U.S. whiffs on "Curveball"
"U.S. whiffs on "Curveball"

By Bob Drogin and John Goetz
Los Angeles Times

BERLIN — The German intelligence officials responsible for one of the most important informants on Saddam Hussein's suspected weapons of mass destruction say the Bush administration and the CIA repeatedly exaggerated his claims during the approach to the Iraq war.

Five senior officials from Germany's Federal Intelligence Service, or BND, said they warned U.S. intelligence authorities that the source, an Iraqi defector code-named "Curveball," never claimed to produce germ weapons and never saw anyone else do so.

According to the Germans, President Bush mischaracterized Curveball's information when he warned before the war that Iraq had at least seven mobile factories brewing biological poisons. Secretary of State Colin Powell also misstated Curveball's claims in his prewar presentation to the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003, the Germans said.

Curveball's German handlers for the past six years said his information was often vague, mostly secondhand and impossible to confirm. "This was not substantial evidence," a senior German intelligence official said. "We made clear we could not verify the things he said."

The German authorities, speaking about the case for the first time, also said that their informant had emotional and mental problems. "He is not a ... psychologically stable guy," said a BND official who supervised the case. "He is not a completely normal person," a BND analyst agreed.

Curveball was the chief source of inaccurate prewar U.S. claims that Baghdad had a biological-weapons arsenal, a commission appointed by Bush reported this year. U.S. investigators did not interview Curveball, who still insists his story was true, or the German officials who handle his case.

The German account emerges as Washington is engaged in a political battle over prewar intelligence. The White House lashed out at Senate Democrats and other critics who allege the administration manipulated intelligence to go to war. Democrats have forced the Senate intelligence committee to resume a long-stalled inquiry. House Democrats are calling for a similar inquiry.

An investigation by the Los Angeles Times based on interviews since May with about 30 current and former intelligence officials in the United States, Germany, England, Iraq and the United Nations shows that U.S. bungling in the Curveball case was far worse than official reports have disclosed.

The White House, for example, ignored evidence that U.N. weapons inspectors disproved virtually all of Curveball's accounts before the war. Bush and his aides issued increasingly dire warnings about Iraq's germ weapons as the invasion neared, even though intelligence from Curveball had not changed.

At the CIA, senior officials embraced Curveball's claims even though they could not check them or interview him until a year after the invasion. They ignored multiple warnings about his reliability, punished in-house critics who provided proof he had lied and refused to admit error until May 2004, 14 months after the invasion.

Fact and fiction

After the CIA vouched for Curveball's information, Bush warned in his State of the Union Speech in January 2003 that Iraq had "mobile biological-weapons labs" designed to produce "germ-warfare agents." The next month, Bush said Iraq "has at least seven mobile factories" for germ warfare.

Curveball told his German handlers, however, that he had assembled equipment on only one truck and had heard secondhand about other sites. Moreover, he could not identify what the equipment was designed to produce.

"His information to us was very vague," the senior German intelligence official said. "He could not say if these things functioned, if they worked."

"Evidence" blows up

David Kay, who headed the CIA's postinvasion search for illicit weapons, said Curveball's accounts were maddeningly murky. "He was not in charge of trucks or production," Kay said. "He had nothing to do with actual production of biological agent. He never saw them actually produce agent."

Powell also highlighted Curveball's "eyewitness" account when he warned the U.N. Security Council on the eve of war that Iraq's trucks could brew enough weapons-grade microbes "in a single month to kill thousands upon thousands of people."

The BND supervisor said he was aghast when he watched Powell misstate Curveball's information as a justification for war. "We were shocked," the German official said. "Mein Gott! We had always told them it was not proven ... ."

In a telephone interview, Powell said CIA director George Tenet and his top deputies personally assured him before the Feb. 5, 2003, speech that intelligence on the mobile labs was "solid." Since then, Powell said, the case "has totally blown up in our faces."

Powell said no one warned him that veterans in the CIA's clandestine division, including the European division chief, had voiced growing doubts about Curveball's credibility. "This is one we really pressed on, really spent a lot of time on," Powell recalled. "We knew how important it was."

"All the [CIA] leadership stood by it," agreed Lawrence Wilkerson, then Powell's chief of staff. "They were convinced, of all the things Powell was presenting, that this was the most solid and most incontrovertible evidence they had."

At the United Nations, Powell said the "eyewitness" was at the site of a 1998 weapons accident that killed 12 technicians. Wilkerson said CIA leaders had explained that the "principal source had not only worked in the mobile labs, but had seen an accident and had been injured in the accident. ... This gave more credibility to it."

But German intelligence officials say the CIA was wrong. Curveball "only heard rumors of an accident," the BND supervisor said. "He gave a thirdhand account."

Tenet has denied ignoring warnings that Curveball might be a fabricator. He declined to be interviewed for this story.

Curveball also could not be interviewed. BND officials threatened last summer to strip him of his salary, housing and protection if he agreed to meet the Times. Curveball now lives under an assumed name in southern Germany.

The BND provides him and his family a furnished apartment, language lessons and a stipend. The agency has relocated him twice over concerns that his life was in danger.

The German government opposed the Iraq invasion, but German intelligence authorities insisted they shared all they gleaned from Iraqi informants.

CIA officials now concede that Curveball fused fact, research off the Internet and what former co-workers called "water-cooler gossip" into a nightmarish fantasy that played on U.S. fears after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. His motive, they say, was to get a German visa, not start a war.

After the invasion, the CIA's Iraq Survey Group, headed by Kay, found that Curveball was fired in 1995, at the time he said he was starting work on germ weapons.

A former CIA official said records showed he had been jailed for an apparent sex crime and that for a time he drove a Baghdad taxi. His childhood friends called him a "great liar" and a "con artist." "The Iraqis were all laughing when we asked about him," a former CIA investigator recalled. "They were saying, 'This guy? You've got to be kidding.' "

In the beginning ...

The case began in November 1999, when Curveball, a Baghdad-born chemical engineer, flew into Munich on a tourist visa and applied for political asylum. The Germans sent him to a refugee center outside Nuremburg.

During interrogations in 2000 and 2001, the Iraqi told BND officers he had worked on a secret-weapons program between 1995 and 1999. He said he worked for Dr. Rihab Taha, known as "Dr. Germ," and helped build a mobile germ factory at Djerf al Nadaf, a grain-handling facility southeast of Baghdad.

The Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), working from a clandestine operating base called Munich House, became the liaison for U.S. intelligence and assigned his code name. German officials insisted Curveball hated Americans, so the DIA was not allowed to interview him.

As a result, the DIA never tried to check Curveball's background. Despite that, CIA analysts accepted the intelligence reports as credible and passed them to senior policymakers. CIA officials admit now that the system failed.

"Look, analysts were studying drawings made by artists working from descriptions by a guy we couldn't talk to," said a former senior CIA official who helped supervise the case and the postwar investigation. "It was hard to figure out."

Like many defectors, Curveball at first seemed eager to please. But as questions intensified, Curveball grew moody and irritable. His memory began to fail. He confused places and dates. He fretted about his safety, about his parents and wife in Baghdad, and about his future in Germany.

"His whole story has a lot of bumps in the road," the BND supervisor said. "He was between two worlds, sometimes cooperative, sometimes aggressive. He was not an easygoing guy."

Curveball largely ceased cooperating in 2001, once he was granted asylum, officials said. He also increasingly asked for money. "He knew he was important," the BND analyst said. British intelligence warned the CIA in 2001 that spy-satellite images taken four years earlier, when Curveball claimed to have been working at Djerf al Nadaf, conflicted with his descriptions. The photos showed a wall around most of the main warehouse, clearly blocking trucks from getting in or out. But CIA analysts ignored the wall or speculated it was a temporary structure built to fool spy satellites.

"No threat agents"

U.N. weapons inspectors were the first to disprove Curveball's claims.

Three days after Powell's speech, U.N. Team Bravo left its Baghdad hotel to conduct the first search of Curveball's supposed former work site. U.N. records show the U.S.-led team spent 3 ½ hours at the site.

Djerf al Nadaf was near the former Tuwaitha nuclear facility. Behind a wall, a two-story grain silo adjoined a warehouse, the building Curveball had identified as the truck assembly facility.

The doors were locked. So Boston microbiologist Rocco Casagrande crawled through a hole in the wall. Inside, he scraped five samples from the walls and floor and tested them for bacterial or viral DNA. The results all came back negative.

"No threat agents detected," Casagrande wrote in his computer journal that night.

A British inspector found another surprise. Curveball had said the germ trucks could enter the warehouse from either end. But there were no doors. And a 6-foot-high wall surrounded most of the building. It was the wall British intelligence saw in 1997 satellite photos. It clearly prohibited the traffic flow Curveball had described.

U.N. inspectors "could find nothing to corroborate Curveball's reporting," the CIA's Iraq Survey Group reported last October, more than a year after the invasion.

U.N. weapons teams also raided the other sites Curveball named. They interrogated managers, seized documents and used ground-penetrating radar to search, according to U.N. reports. They found no evidence of anything suspicious.

On March 7, 2003, Hans Blix, the chief U.N. inspector, told the Security Council that searches had found "no evidence" of mobile biological-production facilities in Iraq. It drew little notice at the time.

The invasion of Iraq began two weeks later.

Copyright © 2005 The Seattle Times Company

Full Article