Aras Karim Habib is the son of the former secretary-general of the Democratic Party of Kurdistan. He studied in Baghdad and reportedly espoused fundamentalist Shi'ite ideas shortly after Ayatollah Khomeini's rise to power in Tehran in 1979. Habib served as the Kurdish intelligence chief and head of the Iraqi National Congress (INC)'s 'information collection program' under Ahmad Chalabi. He was later identified by U.S. intelligence, including the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), as a paid Iranian intelligence asset who passed secrets in both directions to Tehran (confidence: 0.85). Following the 2004 U.S. raid on INC headquarters, Habib fled to Iran. In later years, he engaged in banking activities, maintaining a business relationship with Essam al-Asadi, and faced U.S. Treasury Department sanctions as a banker allegedly involved in financing the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Lebanon's Hezbollah (confidence: 0.75).