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November 20th,
2005 - How U.S. Fell Under the Spell of ‘Curveball’ News article by the Los Angeles
Times |
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How U.S. Fell Under the Spell
of ‘Curveball’ The Iraqi informant’s German handlers say they had told U.S. officials
that his information was ‘not proven,’ and were shocked when President Bush
and Colin L. Powell used it in key prewar speeches By Bob Drogin and John Goetz Los Angeles November 20, 2005 Berlin - The German
intelligence officials responsible for one of the most important informants
on Saddam Hussein's suspected weapons of mass destruction say that the Bush
administration and the CIA repeatedly exaggerated his claims during the
run-up to the war in Iraq. Five senior officials from
Germany's Federal Intelligence Service, or BND, said in interviews with The
Times that 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.
Then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell also misstated Curveball's accounts
in his prewar presentation to the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003, the Germans
said. Curveball's German handlers
for the last six years said his information was often vague, mostly
secondhand and impossible to confirm. "This was not
substantial evidence," said a senior German intelligence official.
"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
suffered from emotional and mental problems. "He is not a stable,
psychologically stable guy," said a BND official who supervised the
case. "He is not a completely normal person," agreed a BND analyst. Curveball was the chief source
of inaccurate prewar U.S. accusations that Baghdad had biological weapons, a
commission appointed by Bush reported this year. The commission did not
interview Curveball, who still insists his story was true, or the German
officials who handled his case. The German account emerges
as the White House is lashing out at domestic critics, particularly Senate
Democrats, over allegations the administration manipulated intelligence to go
to war. Last week, Vice President Dick Cheney called such claims reprehensible
and pernicious. In Congress, the Senate
Select Committee on Intelligence is resuming its long-stalled investigation
of the administration's use of prewar intelligence. Committee members said
last week that the Curveball case would be a key part of their review. House
Democrats are calling for a similar inquiry. An investigation by The
Times based on interviews since May with about 30 current and former
intelligence officials in the U.S., Germany, England, Iraq and the United Nations,
as well as other experts, shows that U.S. bungling in the Curveball case was
worse than official reports have disclosed. The White House, for
example, ignored evidence gathered by United Nations weapons inspectors
shortly before the war that disproved Curveball's account. Bush and his aides
issued increasingly dire warnings about Iraq's biological weapons before the
war even though intelligence from Curveball had not changed in two years. At the Central Intelligence
Agency, officials embraced Curveball's account even though they could not
confirm it or interview him until a year after the invasion. They ignored
multiple warnings about his reliability before the war, punished in-house
critics who provided proof that he had lied and refused to admit error until
May 2004, 14 months after the invasion. After the CIA vouched for
Curveball's accounts, Bush declared in his 2003 State of the Union speech
that Iraq had "mobile biological weapons labs" designed to produce
"germ warfare agents." Bush cited the mobile germ factories in at
least four prewar speeches and statements, and other world leaders repeated
the charge. Powell also highlighted
Curveball's "eyewitness" account when he warned the United Nations
Security Council on the eve of war that Iraq's mobile labs could brew enough
weapons-grade microbes "in a single month to kill thousands upon
thousands of people." The senior BND officer who
supervised Curveball's case said he was aghast when he watched Powell
misstate Curveball's claims as a justification for war. "We were shocked,"
the official said. "Mein Gott! We had always told them it was not
proven…. It was not hard intelligence." In a telephone interview,
Powell said that George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence,
and his top deputies personally assured him before his U.N. speech that U.S.
intelligence on the mobile labs was "solid." Since then, Powell
said, the case "has totally blown up in our faces." Many officials interviewed
for this report, including the German intelligence officers, spoke on the
condition they not be identified because they were bound by secrecy
agreements, were not authorized to speak to the news media or because the
case involved classified sources and methods. Curveball lives under an
assumed name in southern Germany. The BND has given him a furnished
apartment, language lessons and a stipend generous enough that he does not
need to work. His wife has emigrated from Iraq, and they have an infant
daughter. The BND has relocated him
twice because of concerns that his life was in danger. They still watch him
closely. "He is difficult to integrate" into local society, said a
BND operations officer. "We are still busy with him." Curveball could not be
interviewed for this report. BND officials threatened last summer to strip
him of his salary, housing and protection if he agreed to meet with The
Times. "We told him, 'If you
talk to anyone on the outside… you are out and you get no more help from
us,'" the BND supervisor said. CIA officials now concede
that the Iraqi fused fact, research he gleaned on the Internet and what his
former co-workers called "water cooler gossip" into a nightmarish
fantasy that played on U.S. fears after the Sept. 11 attacks. Curveball's motive, CIA
officials said, was not to start a war. He simply was seeking a German visa. German journey The Curveball chronicle
began in November 1999, when the dark-haired Iraqi in his late 20s flew into
Munich's Franz Josef Strauss Airport with a tourist visa. The Baghdad-born chemical engineer
promptly applied for political asylum in Arabic and halting English. He told
German immigration officials he had embezzled Iraqi government money and
faced prison or worse if sent home. The Germans sent him to
Zirndorf, a refugee center near Nuremberg once used for Soviet defectors,
where he joined a long line of Iraqi exiles seeking German visas. Abruptly, his story changed. He once led a team, he told
BND officers, that equipped trucks to brew deadly bio-agents. He named six
sites where Iraq might be hiding biological warfare vehicles. Three already
were operating. A farm program to boost crop yields was cover for Iraq's new
biological weapons production program, he said. Germany provided Europe's
most generous benefits to Iraqi refugees, and several hundred arrived each
month. But few had useful credible intelligence on Baghdad's suspected
weapons programs. Intelligence agents became accustomed to exaggerated
claims. "The Iraqis were adept
at feeding us what we wanted to hear," said a former official of the
Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency who helped debrief about 50 Iraqi
emigres in Germany before the war. "Most of it was garbage.'' But for this defector, the
Germans assigned two case officers as well as a team of chemists, biologists
and other experts. They debriefed him from January 2000 to September 2001. Since the Iraqi had arrived
in Munich, U.S. liaison with German intelligence was assigned to the local
DIA team. Their clandestine operating base was an elegant 19th century
mansion known as Munich House. There he was assigned his codename: Curveball. The base cryptonym
"ball" was used to signify weapons, two former U.S. intelligence
officials said. An earlier informant in Germany, for example, was called
Matchball. In DIA files, Iraqi sources
were listed as "red" if U.S. intelligence could interview them.
Curveball was a "blue" source, meaning the Germans would not permit
U.S. access to him. Curveball said he hated
Americans, the Germans explained. As a result, the DIA - like the
BND - never tried to check Curveball's background or verify his accounts
before sending reports to other U.S. intelligence agencies. Despite that
failure, CIA analysts accepted the incoming reports as credible and quickly
passed them to senior policymakers. The reports had problems,
however. The Germans usually interviewed Curveball in Arabic, using a
translator, although the Iraqi sometimes spoke English. "But a case officer
wants to speak directly to his source," said the senior BND officer.
"Curveball began to learn German, and thus there was a big mix [of
languages] that went on. This explains some of the confusion." It got worse, like a
children's game of "telephone," in which information gets
increasingly distorted. The BND sent German summaries of their English and
Arabic interview reports to Munich House and to British intelligence. The DIA
team translated the German back to English and prepared its own summaries.
Those went to DIA's directorate for human intelligence, at a high-rise office
in Clarendon, Va. Clarendon passed 95 DIA
reports to the Weapons Intelligence, Non-Proliferation and Arms Control
Center, known as WINPAC, at CIA headquarters in nearby Langley. Experts there
called other specialists, including an independent laboratory, to help
evaluate the data. Spy satellites were directed to focus on Curveball's
sites. CIA artists prepared detailed drawings from Curveball's crude
sketches. The system led to confusion,
not clarity. "Analysts were studying
drawings made by artists working from descriptions by a guy we couldn't talk
to," explained a former senior CIA official who helped supervise the
case and the postwar investigation. "It was hard to figure out." "Our fear is that as it
was analyzed and translated and reanalyzed and retranslated, and comments got
added, it could have gotten sexed up by accident," agreed a former CIA
operations official. The British Secret
Intelligence Service, known as MI6, blamed the BND for omitting what a
Parliamentary inquiry called "significant detail" in the reports
they sent to London. At issue were Curveball's trucks. In an e-mail to The Times,
Robin Butler, head of the British inquiry into prewar intelligence, said
"incomplete reporting" by the BND misled the British to assume the
trucks could produce weapons-grade bio-agents such as anthrax spores. But
Curveball only spoke of producing a liquid slurry unsuitable for bombs or
warheads. At the CIA, bio-warfare
experts viewed the defector's reports as sophisticated and technically
feasible. They also matched the analysts' expectations. After the 1991 Gulf War,
U.N. inspectors struggled to unravel Baghdad's secret biological weapons
program. They speculated that the regime produced germs in mobile factories
to evade detection. American U-2 spy planes
looked for suspicious vehicles, and U.N. teams raided parking lots. In 1994, acting on tips from
Israeli intelligence, U.N. inspectors even stopped red-and-white trucks in
Baghdad marked: "Tip Top Ice Cream." Inside they found ice cream. "We thought they could
easily transport other materials around," said Rolf Ekeus, who headed
the U.N. inspectors from 1991 to 1997. Finally, in mid-1995, Iraq
officials admitted that before the Gulf War they had secretly produced 30,000
liters of anthrax, botulinum toxin, aflatoxin and other lethal bio-agents.
They had deployed hundreds of germ-filled munitions and researched other
deadly diseases for military use. They denied they ever had mobile production
facilities. Curveball's story to the Germans
in 2000 and 2001 neatly dovetailed with that history and continuing CIA
suspicions. The Iraqi defector said he
was recruited out of engineering school at Baghdad University in 1994 by
Iraq's Military Industrial Commission, headed by Saddam Hussein's son-in-law
Hussein Kamil. He said he went to work the following year for "Dr.
Germ," British-trained microbiologist Rihab Rashid Taha, to build
bio-warfare vehicles. Kamil and Taha had headed the pre-1991 bio-weapons
program. Curveball said he was assigned
to the Chemical Engineering and Design Center, behind the Rashid Hotel in
central Baghdad. That also fit a pattern, as
the center provided a cover story for Iraq's first bio-warfare program . Curveball said he had helped
assemble one truck-mounted germ factory in 1997 at Djerf al Nadaf, a
tumble-down cluster of warehouses in a gritty industrial area 10 miles
southeast of Baghdad. He helped the Germans build a scale model of the
facility, showing how vehicles were hidden in a two-story building - and how
they entered and exited on either end. He designed laboratory
equipment for the trucks, he said, providing dimensions, temperature ranges
and other details. He sketched diagrams of how the system operated, and
identified more than a dozen co-workers. But the story had holes . "His information to us
was very vague," said the senior German intelligence official. "He
could not say if these things functioned, if they worked." Curveball also said he could
not identify what microbes the trucks were designed to produce. "He didn't know …
whether it was anthrax or not," said the BND supervisor. "He had
nothing to do with actual production of [a biological] agent. He was in the
equipment testing phase. And the equipment worked." David Kay, who read the Curveball
file when he headed the CIA's search for hidden weapons in 2003, 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
[an] agent." But the CIA and the White
House overlooked the holes in the story. In a February 2003 radio
address and statement, Bush warned that "first-hand witnesses have
informed us that Iraq has at least seven mobile factories" for germ
warfare. With these, Bush said, "Iraq could produce within just months
hundreds of pounds of biological poisons." Curveball had told the
Germans that Taha's team planned to build mobile factories at six sites
across Iraq, from Numaniyah in the south to Tikrit in the north. But he
visited only Djerf al Nadaf, he said. His information about the other sites,
he told the Germans, was second-hand. Flawed witness Curveball's reports were
highly valued in Washington because the CIA had no Iraqi spies with access to
weapons programs at the time. One detail particularly
impressed the CIA: Curveball's report of a 1998 germ weapons accident at
Djerf al Nadaf. Powell cited the incident in his prewar U.N. speech. An
"eyewitness" was "at the site" when an accident occurred,
and 12 technicians "died from exposure to biological agents,"
Powell said. Lawrence B. Wilkerson, then
Powell's chief of staff, said senior CIA officials told Powell the
"principal source had not only worked in mobile labs but had seen an
accident and had been injured in the accident…. This gave more credibility to
it." But German intelligence
officials said the CIA was wrong. Curveball only "heard rumors of an
accident," the BND supervisor said. "He gave a third-hand
account." The incident led to the
first questions inside the CIA about Curveball's credibility. In May 2000,
the Germans allowed a doctor from the CIA's counter-proliferation branch to
meet Curveball and draw a blood sample. Antibodies in the blood could
indicate if he had been exposed to anthrax or other unusual pathogens in the
accident. The medical tests were
inconclusive, but the meeting was memorable. The BND, insisting Curveball
spoke no English and would not meet Americans, introduced the doctor as a
German. The CIA physician remained silent, because he was not fluent in
German. He was surprised, he later told others, that Curveball spoke
"excellent English" to others in the room. Moreover, Curveball was
"very emotional, very excitable," the doctor told one colleague.
And although it was early morning, Curveball smelled of liquor and looked
"very sick" from a stiff hangover. German intelligence
officials said Curveball didn't have a drinking problem. But they had other
concerns. Like many defectors,
Curveball at first seemed eager to please. He thanked his new friends and
laughed at their jokes. He was charming and clearly intelligent, providing
complex engineering details. But as the questions
intensified, Curveball grew moody and irritable. His memory began to fail. He
confused places and dates. He fretted about his personal safety, about his
parents and wife in Baghdad, and about his future in Germany. "He was between two
worlds, sometimes cooperative, sometimes aggressive," said the BND
supervisor. "He was not an easy-going guy." Curveball largely ceased
cooperating in 2001 after he was granted asylum, officials said. He would
refuse to meet for days, and then weeks, at a time. He also increasingly
asked for money. "He knew he was important,"
said the BND analyst. "He was not an idiot." Defectors are often problem
sources. Viewed as traitors back home, many embellish their stories to gain
favor with spy services. In the shadow world of intelligence, Curveball's
inability or reluctance to provide many details actually helped convince
analysts he was telling the truth. Had Curveball claimed
expertise with biological weapons or direct access to other secret programs,
said the BND analyst, "It would be easier to assume he was lying." A former British official
involved with the case said Curveball's behavior should be seen through
another lens. He is convinced that Curveball was under intense stress,
terrified both that his visa scam would be exposed, and that his lies would
be used to start a war. "He must have been
scared out of his mind," he said. But concerns about
Curveball's reliability were growing. In early 2001, the CIA's Berlin station
chief sent a message to headquarters noting that a BND official had
complained that the Iraqi was "out of control," and couldn't be
located, Senate investigators found. MI6 cabled the CIA that
British intelligence "is not convinced that Curveball is a wholly
reliable source" and that "elements of [his] behavior strike us as
typical of … fabricators,'' the presidential commission reported. British intelligence also
warned that spy satellite images taken in 1997 when Curveball claimed to be
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. U.S. and German officials
feared that Ahmad Chalabi had coached Curveball after the defector said his
brother had worked as a bodyguard for the controversial Iraqi exile leader. But
they found no evidence. Curveball "had very
little contact with his [bodyguard] brother," the BND supervisor said.
"They are not close.'' More problematic were the
three sources the CIA said had corroborated Curveball's story. Two had ties
to Chalabi. All three turned out to be frauds. The most important, a former
major in the Iraqi intelligence service, was deemed a liar by the CIA and
DIA. In May 2002, a fabricator warning was posted in U.S. intelligence
databases. Powell said he was never
warned, during three days of intense briefings at CIA headquarters before his
U.N. speech, that he was using material that both the DIA and CIA had
determined was false. "As you can imagine, I was not pleased,"
Powell said. "What really made me not pleased was they had put out a
burn notice on this guy, and people who were even present at my briefings
knew it." But BND officials said their
U.S. colleagues repeatedly assured them Curveball's story had been
corroborated. "They kept on telling
us there were three or four sources," said the senior German
intelligence official. "They said it many times." Behind the scenes, the CIA
stepped up pressure to interview Curveball. The BND finally accepted a
compromise in the fall of 2002. They let CIA analysts send questions, but
they could not interview the Iraqi. The frustration was intense
at the CIA. But it wasn't surprising. Relations long have been
rocky between the CIA and BND, officials in both spy services acknowledged.
The friction dates to the Cold War, when the BND complained it was treated as
a second-class agency. Spy services jealously guard
their sources, and the BND was not obligated to share access to Curveball.
"We would never let them see one of ours," said the former CIA
operations officer. Intelligence shift Despite the lack of access
or any new reports from Curveball, U.S. intelligence sharply upgraded its
assessments of Iraq's biological weapons before the war. The shift is
reflected in declassified portions of National Intelligence Estimates, which
are produced as the authoritative judgment of the 15 U.S. intelligence
agencies. In May 1999, before
Curveball defected, a national intelligence estimate on worldwide biological
warfare programs said Iraq was "probably continuing work to develop and produce
BW [bio-warfare] agents," and could restart production in six months. In December 2000, after a
year of Curveball's reports, another national intelligence estimate
cautiously noted that "new intelligence" had caused U.S.
intelligence "to adjust our assessment upward" and "suggests
Baghdad has expanded'' its bio-weapons program. But the caveats disappeared
after the Sept. 11 attacks and the still-unsolved mailing of anthrax-laced
letters to several U.S. states. Iraq "continues to
produce at least … three BW agents" and its mobile germ factories
provide "capabilities surpassing the pre-Gulf War era," the CIA
weapons center warned in October 2001. The CIA followed up with a public
White Paper and briefings for the White House and three Senate committees. The CIA hadn't seen new
intelligence on Iraq's germ weapons. Instead, analysts had estimated what
they believed would be the maximum output from seven mobile labs - only one
of which Curveball said he had seen - operating nonstop or six months. But even
Curveball's description of a single lab was a fiction. Similar misjudgments filled
the most important prewar intelligence document, the National Intelligence
Estimate issued in October 2002. It was sent to Congress days before
lawmakers voted to authorize use of military force if Hussein refused to give
up his illicit arsenal. For the first time, the new
estimate warned with "high confidence" that Iraq "has now
established large-scale, redundant and concealed BW agent production
capabilities." It said "all key
aspects" of Iraq's offensive BW program "are active and that most
elements are larger and more advanced than they were before the Gulf
War." The assessment was based
"largely on information from a single source - Curveball," the
presidential commission concluded. It was one of "the most important and
alarming" judgments in the document, the panel added. And it was utterly
wrong. A handful of bio-analysts in
the weapons center, part of the CIA's intelligence directorate, controlled
the Curveball reports and remained confident in their veracity. But across
the CIA bureaucracy, the clandestine service officers who usually handle
defectors and other human sources were increasingly skeptical. Tyler Drumheller, then the
head of CIA spying in Europe, called the BND station chief at the German
embassy in Washington in September 2002 seeking access to Curveball. Drumheller and the station
chief met for lunch at the German's favorite seafood restaurant in upscale
Georgetown. The German officer warned that Curveball had suffered a mental
breakdown and was "crazy," the now-retired CIA veteran recalled. "He said, first off,
'They won't let you see him,'" Drumheller said. "'Second, there are
a lot of problems. Principally, we think he's probably a fabricator.'" The BND station chief,
contacted by The Times during the summer, said he could not "discuss any
of this." He has since been reassigned back to Germany. His BND
supervisors declined to discuss the lunch meeting. Drumheller, a veteran of 26 years
in the CIA clandestine service, said he and several aides repeatedly raised
alarms after the lunch in tense exchanges with CIA analysts working on the
Curveball case. "The fact is, there was
a lot of yelling and screaming about this guy," said James Pavitt, then
chief of clandestine services, who retired from the CIA in August 2004.
"My people were saying, 'We think he's a stinker.'" The analysts refused to back
down. In one meeting, the chief analyst fiercely defended Curveball's
account, saying she had confirmed on the Internet many of the details he
cited. "Exactly, it's on the Internet!" the operations group chief
for Germany, now a CIA station chief in Europe, exploded in response.
"That's where he got it too," according to a participant at the meeting. Other warnings poured in.
The CIA Berlin station chief wrote that the BND had "not been able to
verify" Curveball's claims. The CIA doctor who met Curveball wrote to
his supervisor shortly before Powell's speech questioning "the validity"
of the Iraqi's information. "Keep in mind that this
war is going to happen regardless of what Curve Ball said or didn't say and
the Powers That Be probably aren't terribly interested in whether Curve Ball
knows what he's talking about," his supervisor wrote back, Senate
investigators found. The supervisor later told them he was only voicing his
opinion that war appeared inevitable. Tenet has denied receiving
warnings that Curveball might be a fabricator. He declined to be interviewed
for this report. Powell said that at the time
he prepared for his U.N. speech in early 2003, no one warned him of the
debate inside the CIA over Curveball's credibility. "I was being as
careful as I possibly could," he said. Working from a CIA
conference room adjoining CIA Director Tenet's seventh-floor office suite,
Powell and his aides repeatedly challenged the credibility of CIA evidence -
including the mobile germ factories. "We pressed as hard as
we could, and the CIA stood by it adamantly," Powell recalled.
"This is one we really pressed on, really spent a lot time on…. We knew
how important it was." No smoking gun On Feb. 5, 2003, Powell told
the packed U.N. chamber that his account was based on "solid
sources" and "facts and conclusions based on solid
intelligence." "We thought maybe they had the smoking gun,"
recalled the BND supervisor, who watched Powell on TV. "My gut feeling
was the Americans must have so much from reconnaissance planes and
satellites, from infiltrated spotter teams from Special Forces, and other
systems. We thought they must have tons of stuff." Instead, Powell emphasized
Curveball's "eyewitness" account, calling it "one of the most
worrisome things that emerge from the thick intelligence file." A congressional staffer on
intelligence said she realized the case was weak when she saw Powell display
CIA drawings of trucks but not photos. "A drawing isn't evidence,"
she said. "It's hearsay." Powell's speech failed to
sway many diplomats, but it had an immediate impact in Baghdad. "The Iraqis scoured the
country for trailers," said a former CIA official who helped interrogate
Iraqi officials and scientists in U.S. custody after the war. "They were
in real panic mode. They were terrified that this was real, and they couldn't
explain it." An explanation was available
within days, but U.S. officials ignored it. On Feb. 8, three days after
Powell's speech, the U.N.'s Team Bravo conducted the first search of
Curveball's former work site. The raid by the American-led biological weapons
experts lasted 3 1/2 hours. It was long enough to prove Curveball had lied. Djerf al Nadaf was on a
dusty road lined with auto repair shops and small factories, near the former
Tuwaitha nuclear facility and a sewage-filled tributary of the Tigris River. Behind a high wall, a
two-story grain silo adjoined the warehouse that Curveball had identified as
the truck assembly facility. "That's the one where
the mobile labs were supposed to be," said a former U.N. inspector who
worked with the U.S. and other intelligence agencies. "That's the one we
were interested in." The doors were locked, so
Boston microbiologist Rocco Casagrande climbed on a white U.N. vehicle,
yanked open a metal flap in the wall, and crawled inside. After scrambling
over a huge pile of corn, he scraped two samples of residue from cracks in
the cement floor, two more from holes in the wall and one from a discarded
shower basin outside. Back at the Canal Hotel that
afternoon, he tested the samples for bacterial or viral DNA. He was searching
for any signs that germs were produced at the site or any traces of the 1998
bio-weapons accident. Test results were all negative. "No threat agents
detected," Casagrande wrote in his computer journal that night.
"Got to climb on a jeep and crawl into buildings and play second-story
man, but otherwise spent the day in the lab." A British inspector, who had
helped bring the intelligence file from New York, found another surprise. Curveball had said the germ
trucks could enter the warehouse from either end. But there were no garage
doors and a solid, 6-foot-high wall surrounded most of the building. The wall
British intelligence saw in 1997 satellite photos clearly made impossible the
traffic patterns Curveball had described. U.N. teams also raided the
other sites Curveball had named. They interrogated managers, seized documents
and used ground-penetrating radar, according to U.N. reports. The U.N. inspectors
"could find nothing to corroborate Curveball's reporting," the
CIA's Iraq Survey Group reported last year. On March 7, 2003, Hans Blix,
the chief U.N. inspector, told the Security Council that a series of 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. Phantom labs Soon after U.S. troops
entered Baghdad, the discovery of two trucks loaded with lab equipment in
northern Iraq brought cheers to the CIA weapons center. Curveball examined photos
relayed to Germany and said that while he hadn't worked on the two trucks,
equipment in the pictures looked like components he had installed at Djerf al
Nadaf. Days later, the CIA and DIA
rushed to publish a White Paper declaring the trucks part of Hussein's
biological warfare program. The report dismissed Iraq's explanation that the
equipment generated hydrogen as a "cover story." A day later, Bush
told a Polish TV reporter: "We found the weapons of mass
destruction." But bio-weapons experts in
the intelligence community were sharply critical. A former senior official of
the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research called the
unclassified report an unprecedented "rush to judgment." The DIA then ordered a
classified review of the evidence. One of 15 analysts held to the initial
finding that the trucks were built for germ warfare. The sole believer was
the CIA analyst who helped draft the original White Paper. Hamish Killip, a former
British army officer and biological weapons expert, flew to Baghdad in July
2003 as part of the Iraq Survey Group, the CIA-led Iraqi weapons hunt. He
inspected the truck trailers and was immediately skeptical. "The equipment was
singularly inappropriate" for biological weapons, he said. "We were
in hysterics over this. You'd have better luck putting a couple of dust bins
on the back of the truck and brewing it in there." The trucks were built to
generate hydrogen, not germs, he said. But the CIA refused to back down. In
March 2004, Killip quit, protesting that the CIA was covering up the truth. Rod Barton, an Australian
intelligence officer and another bio-weapons expert, also quit over what he
said was the CIA's refusal to admit error. "Of course the trailers had
nothing to do with Curveball," Barton wrote in a recent e-mail. The Iraq Survey Group ultimately
agreed. An "exhaustive investigation" showed the trailers could not
"be part of any BW program," it reported in October 2004. The now-discredited CIA
White Paper remains on the agency's website. A CIA spokesman said the report was
posted because it was part of the historical record. After U.S troops failed to
find illicit Iraqi weapons in the days and weeks after the invasion, the CIA
created the Iraq Survey Group to conduct a methodical search in June 2003. Tenet appointed Kay to head
it. The pugnacious Texan was convinced that Baghdad had hidden mobile germ
factories. Kay's teams returned to Djerf al Nadaf and other sites identified
by Curveball. One CIA-led unit
investigated Curveball himself. The leader was "Jerry," a veteran
CIA bio-weapons analyst who had championed Curveball's case at the CIA
weapons center. They found Curveball's personnel file in an Iraqi government
storeroom. It was devastating. Curveball was last in his
engineering class, not first, as he had claimed. He was a low-level trainee
engineer, not a project chief or site manager, as the CIA had insisted. Most important, records
showed Curveball had been fired in 1995, at the very time he said he had
begun working on bio-warfare trucks. A former CIA official said Curveball
also apparently was jailed for a sex crime and then drove a Baghdad taxi. Jerry and his team
interviewed 60 of Curveball's family, friends and co-workers. They all denied
working on germ weapons trucks. Curveball's former bosses at the engineering
center said the CIA had fallen for "water cooler gossip" and
"corridor conversations." "The Iraqis were all
laughing," recalled a former member of the survey group. "They were
saying, 'This guy? You've got to be kidding.'" Jerry tracked down Curveball's
Sunni Muslim parents in a middle-class Baghdad neighborhood. "Our guy was very
polite," Kay recalled. "He said, 'We understand your son doesn't
like Americans.' His mother looked shocked. She said, 'No, no! He loves
Americans.' And she took him into [her son's] bedroom and it was filled with
posters of American rock stars. It was like any other teenage room. She said
one of his goals was to go to America." The deeper Jerry probed, the
worse Curveball looked. Childhood friends called him
a "great liar" and a "con artist." Another called him
"a real operator." The team reported that "people kept saying
what a rat Curveball was." Jerry and another CIA
analyst abruptly broke off the investigation and took a military flight back
to Washington. Kay said Jerry appeared to be nearing a nervous breakdown. "They had been true
believers in Curveball," Kay said. "They absolutely believed in
him. They knew every detail in his file. But it was total hokum. There was no
truth in it. They said they had to go home to explain how all this was all so
wrong. They wanted to fight the battle at the CIA." Back home, senior CIA
officials resisted. Jerry was "read the riot act" and accused of
"making waves" by his office director, according to the presidential
commission. He and his colleague ultimately were transferred out of the
weapons center. The CIA was "very, very
vindictive," Kay said. Soon after, Jerry got in
touch with Michael Scheuer, a CIA analyst who felt he had been sidelined for
criticizing CIA counterterrorism tactics. Scheuer would quit within a year. "Jerry had become kind
of a nonperson," Scheuer recalled of their meeting. "There was a
tremendous amount of pressure on him not to say anything. Just to sit there
and shut up." A CIA spokeswoman confirmed
the account, but declined to comment further. Jerry still works at the CIA
and could not be contacted for this report. His former supervisor, reached at
home, said she could not speak to the media. "What was done to them was wrong,"
said a former Pentagon official who investigated the case for the
presidential commission. "But we didn't see it so much as a cover-up as
an expression of how profoundly resistant to recognizing mistakes the CIA
culture was." Kay’s findings In December 2003, Kay flew
back to CIA headquarters. He said he told Tenet that Curveball was a liar and
he was convinced Iraq had no mobile labs or other illicit weapons. CIA
officials confirm their exchange. Kay said he was assigned to
a windowless office without a working telephone. On Jan. 20, 2004, Bush
lauded Kay and the Iraq Survey Group in his State of the Union Speech for
finding "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities…. Had we
failed to act, the dictator's weapons of mass destruction program would
continue to this day." Kay quit three days later
and went public with his concerns. In Germany, the BND finally
agreed to let the CIA interview Curveball. The CIA sent one of its best
officers, fluent in German and gifted at working reluctant sources. They met at BND headquarters
in Pullach, a suburb of Munich, in mid-March 2004 - one year after the Iraq
invasion. Alone with Curveball at
last, the CIA officer steadily reviewed details and picked at contradictions
like a prosecutor working a hostile witness. He showed spy satellite images
and other evidence from the sites Curveball had identified. Each night, he would file an
encrypted report to CIA headquarters on his computer, and then call
Drumheller. "After the first couple
of days, he said, 'This doesn't sound good,' " Drumheller recalled.
"After the first week, he said, 'This guy is lying. He's lying about a
bunch of stuff.'" But Curveball refused to
admit deceit. When challenged, he would mumble, say he didn't know and suggest
the questioner was wrong or the photo was doctored. As the evidence piled up,
he simply stopped talking. "He never said, 'You
got me,'" Drumheller said. "He just shrugged, and didn't say
anything. It was all over. We told our guy, 'You might as well wrap it up and
come home.'" It took more than a month to
track and recall every U.S. intelligence report - at least 100 in all - based
on Curveball's misinformation. In a blandly worded notice to its stations
around the world, the CIA said in May 2004: "Discrepancies surfaced
regarding the information provided by … Curveball in this stream of
reporting, which indicate that he lost his claimed access in 1995. Our
assessment, therefore, is that Curveball appears to be fabricating in this
stream of reporting." The CIA had advised Bush in
the fall of 2003 of "problems with the sourcing" on biological
weapons, an official familiar with the briefing said. But the president has
never withdrawn the statement in his 2003 State of the Union speech that Iraq
produced "germ warfare agents" or his postwar assertions that
"we found the weapons of mass destruction." U.S., British and German
intelligence officials still debate what Curveball really saw, and what he
really did. One possible answer was buried in records the Iraq Survey Group
recovered at the engineering and design center in Baghdad. They show that Iraqi
officials considered installing seed handling gear on trucks in 1995, but
instead put the machinery in warehouses, like those at Djerf al Nadaf.
Perhaps Curveball heard about the modified trucks and spun them into a
bio-weapons system for gullible intelligence agencies. "You're left at the end
with uncertainty," said the former CIA official who helped supervise the
Curveball case and the postwar investigation. "We know what he said. We
know we don't believe him. But was he making it all up? Was he coached? Did
he hear something and then embellish it? These things are still
unresolved." Not for Curveball. "He
is convinced his story is true," said the BND analyst. "He has no
doubts to this day." Drogin is a Times staff
writer. Goetz is a special correspondent. Also contributing to this report
from Baghdad was staff writer Jeffrey Fleishman. Key developments 1991 Gulf War ends Saddam Hussein loses the Gulf
War and orders aides to destroy stocks of germ-filled bombs. Regime officials
lie to U.N. inspectors about prewar program and hide evidence of biological
warfare factories. 1992 U.N. acts A U.N. weapons inspector
speculates in a memo that Iraq may be using mobile germ production facilities
to hide its bio-warfare program. U.N. launches unsuccessful raids to find the
suspected germ trucks. 1994 Curveball gets job Curveball is hired out of
engineering school at Baghdad University to work at the Chemical Engineering
and Design Center. He says he is first in his class, but records later show
that he was last in his class. May 1995 Enter 'Dr. Germ' Curveball says he is
assigned to help his boss, Dr. Rihab Taha, also known as "Dr.
Germ," as she begins planning for secret assembly of vehicles that can
brew deadly germs and avoid detection. July 1995 An Iraqi admission Regime officials admit to
U.N. inspectors that Iraq produced and weaponized anthrax, botulinum toxin, aflatoxin
and other biological poisons before the Gulf War. CIA analysts suspect
Baghdad has secret mobile labs. July 1997 Germ truck Curveball says he helped
assemble a germ-production unit on trucks at Djerf al Nadaf. But the Iraqi
says he did not see the unit in use, and did not know what germs it was
designed to produce. Fall 1998 Accident rumors Curveball says an accident
at Djerf al Nadaf kills 12 bio-warfare technicians. The CIA later says
Curveball witnessed the accident and was injured, but Germans say he only
heard "rumors" of incident. November 1999 Move to Germany Curveball applies for
political asylum in Germany. He tells German intelligence for first time that
he built germ weapons trucks. U.S. investigators later conclude he conjured up
story to obtain visa. January 2000 Curveball talks German intelligence officers
first interrogate Curveball. They refuse to let U.S. operatives meet him. But
summaries of his information are quickly provided to senior U.S.
policymakers. May 2000 Doubts raised Doubts emerge about
Curveball. A CIA doctor, posing as a German, meets the defector and reports
he spoke "excellent English." German officials say Curveball has
emotional problems. September 2001 9/11 raises profile The Germans complete interrogations
of Curveball. 9/11 terror attacks raise U.S. concerns about Saddam Hussein.
CIA reassesses Curveball reports and sharply increases warnings of Iraq's
germ weapons. Fall 2002 A CIA warning A German intelligence
official tells Tyler Drumheller that Curveball may be a fabricator.
Drumheller tries to warn others at the CIA. But U.S. intelligence concludes
that Iraq has greater bio-warfare capabilities. February - March 2003 Powell speaks Colin Powell warns U.N. that
the mobile labs Curveball described can kill thousands of people. U.N.
inspectors visit Djerf al Nadaf and other sites in Iraq but find no evidence.
U.S. invades Iraq. May 2003 Bush affirms WMD U.S. find two trucks with lab
equipment. Curveball identifies some items. President Bush announces finding
weapons of mass destruction. CIA determines the vehicles cannot be used for
biological weapons. Fall 2003 Story unravels CIA-led investigators
discover Curveball was fired in 1995, and could not have worked on
bio-weapons. Friends call him a liar and a fraud. "Jerry," a CIA
official, tries to convince senior officials of their mistake. March - May 2004 CIA closes case Germans allow the U.S. to
interview Curveball. He refuses to admit deceit, but CIA case officer is
convinced he is lying. CIA declares Curveball a fabricator and withdraws all
reports based on his accounts. © 2005 Los Angeles Times External link: http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-na-curveball20nov20,1,3977455,print.story |