IRAQ: Lara Marlowe visits the Baghdad base of the Iraqi National Congress which is bankrolled by the US.
The armed guard at the former Mansour Hunting Club opens the gate just wide enough for a delegation of Iraqis in silk ties and expensive suits to walk out.
The rich men are leaving a meeting with Ahmad Chalabi, the founder of the Iraqi National Congress and a prominent character on the chaotic, nascent Iraqi political stage. But when I try to ask one of the men who they are, the guard shoos me away. The INC can be a secretive organisation.
As the rich men walk out, the unwashed poor of Baghdad's Shia slums try to push in. Open hands are extended through the wrought iron in a begging gesture. "We have no food. We have no money," one cries out. "We want to meet Dr Chalabi."
They're not likely to find a slot in Mr Chalabi's busy schedule.
Mr Chalabi is known as "Dr" for his degree in mathematics from the University of Chicago. Dozens of political parties have sprouted up around the capital in the past two weeks, but his is the most affluent.
The INC has received $1 million a month since 2000, voted by the US Congress and distributed by the State Department.
It claims to be the umbrella for most of the prominent former opposition groups, including the Kurdish KDP and PUK, the Shia "Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq", the Iraqi National Accord and the Constitutional Monarchy Movement.
But the real value of the INC to Washington is as an intelligence network and proxy militia. Three of the eight men arrested from Washington's "most wanted list" (of 55) have been apprehended by the INC and Mr Chalabi makes almost daily claims to know where Saddam Hussein and his sons have been hiding.
Mr Chalabi, who founded the INC in 1992, fell out with his CIA mentors in 1996, but he faithfully relays the views of his new master, the US Defence Secretary, Mr Donald Rumsfeld.
He has found it difficult to shake off a conviction for embezzlement in Jordan and, if you ask the average Iraqi in the street, most likely he hasn't heard of Mr Chalabi or says he will never vote for a man who didn't stay in Iraq and suffer.
"Chalabi is the dog of the USA," says graffiti near his office.
Mr Chalabi arrived in Baghdad with his own 1,700-strong private army - the Free Iraqi Forces. They carry assault rifles, wear US combat uniforms and FIF shoulder flashes.
It's too late for the Free Iraqi Forces to fulfil the role of US cannon fodder, played by the KLA in Kosovo or the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. It didn't fight in the war, but Mr Chalabi's spokesman, Mr Zaab Sethna, says it will eventually be integrated into a reformed Iraqi army, along with the Kurdish Peshmerga.
The Georgetown-educated Pakistani-born Mr Sethna, like Mr Chalabi, is a smooth talker, but the Rolex watch is too flashy in devastated Baghdad.
Mr Sethna first met Mr Chalabi when he was a public relations officer with the Rendon Group, the Washington firm which disgraced itself by fabricating the dead-babies-in-incubators story during Iraq's occupation of Kuwait.
"The Rendon Group had a contract to support the Iraqi opposition," Mr Sethna said of his meeting with Mr Chalabi. "It was a contract from the CIA, which we didn't know at the time. The INC and the CIA had a big, nasty split in the mid 1990s. I went with the INC."
Mr Sethna says all the right things about "building civil society and democracy in Iraq". At times, sitting in the manicured garden of the former Hunting Club, you almost forget where you are.
He even has an answer to the hardest question for Mr Chalabi. Has he the slightest hope of winning over millions of Iraqi Shias who follow the Najaf sheikhs?
"Most of the people who come to see us are from [the Shia slums of\] ath-Thawra," Mr Sethna claims, not very convincingly. "That's half of Baghdad. These people have been despairing and oppressed for too long. It's very important to the INC to empower them."
In the immediate future, "de-Baathification is a very important process for us", Mr Sethna says.
The US doesn't have the means to assess the crimes of low to mid-ranking Baathists. That's where their Iraqi National Congress sub-contractors come in, with their "unrivalled intelligence network".