Luke Harding in Berlin
The Guardian,
Friday April 2 2004
Germans accuse US over Iraq weapons claim
An Iraqi defector nicknamed Curveball who wrongly claimed that Saddam Hussein had mobile chemical weapons factories was last night at the centre of a bitter row between the CIA and Germany's intelligence agency.
German officials said that they had warned American colleagues well before the Iraq war that Curveball's information was not credible - but the warning was ignored ...
Yesterday, however, German agents told Die Zeit newspaper that they had warned the Bush administration long before last year that there were "problems" with Curveball's account. "We gave a clear credibility assessment. On our side at least, there were no tricks before Colin Powell's presentation," one source told the newspaper.
Officially, Germany's intelligence agency, the BND, has refused to comment ...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/apr/02/iraq.germanyPublished on Saturday, April 2, 2005 by the Los Angeles Times
'Curveball' Debacle Reignites CIA Feud
The former agency chief and his top deputy deny reports that they were told a key source for Iraqi intelligence was deemed unreliable.
by Bob Drogin and Greg Miller
... "My people were saying: 'We think he's a stinker,' " <James L. Pavitt, former deputy director of operations and former head of the clandestine service> said. But CIA bioweapons analysts, he said, "were saying: 'We still think he's worthwhile.' " Pavitt said he didn't convey his own doubts to Tenet because he didn't know until after the March 2003 invasion of Iraq that Curveball was "of such import" in prewar CIA assessments provided to the president, Congress and the public ...
Tyler Drumheller, former chief of the CIA European Division, said he and other senior officials in his office — the unit that oversees spying in Europe — had issued repeated warnings about Curveball's accounts ...
Drumheller scoffed at claims by Tenet and McLauglin that they were unaware of concerns about Curveball's credibility. He said he was disappointed that the two former CIA leaders would resort to a "bureaucratic defense" that they never got a formal memo expressing doubts about the defector ...
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0402-01.htmCurveball the Goofball
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: April 3, 2005
... We don't need a 14-month inquiry producing 601 pages at a cost of $10 million to tell us the data on arms in Iraq was flawed. We know that ... This is the fourth exhaustive investigation that has not answered the basic question: How did the White House and Pentagon spin the information and why has no one gotten in trouble for it? ...
Curveball's information was used to justify the war even though it was clear Curveball was a goofball. As the commission report notes, a Defense Department employee at the C.I.A. met with him and "was concerned by Curveball's apparent 'hangover' during their meeting" and suspicious that Curveball spoke excellent English, even though the Foreign Service had told U.S. intelligence officials that Curveball did not speak English.
By early 2001, the C.I.A. was receiving messages from our Foreign Service, reporting that Curveball was "out of control" and off the radar. A foreign intelligence service also warned the C.I.A. in April 2002 that it had "doubts about Curveball's reliability" and that elements of the tippling tipster's behavior "strike us as typical of individuals we would normally assess as fabricators." ...
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/03/opinion/04dowd.html?_r=1&oref=slogin November 21, 2005 at 11:00 a.m.
Germany: CIA knew 'Curveball' was not trustworthy
German intelligence alleges Bush administration repeatedly 'exaggerated' informant's claims in run-up to war.
By Tom Regan | csmonitor.com
Five top German intelligence officers say that the Bush administration and the CIA repeatedly ignored warnings about the veracity of the information that an Iraqi informant named 'Curveball' was giving about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. The Los Angeles Times, in a massive report published Sunday, reports that "the Bush administration and the CIA repeatedly exaggerated his claims during the run-up to the war in Iraq." They also say that 'Curveball,' whom the Germans described as "not a psychologically stable guy," never claimed that he had produced germ weapons, nor had he ever seen anyone do it ...
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 Times report also says that the White House ignored evidence presented by the United Nations that showed that Curveball was wrong, and that the CIA " punished in-house critics who provided proof that he had lied and
refused to admit error until May 2004, 14 months after the invasion." Much of the information Curveball gave to the CIA later turned out to be stories he had gleaned from research on the Internet ...
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1121/dailyUpdate.htmlExclusive: Curveball, the Defector Whose Lies Led to War
March 13, 2007 1:46 PM
Brian Ross and Rhonda Schwartz Report:
... "People died because of this," said Tyler Drumheller, the former chief of European operations at the CIA, who has written about it in a new book, "On the Brink." "All off this one little guy who all he wanted to do was stay in Germany."
Drumheller says he personally redacted all references to Curveball material in an advance draft of the Powell speech.
"We said, 'This is from Curveball. Don't use this,'" Drumheller says. Powell says neither he nor his chief of staff Col. Larry Wilkerson was ever told of any doubts about Curveball ...
http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/2007/03/exclusive_curve.htmlFriday, 2 November 2007, 18:17 GMT
... The CBS show 60 Minutes ... says he arrived in a German refugee centre in 1999 where he lied to win asylum and was not the chemical expert he said he was ...
German intelligence agents warned the US in a letter that there was no way to verify Mr Alwan's claims ...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7075501.stm March 22, 2008
German Intelligence Was 'Dishonest, Unprofessional and Irresponsible'
David Kay was charged by the Bush administration with finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq after the invasion. Instead of finding weapons, though, he found what he told SPIEGEL was 'the biggest intelligence fiasco of my lifetime.'
... Kay: ...The Germans never gave us 'Curveball’s' real name which once lead to minor disaster in Germany ... Members of the CIA based in Munich thought they had his name and went out and found someone in Germany with a very similar name. They found him -- a young Iraqi -- and knocked on his door without approval by the German authorities. But it was the wrong guy, and he ended up calling the police on the intruders ...
SPIEGEL: When you were in Iraq, your team found out that 'Curveball’s' story had nothing to do with the truth. How did CIA leadership react to your findings?
Kay: With resistance and denial. It was an absolute refusal to face reality. I just kept on hearing, 'don’t stop now. Keep working. You must be wrong. You will find it. Keep looking.' ...
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,542888,00.htmlSee also:
Entries from Lie By Lie tagged with 'Curveball'
http://www.motherjones.com/mb/mt-search.cgi?tag=Curveball&blog_id=2THE RECORD ON CURVEBALL
Declassified Documents and Key Participants Show the Importance of Phony Intelligence in the Origins of the Iraq War
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB234/index.htm
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