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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
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June 17th,
2008 - ‘Curveball’ Speaks News article by the Los Angeles
Times |
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‘Curveball’
Speaks, and a Reputation as Disinformation Agent Remains Intact The Iraqi speaks publicly for the first time. Charges that he
fabricated intelligence that helped lead to war in Iraq are themselves
fiction, he insists. But there are fresh doubts about his honesty. By John Goetz & Bob Drogin Los Angeles Times June 17, 2008 Nuremberg, Germany - Rafid
Ahmed Alwan hoped for an easier life when he came here from Iraq nine years
ago. He also hoped for a reward for his cooperation with German intelligence
officers. "For what I've done, I
should be treated like a king," he said outside a cramped, low-rent
apartment he shares with his family. Instead, the Iraqi informant
code-named Curveball has flipped burgers at McDonald's and Burger King,
washed dishes in a Chinese restaurant and baked pretzels in an all-night
bakery. He also has faced withering international scorn for peddling
discredited intelligence that helped spur an invasion of his native country. Now, in his first public
comments, the 41-year-old engineer from Baghdad complains that the CIA and
other spy agencies are blaming him for their mistakes. "I'm not guilty,"
Alwan said, insisting that he made no false claims. "Believe me, I'm not
guilty." It was intelligence
attributed to Alwan - as Curveball - that the White House used in making its
case that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. He described
what turned out to be fictional mobile germ factories. The CIA belatedly
branded him a liar. After Curveball's role in
the pre-invasion intelligence fiasco was disclosed by The Los Angeles Times
four years ago, the con man behind the code name remained in the shadows. His
security was protected and his identity concealed by the BND, Germany's
Federal Intelligence Service. But when a reporter knocked
on his door one Sunday morning earlier this year, Alwan seemed neither
alarmed nor surprised. In a series of sometimes reluctant interviews that
followed, he emerged as a defiant and pugnacious defender of his intelligence
contributions and reputation. "Everything that's been
written about me isn't true," Alwan repeated. Along with confirmation of
Curveball's identity, however, have come fresh disclosures raising doubts
about his honesty - much of that new detail coming from friends, associates and
past employers. "He was corrupt,"
said a family friend who once employed him. "He always lied,"
said a fellow Burger King worker. And records reveal that when
Alwan fled to Germany, one step ahead of the Iraq justice ministry, an arrest
warrant had been issued alleging that he sold filched camera equipment on the
Baghdad black market. The reporter at his door
that morning offered Alwan a chance to defend himself publicly. He was calm, unshaven,
wearing a T-shirt and pajama bottoms. Alwan tried to bargain for an interview
fee. When he didn't get one, he shut the door saying he was "risking my
family" by talking. Over the next few weeks,
Alwan dodged attempts to reopen conversations and took steps to elude the
reporter. He altered his appearance by shaving his bushy mustache. He pulled
his name from a mailbox. He failed to show up at promised appointments. Eventually, he agreed to a
series of brief interviews. In every encounter, he was combative and
unapologetic. Others, he insisted, had twisted or misinterpreted his
information. "I never said Iraq had
weapons of mass destruction, never in my whole life," he said. "I
challenge anyone in the world to get a piece of paper from me, anything with
my signature, that proves I said there were weapons of mass destruction in
Iraq." How did the Bush
administration get it so wrong? "I'm not the source of
these problems," he said. Alwan's life as a secret
informant began in January 2000, soon after he applied for political asylum
at Zirndorf, a refugee camp outside Nuremberg. He told a BND team he had
helped run a secret Iraqi program to produce biological weapons, records
show. In 52 meetings with BND
handlers over the next year and a half, he provided hand-drawn sketches and
other details. German officials said they met mostly on Saturday mornings at
a BND safe house. He liked to go for pizza afterward. Alwan didn't share all his
secrets. He didn't disclose that he had been fired at least twice for dishonesty,
or that he fled Iraq to avoid arrest. But he did tell some whoppers that
should have raised warnings about his credibility. He claimed, for example,
that the son of his former boss, Basil Latif, secretly headed a vast WMD
procurement and smuggling scheme from England. British investigators found,
however, that Latif's son was a 16-year-old exchange student, not a criminal
mastermind. When a Western intelligence
team interviewed Latif outside Iraq in early 2002, a year before the war, he
warned that Alwan had been fired for falsifying invoices at work. Latif also
denied that anyone produced biological weapons at the plant where he worked
with Alwan. "They thought I was
lying," Latif, who now lives in Oman, said in an interview. "But I
was telling the truth. It upset me very much." German officials instead
believed Alwan's story that he helped manage an Iraqi factory that installed
fermenters, spray dryers and piping within tractor-trailers to brew anthrax,
botulinum toxin and other biological agents. CIA and Pentagon biological
warfare analysts embraced Alwan's account without corroborating evidence or
directly questioning the informant. President Bush declared in
his State of the Union address in January 2003 that "we know" that
Iraq built mobile germ factories. Then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell
highlighted Alwan's supposed "eyewitness" account to the U.N.
Security Council when he pressed the case for war. In October 2004, more than a
year after the invasion, a CIA-led investigation concluded that Baghdad had
abandoned all chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs after the
1991 Persian Gulf War. The germ trucks never existed. Alwan grew up in the
middle-class Dora neighborhood of southern Baghdad. The youngest of five
children, he was raised by his mother after his father died, according to
family friends. They were Sunni Muslims, members of the influential Janabi
clan, and his eldest brother became a brigadier in Saddam's Republican Guard. Alwan studied chemical
engineering at the Technical University of Baghdad, records show, graduating
in 1990 with a D average. His best subject: "Culture and History of
Iraq." But he learned English, the language of instruction, and applied
to join the ruling Baath Party. He worked as an appliance
repairman, then as a junior engineer at the state-run Chemical Engineering
and Design Center. In late 1994, he was named site engineer at Djerf al
Nadaf, a new warehouse complex about 10 miles south of Baghdad. His direct supervisor was
Hilal Freah, a British-trained engineer and friend of Alwan's mother. Freah,
who now lives in Jordan, viewed himself as Alwan's mentor but had trouble
trusting his protege. "Rafid told five or 10
stories everyday," Freah said in an interview. "I'd ask, 'Where
have you been?' And he'd say, 'I had a problem with my car.' Or, 'My family
was sick.' But I knew he was lying." He had a gift for it and
"was not embarrassed when caught in a lie," Freah said. At the Djerf al Nadaf
warehouse, laborers treated seeds from local farmers with fungicides to
prevent mold and rot. But Alwan convinced his BND handlers that the site's
corn-filled sheds were part of Iraq's secret germ weapons program. He worked
there, he told them, until 1998, when an unreported biological accident occurred. In fact, Alwan had been
dismissed three years earlier, in 1995, after inflating expenses and faking
receipts for tools, supplies and lamb for an office party. "I fired him,"
Freah said. "He was corrupt and he was found stealing." But the family
friend gave Alwan one more chance. Freah, Alwan and two other
friends formed a business to sell locally made shampoo and cleaners. Freah
says Alwan overcharged the partners for each shampoo bottle, and the company
collapsed. So did their friendship. Alwan's embarrassed mother later repaid
her son's debts. Alwan next created a line of
cosmetics, selling an eye shadow named "Whisper" in Arabic. That
failed amid allegations that he cheated his suppliers, Freah said. He then worked as a
technician at Babel, a Baghdad film and TV company that produced adoring
documentaries about Saddam. Alwan's alleged sale of Babel camera lenses and
other gear on the black market led the Iraqi justice ministry to issue an
arrest warrant, signed by a judge, in August 1998. Alwan already had fled.
Officials say smugglers helped him make his way through Jordan, Egypt, Libya
and Morocco before he reached southern Germany in late 1999. He brought no
blueprints, photos or other evidence, but he quickly won the confidence of the
BND officers. "He was
understated," said one former BND officer, who spoke on condition of
anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the case. "He was the
opposite of a braggart, and that was impressive." The BND set him up in a
small apartment and provided living expenses. Alwan started dressing in
stylish suits, bought a heavy gold necklace and kept a cupboard stocked with
whiskey, according to former neighbors. He left his TV blaring all day and
hit a local disco at night. He arranged to divorce the wife he had left in
Baghdad and married a Moroccan woman. They now have two children. The family
moved to Erlangen and then to another German location that The Times agreed
not to disclose. Alwan's fanciful accounts to
BND were echoed in his tall tales to friends and co-workers. In early 2002, a year before
the war, he told co-workers at the Burger King that he spied for Iraqi
intelligence and would report any fellow Iraqi worker who criticized Saddam's
regime. They couldn't decide if he
was dangerous or just crazy. "During breaks, he told
stories about what a big man he was in Baghdad," said Hamza Hamad
Rashid, who remembered an odd scene with the pudgy Alwan in his too-tight
Burger King uniform praising Saddam in the home of der Whopper. "But he
always lied. We never believed anything he said." Another Iraqi friend,
Ghazwan Adnan, remembers laughing when he applied for a job at a local
Princess Garden Chinese Restaurant and discovered Alwan washing dishes in the
back while claiming to be "a big deal" in Iraq. "How could
America believe such a person?" But an unrepentant Alwan is
unfazed. "Everything I said was
true," he said. "And everything that's been written about me is
wrong. It's all wrong. The main thing is, I'm an honest man." About this story Four years ago, The Times
broke a story about an Iraqi refugee living in Germany whose bogus
intelligence about a Baghdad biological weapons program was used to justify
the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. John Goetz, an American freelance journalist
in Germany, worked with Times staff writer Bob Drogin on subsequent coverage
of the informant, code-named Curveball. Goetz, now a reporter for
Germany's Der Spiegel magazine, recently interviewed Curveball as part of a
German reporting team that included Marcel Rosenbach and Holger Stark. Der
Spiegel shared its material with The Times, which conducted additional
reporting. This article was written for The Times by Goetz and Drogin. External link: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-na-curveball18-2008jun18,0,5268366.story |