The raid on Ahmad Chalabi's headquarters in Baghdad on Thursday marks an ignominious fall for a man who helped make the US case to topple Saddam Hussein but was seen as a duplicitous opportunist by US diplomats and spies.
Four months ago Mr Chalabi was a guest of first lady Laura Bush at the State of the Union speech, Washington's premier political event, and a favourite of the Pentagon, which paid his Iraqi National Congress $340,000 a month for intelligence.
This week US officials said they had cut off this funding and US forces and Iraqi police raided his Baghdad home and party offices, seizing computers and files from the man once seen by the Pentagon as potential post-Saddam leader.
US officials said the raid was to gather evidence of suspected "corruption" by INC members and that Mr Chalabi was not a target. An Iraqi judge, Hassan Muathin, said it was carried out under an arrest warrant for several men wanted for stealing state-owned vehicles.
But analysts said the raid seemed a political act against a man who fell from US favour because of incendiary statements about allowing Baathists back into government, a long history of providing dubious intelligence, contacts with Iran that spooked Washington and a belief he was simply out for himself.
"It was obvious that he was seeking to further his own ambitions by turning to Iran, by turning to Shi'ite groups including links to some of the Shi'ite militias," said Anthony Cordesman of Centre For Strategic and International Studies.
"He was seen as somebody who really pursued his own ambitions with very little real regard to any other goal," Cordesman added. "He basically was an outside opportunist."
Mr Chalabi's dealings with the US government go back more than a decade. The CIA had a relationship with him in the early 1990s but became disaffected in the mid-1990s after the INC failed to overthrow or weaken the Iraqi regime.
The CIA cut off funding to the INC in the mid-1990s because it did not trust Chalabi to be an honest broker and, in more recent years, the spy agency viewed Mr Chalabi with suspicion amid "continued signs of his duplicity," said one US official.
The State Department then funded the INC, but it also cut off funds for a time because the group could not fully account for the money, and the Pentagon eventually picked up the tab.
Whatever the misgivings of the US intelligence and diplomatic communities, a congressional report found the State Department paid the INC at least $33 million since March 2000.
Mr Chalabi was instrumental in making the case on Capitol Hill for the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, a US law which said regime change should be US policy towards Saddam.
But despite his intelligence - Mr Chalabi holds mathematics degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago - US diplomats have doubted that a man who spent four decades outside Iraq could emerge as a leader.
Mr Chalabi was convicted in absentia of bank fraud in 1992 by a military court in Jordan, where he had founded a bank that failed. He says the charges were politically motivated.
US officials suggested Chalabi undermined his support in the Pentagon and the vice-president's office by suggesting that a US policy of allowing some Baathists back into public life was like putting Nazis in charge of postwar Germany.
One US official, saying Mr Chalabi had "lashed out" over the policy on Baathists, said Washington increasingly saw the Iraqi trying to "undercut some of the efforts that we are making to stabilise Iraq" to advance his own personal interests.
Mr Chalabi was also seen as contributing to the US pre-war view that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, which critics say he pushed by coaching defectors to tell the Pentagon what it wanted to hear.
The INC directed some defectors to the Defence Intelligence Agency who added to the impression that Iraq had such weapons. The main justification for invading Iraq was the threat from weapons of mass destruction, but no large chemical or biological stockpiles have been found.
"As far as the value of the information that they have provided, you've got DIA and CIA folks saying that very little has been proven to be of much value," said one official.