On February 5, 2003, Colin Powell, one of the most respected members of
President Bush’s war Cabinet, sat in the heart of the UN Security Council,
surrounded by the world’s diplomats and in front of a global television
audience.
The former US Secretary of State – with George Tenet, the CIA Director, behind
him – presented a bone-chill-ing account of Iraqi biological weapons sites.
At one point he waved a model vial of anthrax (it was talcum powder) to
demonstrate the danger Saddam Hussein posed to the world.
He spoke of “an Iraqi chemical engineer who supervised” one of Saddam’s mobile
biological weapons labs. “He actually was present during the biological
agent production runs,” Mr Powell said. “He was also at the site when an
accident occurred in 1998. Twelve technicians died from exposure to
biological agents.”
This brave engineer, Mr Powell added, was one of those “who have risked their
lives to let the world know what Saddam Hussein is really up to”. The man –
the primary intelligence source justifying the invasion of Iraq that took
place a month after Mr Powell’s address – was a chain-smok-ing, alcoholic,
confidence trickster and Iraqi defector called Rafid Ahmed Alwan, codenamed
“Curveball”.
No US intelligence official had met him. His German handlers had warned CIA
officials that he was “crazy”, unreliable and probably a “fabricator”. Yet
his first-hand claims about Saddam’s biological weapons labs – all proved to
be lies – formed the heart of the US intelligence community’s pivotal
October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate presented to President Bush.
Based solely on Curveball’s unverified fantasies, it stated with “high
confidence” that Saddam “has” an illicit biological and chemical weapons
programme.
Curveball’s story is also at the heart of the manifold and breathtaking
failures of US spy agencies in the run-up to war, from how intelligence was
gathered, analysed and eventually presented to an Administration determined
to topple Saddam.
In a devastating
601-page report released in March 2005, by a commission established by
President Bush to investigate prewar intelligence blunders, the
almost-exclusive reliance on Curveball and abject failure to check his
claims were cited as the primary reasons that the CIA and other agencies
were “dead wrong” in nearly all their prewar assessments.
“Worse than having no human sources,” the commission said, “is being seduced
by a human source who is telling lies.”
Curveball, a former taxi driver and chemical engineer, defected to Germany in
1999 in search of political asylum – and a Mercedes – and was willing to say
anything to get them. He initially convinced his German handlers, with his
impressive and detailed knowledge of biological weapons programmes (much of
it gleaned off the internet) that Iraq had seven mobile weapons labs. German
intelligence passed transcripts on to their US counterparts but, because of
simmering Cold War rivalry, never allowed Curveball to be interviewed by
American officials.
By the time of the National Intelligence Estimate, the Germans had grave
doubts about Curveball. Several CIA officials testified to the commission
that after they had been told by German agents that Curveball had suffered a
breakdown – and was probably a liar – they strongly voiced their concerns to
Mr Tenet and his deputy, John McLaughlin. Tyler Drumheller, a veteran CIA
officer, says that he urged Mr Tenet not to include Curveball’s claims in Mr
Powell’s UN speech. Mr Tenet and Mr McLaughlin say that they received no
such warnings.
Nevertheless, even a cursory investigation of Curveball’s claims would have
revealed them to be bogus. The deadly biological lab incident that he said
he witnessed took place in 1998, when he “was not even in Iraq at that time”
– a fact confirmed by his travel records, the commission found. Meanwhile,
the allegation that Iraq sought to acquire uranium from Niger was based on
“transparently forged documents” purporting to show a contract between the
two countries, the commission said. There were “flaws in the letterhead,
forged signatures, misspelled words, incorrect titles for individuals and
government entities”. The fake contract referred to an alleged meeting “that
took place on ‘Wednesday, July 7, 2000’, even though July 7, 2000 was a
Friday”, the report said.
According to the investigative journalist Bob Woodward, Mr Tenet assured Mr
Bush at a meeting on December 12, 2002, that the evidence against Saddam was
a “slam-dunk case”. Mr Tenet said that his words were taken out context; he
was saying that persuading the US public to back the war would be a
“slam-dunk”.
Mr Bush and Dick Cheney, the Vice-President, who were convinced that Saddam
possessed illicit weapons, needed little persuading. “Simply stated, there
is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There
is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our
allies and against us,” Mr Cheney declared on August 26, 2002, to the
national convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. He said in the same
address that Saddam had reconstituted his nuclear weapons programme, a claim
with no credible intelligence to back it up.
Across the Atlantic, Britain faced a similar intelligence failure. The
Government’s intelligence dossier, published in September 2002, provided the
“evidence” of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and was used by Tony Blair
to convince Parliament that Saddam had to be confronted. The claims proved
unfounded and were a disaster for politicians and spy chiefs alike.
It cannot be overestimated how big a shock it was for the intelligence
community to discover that the weapons of mass destruction did not exist.
Indeed, such was the disbelief that they had got it wrong that some senior
figures remained confident for a long time that eventually the weapons would
be uncovered. In the event the Iraq Survey Group, a team of more than 1,000
Americans, Britons and Australians given the job of finding Saddam’s WMDs,
turned up with two chemical weapons shells dating back to the Iran-Iraq War
after scouring the country for 18 months. Since then Britain’s intelligence
services have overhauled the way they recruit and run agents. There is now a
three-lay-ered system that analyses and checks the veracity and value of
intelligence.
Similarly, in the US, the searing experience of Curveball has led to a far
more rigorous and meticulous vetting of sources. “You would not now have
Curveball getting the prominence he did,” said Bruce Riedel, a former CIA
veteran and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution think-tank.
Mr Tenet left the CIA in July 2004. Curveball lives in hiding, protected by
the authorities, in Germany – probably still without a Mercedes.
