Service, or INIS. Only INIS isn't really "National" at all. To the great chagrin of the Maliki government, it's financed and controlled by the CIA. And its boss is a longtime Allawi friend and CIA asset, Muhammed Shahwani.

Who's Muhammed Shahwani? He's a former Iraqi military officer who, along with Allawi, helped plot a botched coup against Saddam Hussein in 1996. Despite the failure, the CIA considered him a valuable asset, largely on the strength of his considerable knowledge of Saddam's military apparatus. In his memoir, ex-CIA Director George Tenet writes that when Shahwani returned to Iraq as part of "the Agency-sponsored Iraqi paramilitary group known as 'the Scorpions'" he became "key to developing a strong network inside Iraq for the Agency."

As a result, Shahwani, a member of Allawi's Iraqi National Accord party, was an obvious choice to lead the CIA-created INIS. Throughout the Coalition Provisional Authority era and the Allawi regime that followed it, Shahwani was a reliable fixture -- so much so that when the 2005 election saw Allawi's government replaced by a Shiite coalition known as the United Iraqi Alliance, the agency decided that INIS was too valuable to hand over to the less-reliable UIA. (Concerns about sovereignty have their exceptions.) INIS had control over extensive files on Iraqis tied to the insurgency -- and many others not suspected of crimes -- and the UIA bristled when unable to get access to what it considered the rightful spoils of its electoral victory. "I prefer to call it the American Intelligence of Iraq, not the Iraqi Intelligence Service," a Shiite parliamentarian and militia commander told reporters Hannah Allam and Warren Strobel.

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How does Allawi pay for his lucrative contract with GOP lobbying powerhouse Barbour Griffith & Rogers? The obvious guess is that his old buddies at the CIA pay for him. But he may not need the agency's cash. One member of his coterie is suspected of participating in what an Iraqi public-corruption judge calls "possibly the largest robbery in the world" -- the theft of approximately $1 billion from the Iraqi treasury.

In mid-2004, Hazem Shaalan had it all: he had risen from being a small businessman in London before the war to becoming Ayad Allawi's defense minister. (Shaalan had been a member of Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, but the relationship between Shaalan and Chalabi became acrimonious, with the INC accusing Shaalan of being a Baathist spy.) The defense ministry was Allawi's single biggest priority, as he owed his appointment -- made jointly by the U.S. and the United Nations -- to his promise of restoring stability to the insurgency-wracked country. Shaalan came through for him, fully backing the joint U.S.-Allawi decision to fight the Mahdi Army in the Shiite holy city of Najaf in August 2004.

But that wasn't all Shaalan did at the defense ministry.

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Christina Davidson at IraqSlogger, who broke the story that influential GOP lobbying firm Barbour Griffith & Rogers are promoting Iraqi parliamentarian Ayad Allawi to be the new prime minister, has another scoop. On Monday, BGR president Robert Blackwill -- President Bush's former Iraq coordinator at the White House -- signed a contract with Allawi worth $300,000 over six months to provide "strategic counsel" for the would-be-premier "before the US Government, Congress, media and others."

Reports Davidson:

The filings stipulate that Allawi is not supervised by, owned by, directed by, controlled by, financed by, or subsidized by any foreign government, foreign political party, or other foreign principal.

While BGR registers him as an individual, rather than as a political party, they do identify him as head of the Iraq National Accord, and indicate they will not only represent Allawi, but also "his moderate Iraqi colleagues."

Coming up: who are Allawi's "moderate Iraqi colleagues" -- and how can they afford such a boutique lobbying firm?

Barbour Griffith & Rogers has long been a powerhouse GOP lobbying firm. Now, apparently, American politics are just too small-time. BGR, according to a report by IraqSlogger's Christina Davidson, is trying to influence Iraqi politics as well.

BGR, the firm started by Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, has been promoting Ayad Allawi, the one-time Iraqi interim prime minister who over the weekend published an op-ed in the Washington Post calling for the parliamentary overthrow of current PM Nouri al-Maliki. The piece amounted to a trial balloon for American support for a second Allawi-led government, promising non-sectarianism and stability. Allawi has decades-old ties to the CIA, making him a known quantity to U.S. officials during a time of extreme frustration with Maliki.

But frustration alone doesn't get governments to fall. That's where BGR comes in. On August 17, the firm purchased the domain name Allawi-For-Iraq.com (the site's not yet live). Following publication of the op-ed, Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) called on the Iraqi parliament to hold a no-confidence vote on Maliki. BGR circulated Levin's comments around Washington -- and particularly to Congressional staffers -- using the e-mail address DrAyadAllawi@Allawi-for-Iraq.com.

Yet BGR hasn't registered any affiliation with the ex-premier:

Allawi's relationship with BGR apparently is relatively new, however, because official Justice Department and Senate lobbyist tracking records provide no indication of the BGR-Allawi relationship.

BGR's Web site, which identifies dozens of BGR clients by name, makes no mention of Allawi.

But the firm's ties with Allawi perhaps shouldn't be so surprising. Among BGR's executives is Ambassador Bob Blackwill, who in 2004 served as the White House's Iraq coordinator. In that role, Blackwill was an enthusiastic booster of Allawi, helping manage the process that led to Allawi's selection by the U.S. and the U.N. as interim prime minister in advance of the dissolution of the Coalition Provisional Authority. After the 2005 elections in Iraq, Blackwill wrote a laudatory op-ed in The Wall Street Journal praising Allawi's strategy for crushing the insurgency: "Mr. Allawi's message is simple: Join us in building the new Iraq and accept its benefits or, if you support the insurgency, get ready to die."

As it happened, the strategy didn't live up to its promises. The elections knocked Allawi out of power, as his tenure ended up alienating a large swath of the majority Shiite population. His attempts at enlisting American support to return to office -- a perennial rumor in Washington
over the past two years -- have all fallen short. Evidently, though, Blackwill and BGR evidently think that the time is right to get the old gang back together.

After initially granting tepid support to the current Iraqi government during the current fracas, President Bush clarified yesterday in his speech to the VFW convention that he supports Maliki, whom he called "a good guy." We'll see how long that lasts.