Ali Haider/European Pressphoto Agency

In an interview with my colleagues Rod Nordland and Tim Arango in Baghdad on Monday, Ayad Allawi, the former Iraqi exile who may become Iraq’s next prime minister, described an incident from his past that has burnished his reputation for toughness. In 1978, he managed to fight off two ax-wielding assassins sent to kill him after he broke with Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party.

After Mr. Allawi returned from exile and was appointed Iraq’s interim prime minister in 2004, though, reports in the American and British press presented a less flattering view of his past. In a 2005 New Yorker profile, Jon Lee Anderson even wrote:

Just as, in the past, Iraqis hid their true feelings about Saddam’s brutal tyranny by referring to him as “strict,” Iraqis today commonly describe Allawi as “tough.” It is an oddly polite term—a euphemism—that conceals varying degrees of fear, loathing, and admiration. An Iraqi friend of Allawi’s who has close links to Jordan’s Hashemite monarchy told me, “Iyad’s a thug, but a thug where he needs to be one. The Americans who set this up call him Saddam Lite.”

In a 2004 New York Times article, “Ex-C.I.A. Aides Say Iraq Leader Helped Agency in 90’s Attacks,” Joel Brinkley reported that Mr. Allawi “ran an exile organization intent on deposing Saddam Hussein that sent agents into Baghdad in the early 1990’s to plant bombs and sabotage government facilities under the direction of the C.I.A., several former intelligence officials say. Dr. Allawi’s group, the Iraqi National Accord, used car bombs and other explosive devices smuggled into Baghdad from northern Iraq, the officials said.”

Although no public record of the bombing campaign was available, Mr. Brinkley’s sources said that it had taken place between 1992 and 1995, as his organization, the Iraqi National Accord, tried to set the stage for removing Mr. Hussein in a coup. Mr. Brinkley explained:

The Iraqi government at the time claimed that the bombs, including one it said exploded in a movie theater, resulted in many civilian casualties. But whether the bombings actually killed any civilians could not be confirmed because, as a former C.I.A. official said, the United States had no significant intelligence sources in Iraq then. One former Central Intelligence Agency officer who was based in the region, Robert Baer, recalled that a bombing during that period “blew up a school bus; schoolchildren were killed.” Mr. Baer, a critic of the Iraq war, said he did not recall which resistance group might have set off that bomb. Other former intelligence officials said Dr. Allawi’s organization was the only resistance group involved in bombings and sabotage at that time. But one former senior intelligence official recalled that “bombs were going off to no great effect.” “I don’t recall very much killing of anyone,” the official said.

Writing in Britain’s Spectator later that year, Andrew Gilligan described Mr. Allawi’s exile group as “a small but influential collection of almost exclusively ex-Baathists who had held office but fallen out with Saddam. From the beginning, the I.N.A. was never meant to be any sort of mass movement. Its aim was never to bring democracy to Iraq, but to engineer a palace coup which would see, in Allawi’s estimate, the top 30 to 40 leaders replaced by … well, people like himself.” Mr. Gilligan added:

The I.N.A.’s most controversial operation during this period was a campaign of what can only be termed terrorism against civilians. In 1994 and 1995 a series of bombings at cinemas, mosques and other public places in Baghdad claimed up to 100 civilian lives.

Just before Mr. Allawi took office in June 2004, Seymour Hersh reported in The New Yorker that his past also reportedly included a stint with Iraq’s intelligence agency, the Mukhabarat, before his falling out with the Baath Party.

His credentials as a neurologist, and his involvement during the past two decades in anti-Saddam activities, as the founder of the British-based Iraqi National Accord, have been widely reported. But his role as a Baath Party operative while Saddam struggled for control in the nineteen-sixties and seventies—Saddam became President in 1979—is much less well known. “Allawi helped Saddam get to power,” an American intelligence officer told me. “He was a very effective operator and a true believer.” Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former C.I.A. case officer who served in the Middle East, added, “Two facts stand out about Allawi. One, he likes to think of himself as a man of ideas; and, two, his strongest virtue is that he’s a thug.” […] Allawi moved to London in 1971, ostensibly to continue his medical education; there he was in charge of the European operations of the Baath Party organization and the local activities of the Mukhabarat, its intelligence agency, until 1975. “If you’re asking me if Allawi has blood on his hands from his days in London, the answer is yes, he does,” Vincent Cannistraro, the former C.I.A. officer, said. “He was a paid Mukhabarat agent for the Iraqis, and he was involved in dirty stuff.”

Asked about reports of his links to Iraqi intelligence during his early years in England, Mr. Allawi told The New Yorker they were not ture:

“No, no,” he protested. “First of all, I never worked as a government official, never ever. Neither as a Mukhabarat nor anything else. Second, there was not anything called Mukhabarat when I left Iraq.” He explained that the organization known by that name had come into existence only in 1973—a rather technical argument, given that mukhabarat is an Arab word that means “intelligence.” He added that when a precursor agency to the Mukhabarat was created he had argued against it at a Party meeting.

In an article headlined “A Tough Guy Tries to Tame Iraq,” the following month, my colleague Dexter Filkins noted that Mr. Allawi’s past links to the C.I.A. and the Baath Party appealed to some Iraqis:

Mr. Allawi is known for his decade of work in trying to topple Mr. Hussein, but he is a former Baathist himself, with suggestions among those who regard him with suspicion that he once engaged in thuggish work on the party’s behalf. That tough-guy past, even his former association with the Central Intelligence Agency, seems to warm the hearts of many Iraqis who miss Mr. Hussein’s iron-fisted ways. “That Allawi worked for the C.I.A. may be a problem for Americans,” an Iraqi journalist said in conversation recently, “but it is not a problem for Iraqis.”

In his New Yorker profile, Mr. Anderson noted that Mr. Allawi’s group of Iraqi exiles, like that of his cousin Ahmed Chalabi, provided information on weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 that subsequently turned out to be untrue.