Qubad Talabani, the son of the Iraqi president and the Kurds’ official representative in Washington, delivered the keynote address. At the end of his speech, he announced that the next year’s celebration would take place in Kurdistan. When Talabani extended the invitation, an impromptu gesture of generosity, he had little reason to anticipate the intensity of Muth’s reaction. A wave of memos arrived in his office, and Muth quickly scheduled a meeting. When Muth came dressed in uniform, Talabani couldn’t resist asking about his biography. “He starts telling me stories about how his uncle was the deputy chairman of the East German intelligence and through that they supported the Iraqi security services and helped build Saddam Hussein’s intelligence network.”

This narrative was horribly calibrated. Hussein, after all, had waged a genocidal campaign against the Kurds. As Talabani stared uncomfortably at his aides, Muth described how he wanted to invite the enemies of the United States — the Taliban, the Mahdi Army — to Kurdistan. Once he gathered them, he would launch the mother of all peace processes. Talabani interrupted before he could finish. “Good luck to you,” he said. “But we want no association with you, the Taliban, the Sadrists.”

The Iraq Embassy initially considered Muth harmless. He organized lovely parties for visiting dignitaries. It was touching that Muth admired the Iraqi Army enough to wear its uniform (or rather, what appeared to be a hybrid of Iraqi and Jordanian secondhand components). But the embassy caught wind that Muth had gone to the Pentagon, dressed in his uniform, handing out invitations to Iraq Liberation Day. A party costume was one thing, carrying this charade into the inner sanctum of the U.S. military was quite another. The embassy strongly urged its employees to avoid dealing with Muth and asked the F.B.I. to investigate him.

In September 2010, the State Department received an anonymous fax containing a diplomatic dispatch that a mole had sent to the editors of WikiLeaks. Investigators from the department quickly dismissed the fax as an uninteresting clip job. But as a matter of protocol, they phoned the house that sent the fax. When Viola Drath answered their call, she instantly fingered her husband as its author. Although the agent couldn’t be sure, he thought that he heard “a commotion” on the other end of the line, he later told the police. The phone went dead. He and a partner armed themselves and quickly drove to the house on Q Street, but there was no response to their knocking.

When the agents later arranged to see Drath, she insisted that they meet anywhere but her house. She arrived at a restaurant wearing dark glasses, which she didn’t remove until asked by the agents. Although Drath claimed that her black eye resulted from a collision with a banister, she also told the agents that she feared for her safety. Could they deport her husband? “She was terribly worried about his anti-Americanism and his vitriol,” George Schwab remembers. “She told me, ‘If something happens, you will know who perpetrated the deed.’ ”

During her years with Muth, Drath’s social world slowly contracted. Guests flooded her home in response to Muth’s invitations, but she lost touch with old friends. “I have a terrible conscience about the fact that we stopped seeing her,” says Richard Gookin, the former associate chief of protocol at the State Department. “We didn’t invite her over, because we feared that he would come along.” Muth’s embarrassments were mounting. The pastor at her church barred him from the building. The German Embassy axed him from its guest list, for fear of his drunken behavior, and curtailed its dealings with her.

Muth no longer left the house much, except to smoke his dime-store cigars. During the day, he lounged on the couch, writing memos on his laptop and collecting details that might help him maintain a credible front. At night, he often drained a bottle of Madeira and read the English-language press in Asia so he could send e-mails that presaged the next morning’s stories about Iraq. Drath knew that he kept careful tabs on her e-mail account — and that he would send notes under her name. One day, while Muth was out, she called a young friend and asked him how she could set up a new address. But she was 90 years old and quickly surrendered to frustration.