Throwing a Curve on Iraq

October 13, 2007
Throwing a Curve on Iraq

The defector knew impressive details about the trailers and Iraq's biological weapons programs. His claims were at the heart of the pivotal National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002, the intelligence community's "gold standard" report. It concluded with "high confidence" that Iraq had chemical and biological arms. Curveball's information also found its way into Mr. Bush's State of the Union address in January 2003, which prepared the country for war, and into Secretary of State Colin Powell's February presentation to the U.N., which persuaded many skeptics of Iraq's danger and duplicity.

None of it was true. As Mr. Drogin and his colleague Greg Miller first disclosed in the Los Angeles Times in early 2004, Curveball was a fabricator whom the Germans were eager to keep to themselves, providing other countries only with transcripts of their interrogations. The Germans were worried, they said, about protecting their source and thus did not allow the CIA to interview Curveball until a year after the invasion. The "paper thin" sources who supposedly corroborated Curveball's claims, Mr. Drogin concludes, eventually proved to be worthless.