The Iraqi opposition met this week near London, courtesy of the US. Chris Stephen wasn't supposed to be there . . . as he discovered
The scene came straight from James Bond. In the rolling grounds of a discreet hotel in deepest Surrey, dark-suited American security men patrolled in pairs, stopping to have conversations with their watches.
In the hotel itself, more thick-necked security people, all of them with funny things in their ears, were watched by curious chamber maids in pretty white aprons.Among them mingled mysterious Arabs, also in sharp suits but more portly, muttering to each other as they wandered the corridors.
Improbable as it sounds, this hotel was the site of the US's grandly-named Future of Iraq project, a desperate attempt to get the Iraqi opposition to agree on a new government to replace that of Saddam Hussein.
More than 25 opposition groups were flown in from exile around the world for the two-day meeting. On Wednesday I was the only journalist present, having been tipped off by a friendly Iraqi, but I was not welcome.
"What are you doing here?" asked a US diplomat summoned by hotel staff. "It's a closed meeting. I can't let you in. You'll have to go." His anxiety was understandable, because behind the firmly closed doors of the hotel's main conference room, US plans to set up a new democratic Iraq were turning to dust.
This is bad news for the White House, which needs to demonstrate that removing Saddam will usher in democracy, rather than civil war.
Though nobody here will say so publicly, most expect Iraq to suffer a Yugoslavia-style melt-down if Saddam Hussein's dictatorship is removed.
Consider the parallels: Iraq, like Yugoslavia, is an artificial creation by the West: They were even created at the same time - out of the ruins of the first World War.
Like Yugoslavia, Iraq is in effect a clumsy welding operation, throwing together three ethnic groups - Kurds, Shias and Sunnis - with a long history of mutual antagonism. Coups and dictatorships are the norm and democratic government unknown.
Complicating things still further is the bewildering array of splinter groups scrambling for a slice of the post-Saddam cake: fundamentalists vie with liberals, communists oppose monarchists, tribal chieftains squabble among themselves and nobody trusts the growing band of defectors from Saddam's own regime.
"They hate each other more than they hate Saddam Hussein," observed Abdul Bari Atwani, editor of the influential Arabic newspaper Al Quds.
But the real problem is with the Big Three ethnic groups: Once the US army completes its "regime change", the Kurds in the north and the Shias in the south plan to tear out great chunks of territory for themselves at the expense of the Sunnis in the centre.
The Kurds are best placed for this, with 40,000 troops waiting in the north and one objective - the oil rich city of Kirkuk. Ten years ago, Kurds were ethnically cleansed, and replaced by Arabs, by Saddam Hussein.
Now the Kurds want it back and plan to reverse the cleansing process. "Don't worry, there won't be any violence," joked one observer. "You think the Arabs of Kirkuk are going to wait around for the Kurdish army to arrive?" The Kurds, however, have their own factionalism to sort out first: They are split evenly between the Kurdish Democratic Party, under Massoud Barzani, and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, controlled by Jalal Talabani.
Ten years ago I interviewed Barzani in Barzan, the bombed-out ruins of his village in northern Iraq. "I'm used to it," he said. "My village was bombed 15 times in the past century, once by the British." Complicating their relationship is the fact that Talibani deserted the KDP in the 1970s, and animosity between the two groups is strong. What is likely to bring them together, however, is the prospect of the huge riches of the Kirkuk oil fields.
Down south, the Shias have a 3,000-strong army based just over the border in Iran under the command of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution.
The council's leader, Ayatollah Mohammad Baqir al-Hakim, pointedly refused to show up at the Surrey talks, instead giving interviews in Tehran voicing opposition to the planned US attack.
Trying to hold it together is the umbrella group Iraqi National Congress, which fears that the US may simply give up on democracy and install a new dictator to replace Saddam.
"The Iraqi people do not want something like US intelligence operations in Latin America, which replaced regimes and left power in the hands of dictators," said congress leader Ahmad Chalabi.
Chalabi is the nearest thing the Iraqi opposition has to a figurehead, enjoying the support of several Sunni parties and the big Kurdish power brokers.
But his calls for unity went unheeded. "We cannot agree a government in advance, I do not think so," said one participant. "Please do not mention my name." The problem with Iraq, as with Afghanistan, is that the forces pulling the country apart are stronger then those holding it together - or rather, they will be if Saddam Hussein's iron grip is broken.
The Americans may not want to believe this, but the British know better.
British officials preferred to sit on the hotel veranda drinking tea rather than get involved in the haggling taking place within. The man from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office insisted British officials were there strictly as "observers". Translation: when it all falls apart, blame the Americans, not us.
By the end of two days of exhausting talks, the Iraqis seemed happy enough, trooping out for the trip back to the airport still arguing and looking forward to a whirl around the Duty Free before returning to their points of exile.
The Americans looked shattered, their officials wearing faces like crumpled paper bags, bewildered by the failure of the world's most powerful nation to force Iraq's opposition to speak with one voice.
For them the task now is to return to Washington empty- handed, to explain to the White House that, as with Afghanistan last year, invading Iraq will be the easy part.