Curveball by Bob Drogin

Author:Bob Drogin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781588367365
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-10-30T04:00:00+00:00

Others were less impressed.

Werner Kappel, the senior BND official, turned on the large TV in his corner office in Berlin and invited members of the Curveball team to join him. They watched in mute shock as Powell highlighted the trucks and cited an “eyewitness” three different times, a defector who was “hiding in a foreign country.” Someone cursed under his breath.

Kappel was the first to speak when the speech ended.

“Mein Gott! We had always told them it was not proven,” he said in dismay. “It was not hard intelligence.”

Those in the room knew that Powell had grossly mischaracterized the warehouse accident. The Americans apparently had misunderstood or misinterpreted the BND reporting. Curveball had never claimed to the BND that he had witnessed the incident, or even was anywhere near Djerf al Nadaf that day.

“He only heard rumors of an accident,” Kappel said. “He heard it thirdhand.”

Powell’s diagrams of the trucks stunned them as well. They appeared identical to a set that the BND staff had produced, except the CIA illustrations used different colors. “Those are our damn trucks,” Kappel complained.

Kappel had expected to see photographs, hard evidence. Powell’s illustrations weren’t proof. They were hearsay. Kappel couldn’t get over it. Powell had used artists’ conjectures based on analysts’ interpretations of Arabic-to-German-to-English translations of debriefing reports of a manic-depressive defector the Americans had never talked to.

It was ludicrous, insane, Kappel thought. He read secret intelligence reports every day and most of them, he suspected, weren’t true. People hear what they want to hear. And the Americans were going to war on this?

After the speech, the BND group sat in uneasy silence.

“What the hell is going on?” Kappel asked his colleagues. No one had an answer.

Ernst Uhrlau, Germany’s national coordinator for intelligence, was incredulous as well. Curveball proved nothing, he thought. The Iraqi was a piece of a puzzle, a single source of information. His story was unverified, unconfirmed, unknown.

Uhrlau quickly decided what must have happened. Germany opposed going to war so the Americans were using BND intelligence to justify an invasion. The White House had tried for months to link the 9/11 cell in Hamburg to Saddam. That didn’t work. Even the CIA didn’t buy it. So they were using Curveball. The CIA was sticking it to the BND again, just like in the past, he concluded.

At Munich House, Alex Steiner, the head of operations, heard from a senior BND operations officer who seemed frantic. “No proof, no proof, no proof,” the German kept on repeating. Curveball’s information was “not confirmed.”

Rolf Ekeus, the former chief of UNSCOM, went to the U.N. to watch. He was not convinced by Powell’s presentation. The illustrations of the trucks were “beautifully painted,” he said that afternoon. But the Americans should show “real pictures” or it meant nothing.

U.N. inspectors in New York and Baghdad were startled to hear Powell declare that they didn’t work on Fridays. Apparently the CIA had not bothered to check. The U.N. teams worked on Fridays precisely because it was an Iraqi holiday. They searched fewer sites since most things were closed.

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