http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0511200330nov20,1,2773158.story?coll=chi-news-hed

Germany warned U.S. on faulty intel

Claims by informant misstated, they say

By Bob Drogin and John Goetz
Tribune Newspapers: Los Angeles Times

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 the Bush administration and the CIA exaggerated his claims in the run-up to the Iraq war.

Five senior officials from Germany's Federal Intelligence Service, or BND, said in interviews with the Los Angeles 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 Powell also misstated Curveball's claims in his prewar presentation to the United Nations, 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," 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 had emotional and mental problems. "He is not a stable, psychologically stable guy," said a BND official who supervised the case.

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

An investigation by the Times based on interviews since May with about 30 current and former intelligence officials in the U.S., Germany, Britain, 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 UN weapons inspectors disproved virtually all of Curveball's accounts before the war. Bush and aides issued increasingly dire warnings about Iraq's germ weapons as the invasion neared, even though intelligence from Curveball had not changed.

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

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 in a radio address and a statement that Iraq "has at least seven mobile factories" for germ warfare.

Vague information

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

"His information to us was very vague," said the senior German intelligence official.

David Kay, who headed the CIA's post-invasion 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."

Powell also highlighted Curveball's "eyewitness" account when he warned the UN 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.

"We were shocked," the German official said. "Mein Gott! We had always told them it was not proven."

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

At the UN, Powell said the "eyewitness" was at the site of a 1998 weapons accident that killed 12 technicians. But German intelligence officials say the CIA was wrong. Curveball "only heard rumors of an accident," the BND supervisor said.

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

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. His motive, they say, was to get a German visa.

After the invasion, the CIA's Iraq Survey Group, headed by Kay, found that Curveball was fired from his job 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, apparently for a sex crime. His friends called him a "great liar" and a "con artist."

How it began

The case began in November 1999, when the Baghdad-born chemical engineer flew into Munich on a tourist visa and applied for political asylum. .

During interrogations in 2000 and 2001, the Iraqi told BND officers he had worked on a secret weapons program between 1995 and 1999.

But as the questions intensified, Curveball grew moody and irritable. His memory began to fail. He fretted about his safety, about his family in Iraq and his future in Germany.

British intelligence warned the CIA in 2001 that satellite images taken four years earlier, when Curveball claimed to be working at a germ factory at Djerf-al-Nadaf, conflicted with his descriptions. The photos showed a wall around most of the main warehouse, blocking trucks from getting in or out.

But CIA analysts ignored the wall, or speculated it was temporary, built to fool spy satellites.

UN weapons inspectors were the first to disprove Curveball's claims. On Feb. 8, three days after Powell's speech, a U.S.-led UN Team Bravo left its Baghdad hotel to conduct the first search of Curveball's former work site.

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

A British inspector found another surprise. Curveball had said 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--the wall British intelligence saw in their 1997 satellite photos.

On March 7, 2003, Hans Blix, the chief UN inspector, told the Security Council that searches had found "no evidence" of mobile biological production facilities in Iraq. The invasion of Iraq began two weeks later.