On August 20, 2002, Mithal al-Alusi left a comfortable life running a textile import company in Hamburg for a deed that earned him a year in a German prison. He led two teams of fellow exiles in the siege of Iraq’s embassy in Berlin, armed with one real gun, two fake ones, pepper spray, duct tape, and an axe. After letting most of the staff go, he ordered his men to tape the ambassador and another intelligence officer to chairs, fearing they might try to shoot.

At the time, the operation was denounced by most foreign governments. White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said, “Actions like this takeover are unacceptable. They undermine legitimate efforts by Iraqis both inside and outside Iraq to bring regime change to Iraq.” The German foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, famously apologized to the Iraqi ambassador and brought flowers to his hospital room.

For Mr. al-Alusi, the five-hour standoff between his Democratic Iraqi Opposition Deutschland and German police was the first action of the war to bring down Saddam Hussein. “I think this was one of the first incidents of the liberation of Iraq,” he said.

In an interview with The New York Sun Mr. al-Alusi said he went to London 13 days prior to the operation to inform Ayad Allawi. At the time, Mr. Allawi was the head of the Iraqi National Accord, an opposition group comprised of ex-Baathists. Today, he is Iraq’s interim prime minister. “I remember Ayad wanted the details of the operation. We told him we had 80-to-100 people,” he said.

The plan for Mr. al-Alusi originally was to quickly obtain files from the embassy that would prove Iraq’s political and financial support for Chancellor Schroeder’s Social Democratic Party and publicize them. Mr. al-Alusi says his men downloaded some computer files to a disk that to this day remains in the custody of Berlin’s police.

On August 20, 2002, Mr. Allawi told reporters he knew nothing of the plan and sharply criticized it as a rogue operation. While Mr. Allawi would arrive in Baghdad with American soldiers as the statue of Saddam fell, Mr. al-Alusi learned of his native Iraq’s liberation alone in cell block 242 of Berlin’s infamous Moabit prison. In the 1930s and early 1940s, the jail was where the Gestapo interrogated and executed some of the most famous resisters to the Nazis. In 1945, poet Albrecht Haushofer wrote sonnets there, including “Fetters,” which includes these haunting lines, “under the brick and iron gating, there’s a living breath, a kept-awaiting, that shows the awful want of other souls.”

While other leaders of the Iraqi opposition were in Baghdad forming the governing council that would advise the Coalition Provisional Authority, Mr. al-Alusi researched the prison and launched an unsuccessful campaign to get the warden to name the cell blocks after the Nazi resisters who once occupied them.

In November 2003, he made his way finally to Baghdad and quickly became a leading official on the country’s de-Baathification commission. He says he negotiated with the German Embassy in Baghdad to release the other men who took over the embassy by threatening to launch Iraqi governing council investigations into the German government’s dealings with Saddam’s Iraq.

Today Mr. al-Alusi is earning a reputation for bravery. In many newspapers he is now called Aba al-Shahidain, the father of the two martyrs, after his two sons were slain last month by Baathist insurgents. He is the only Iraqi politician to openly tell the press that he has visited Israel, a decision that cost him his job as the director of outreach and education for Iraq’s de-Baathification commission and his membership in Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress.

He says he drafted a memo to Mr. Allawi after his visit in September to the counterterrorism conference in Israel for which he was fired from his job, pressing for Iraq to normalize relations with Israel. “Of course there are problems with the Israeli occupation. But we should not let our national interests be determined by Palestine,” he said, breaking away from the dominant view of all but two of the 22 members of the Arab League on the question of recognition of Israel.

In December, he launched a political party, the Iraqi List, whose purpose was to create a liberal political voice within the new Iraqi politics. His party in Iraq today, which could not muster enough votes to win a single seat in the new assembly, is a rare exception to the confessional politics of the major Shiite and Kurdish alliances, which play to the ethnic and sectarian allegiances of voters. Over a dinner Tuesday night, he warned, “In one year if the Islamists are not defeated, they will be calling on America to leave and Iran will be in a position to take over.”

Mr. al-Alusi plans to launch a new federation of democrats in the Middle East to publicize the plight of political prisoners in the region.