The government calls him a spy.

Sami Khosaba Latchin now sits under house arrest in Des Plaines for being an alleged Iraqi agent, ratted out by documents found in a Baghdad apartment and the accusations of admitted spies abroad.

Informants who pointed out Latchin for American investigators say he was put in a program that spread sleeper agents for Saddam Hussein. He was told to become a U.S. citizen, to spend years hiding in Chicago until summoned to begin spying.

In the meantime, he spent. Then he went bankrupt.

He has tens of thousands of dollars in bills on a dozen credit cards, according to his 2003 bankruptcy. His bank wants thousands more before granting title to his car, a used Cadillac Escalade too expensive for a man who worked as a gate agent and then a hotel desk clerk.

As the case against Latchin unfolds, a portrait of Latchin's life--and perhaps even of an unraveling foreign intelligence plot--has emerged from his 2003 bankruptcy filing, his 2001 car loan application, housing records, federal court papers and other documents.

A whispering cast of anonymous characters--Individuals A through J, most admitted former Iraqi agents--is introduced in bullet-point form in an FBI affidavit used for an August search warrant.

"We have to look at the whole story," Bill Theis, one of Latchin's appointed federal defenders, told a judge last month questioning the government's reasons for bringing the case. . "And from the government, I don't think we've gotten it."

Because the Latchin case relies so heavily on the testimony of admitted spies, it also sheds light on the secretive world of the old Iraqi regime, whose tendrils reached into the United States not to spy on government, but on Hussein's Iraqi enemies in exile here.

His alleged target: Assyrian dissidents in Chicago.

After the FBI arrested Latchin in August, it accused him of failing to mention an alleged past in the Mukhabbarat, Hussein's spy service, when he applied for citizenship in 1998. On Dec. 1, charges against Latchin were upgraded, accusing him of conspiring with others to act as a secret agent.

Neighbors, fellow workers and former employers said Latchin, 57, worked as an American Airlines gate agent at O'Hare International Airport from 1995 until 2000, then as a desk clerk at two nearby hotels.

He once told a co-worker he left Iraq because he didn't like the government there but later professed loyalty to Hussein and Hussein's Baath Party in an FBI interview, according to court documents.

His voice is quiet but steady, his handshake firm without a tight grip, and he politely declined comment for this report at the front door of his condominium in Des Plaines.

Iraqi intelligence informants allege that before working at O'Hare, he had used an Iraqi Airways job as cover for spy work in Athens in the 1980s and then worked at the Baghdad headquarters of the Mukhabbarat from 1987 until 1991, when the first Gulf War erupted.

His passport and immigration papers show he arrived in the U.S. on May 27, 1993, became a permanent resident and waited to apply for citizenship.

From then on, the government says, he was supposed to spy on Assyrians.

Residents of northern Iraq since before the time of Christ, Assyrians poured into the United States in the 1970s. Many settled in Chicago, still a center of the Assyrian population in America. Various estimates put the number of Assyrians in Chicago at about 80,000.

After years in the Iraqi intelligence service, Latchin was sent to penetrate the Assyrian community here under the guidance of an alleged Iraqi spymaster, the government alleges.

Individual C--Latchin's alleged longtime handler-turned-informant--told investigators he persuaded Latchin to work undercover in the United States, gave him a code name, prepared him and paid him.

He was one of at least six former Iraqi intelligence officers said to have known Latchin for more than 15 years, FBI agent Amy Beuschlein disclosed in an Aug. 27, 2004, affidavit.

Other informants in the affidavit filled in more of Latchin's alleged past:

He joined the intelligence service in the late-1970s after graduating from Al-Mustansiriya University, they told authorities. After years of spy work in Athens and at headquarters in Baghdad, informants said, he was to move to the United States and disappear.

For at least the next nine years, he blended in perfectly. A new used car every few years. A condo. Three jobs.

Tim Kinsley and his wife, Claudia Flam, hired him in the mid-1990s at Service Service Inc., a private firm that ran American Airlines' O'Hare ticket counter until 1997.

Records show Latchin was hired in 1995, by which time he had lived at two addresses within blocks of each other in the Assyrian neighborhood near Devon and Western Avenues.

Latchin stayed at Service Service after it was sold to Huntleigh USA in 1997, but in 2000 he moved to a job at the front desk at the Travelodge O'Hare.

About the same time, Latchin also began working at the Mt. Prospect Ramada Inn.

"He was not exceptionally outgoing, he was not exceptionally quiet," said general manager Shaukat Sindhu.

What stuck out was that Latchin spent most of a year holding down two jobs, days at the Travelodge and nights at the Ramada, Sindhu said.

"It seemed when he was here, he was working here for the money," Sindhu said. "I thought spies were supposed to be rich--rich like James Bond."

In fact, Latchin was bankrupt, or on the way.

He bought the condominium where he still lives from his brother in early 1998 and almost immediately started a series of frequent refinances and home-equity loans that continued until his 2003 filing for bankruptcy.

An alleged Iraqi co-conspirator and college friend said Latchin called him all the time, "often complaining about his financial situation in the United States," said a Dec. 17 federal court filing.

Phone records appear to confirm at least part of that account. The month he bought the Escalade in 2001, phone records show, he called his alleged handler in Baghdad 30 times.

He had made 13 calls to his alleged handlers in the previous 3 1/2 years, court records state.

Though the FBI said it had interviewed Latchin in Chicago as early as 2002, the beginning of Latchin's real troubles came after American troops poured into Baghdad in the spring of 2003.

Unable to destroy documents quickly enough to keep them out of American hands, Iraqi intelligence officials rushed sensitive papers into homes throughout Baghdad, informants later told U.S. investigators.

Iraqi army officers found such a stash in April 2003 stacked in the living room of House 10, Street 13, District 904, Baghdad.

Dates on the pages ran from 1984 until 1990, a period when, government informants allege, Latchin had worked at Mukhabbarat headquarters in Baghdad.

One of them, an April 9, 1990, cover letter signed by a member of the Mukhabbarat's Secret Service Directorate, advertised the "original findings by Mr. Sami Khoshaba Latchin."

The Mukhabbarat "were very ruthless people," said Judith Yaphe, whose 20 years at the CIA included work on Iraq and terrorism. But she questioned the conditions under which any document from the former Iraqi intelligence agency was produced. "Based on their past performance, you can make some fairly safe judgments," she said.

"But that doesn't get you any closer to the truth about who this guy is," she said.

By James Janega
Chicago Tribune

Tribune staff reporter Matt O'Connor contributed to this report