I expect a number of people will diary this, but it deserves it. For me, it's an exercise in learning, just like college: Read and takes notes, then write them up. Find the important parts, make sure they stick, make sure I communicate those parts effectively. It's a big article (with a great timeline at the end) and the Times is free onlin (may need to register, but I've never gotten spammed by them).
How U.S. Fell Under the Spell of 'Curveball'
by Bob Drogin and John Goetz, Special to The Times
The report was based on 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. ... 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 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."
The CIA accepted Curveball's information; the Germans did not. The Germans said Curveball never said he saw bio-weapons; the CIA let Bush say that such an eyewitness existed -- and they meant Curveball. Colin Powell used the same source to tell the world the U.S. would invade Iraq -- the CIA swore to Powell the intel was solid when it was not. Here's the best the Germans had to say for this source:
"[H]is information was often vague, mostly secondhand and impossible to confirm.
Further,
"'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 not a fanatic on a mission. He was not seeking power like Chalabi. He had a very simple goal: He wanted a German visa.
His background remained unexplored until after the invasion. His interrogations were usually conducted through an interpreter, and he refused to deal directly with any Americans, whom he hated! The CIA, therefore, was using third-hand data to develop its reports. What made it possible for the CIA to use such reliable, unverified intel, which "could have gotten sexed up by accident" according a former CIA operations official, was a simple matter of basic psychology:
Curveball's information matched the CIA's expectations.
The few successes U.N. weapons inspectors had had, particularly in 1995 when the Iraqis admitted to researching and creating bio-warfare weapons provided sufficient basis for the CIA to hold to their own theories and interpret Curveball's information in that light.
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. "
Worse, despite warnings from the Germans and the lack of verification for the information, the data was used to create the justification for war. Powell and Bush both spoke to the country and the world as if their information was strong and solid when, as should have been recognized at the time -- as the Germans indeed did recognize at the time -- the source of the intel was far too questionable for any definite conclusions to be reached. Especially the conclusion that war was justified.
The surest part of the Curveball story, as related by the German intelligence officials, is that his only honest goal was to be granted asylum. Once he had asylum, and as he recognized that the information he was feeding to his German holders was highly valued, he become increasingly less cooperative and more demanding. He apparently drank heavily at times.
But despite warnings from both the Germans and the British that Curveball was unreliable, and despite the interference of Ahmad Chalabi and his team of frauds, the CIA was so desperate to be prove it had the inside story on WMDs in Iraq, that they lied to the Germans about having multiple sources to verify Curveball's stories and they let the data be presented to Colin Powell as if it were solid -- the basis for a declaration of war.
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."
As the vote to authorize the use of force neared, the CIA prepared more and more reports, racheting up Iraq's non-existent bio-weapon capabilities, all of it based on a single source: Curveball.
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. ... 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.
Holy crap. CIA analysts certified the unverified intel from a source doubted by their own agency, along with his own handlers, and pushed bad data that led to a terrible war because they found corroboration on the Internet! The Marine who died yesterday, who went to high school ten miles from where I sit and write, is dead because the CIA replaced solid evidence with Google searches.
The CIA also let Colin Powell go before the U.N. and tell a pack of lies. Powell claims he and his team pressed the CIA on the veracity of the intel regarding the mobile germ factories and that the CIA stuck to its guns. But because the Bush inside team was determined to go to war, and because the CIA knew that was expected was evidence to support the call to war -- " '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,' one CIA supervisor wrote to his colleague who had observed Curveball in person -- the CIA presented reports and data that matched the need. And when their evidence was proven to be false:
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.
In fact, every aspect of what Curveball had reported about the site proved to be wrong, including descriptions of routes of travel for trucks.
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.
Once the invasion was concluded and U.S. forces had direct access to Iraqi resources, the evidence became damning that the CIA had failed. Hamish Killip, a former British army officer and biological weapons expert, quit the Iraq Survey Group when the CIA not only refused to back down from their pre-war claims, they covered up the truth of what they were finding in Iraq.
Part of the Iraq Survey Group finally got around to investigating Curveball himself:
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.' "
The CIA's response to these findings? An attack on the analyst doing the investigation. They were, in the words of David Kay, "very, very vindictive" to him and any other analysts who spoke against the reports based on Curveball's fabrications. Said a former Pentagon official who investigated the case for the presidential commission, "[W]e didn't see it so much as a cover-up as an expression of how profoundly resistant to recognizing mistakes the CIA culture was."
How pathologically wedded was the CIA to its fantasy tales?
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.
And then, in March 2004, one year after the war began, the CIA was finally able to interview Curveball directly. In May 2004, the CIA because the last intelligence agency to admit the Curveball had been lying out his ass all along. They recalled all reports based on his false information and notified its staff that: "Our assessment . . . is that Curveball appears to be fabricating in this stream of reporting."
And according to the Germans, Curveball remained convinced he had been telling the truth all along.
So, to summarize, over tens of thousands of Americans, Iraqis, British, Italians, and others from around the world are dead; terrorism is on the increase; Iraq's instability is far worse; the U.S. economy is crumbling; and we are now possibly the most hated nation on earth -- because Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and the rest were so dedicated to going to war in Iraq that the CIA was forced to use the only source of data that would justify that war. That the data was seem to be unworthy of such trust by the Germans who held Curveball, not to mention many within the CIA, mattered far less than that the Agency was expected to produce a specific product. And under the leadership of George Tenet, that evidence was provided.
From the day George W Bush took office, his administration's lust for this one war was so overwhelming that not even the real world could shake it. 9/11 simply opened the door; the fear and anger generated by the attacks were used by the Bushies in the most cynical, evil manner. A pathological liar -- a loser whose only talent was the ability to make up stories people wanted to hear -- gave them their evidence. Maybe Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al never did know specifically that the evidence was false; but they put into place the structure that demanded one and only one result: war. It just happened to be Curveball who was available. If he hadn't existed, they would have invented him.