State of War by James Risen

Author:James Risen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2006-10-06T04:00:00+00:00

Perhaps the most shocking thing about the American reliance on Curveball was the fact that U.S. intelligence officials never even met him before the war and couldn’t talk to him directly. Curveball was an Iraqi exile who served as a source for the German intelligence service, and the Germans refused to provide the United States with direct access to the informant. The Germans claimed that Curveball would refuse to talk to the Americans, and so they would only provide reports based on their own debriefings of the Iraqi.

What was worse for the CIA, the agency wasn’t even receiving the reports directly from the Germans. Instead, Berlin provided Curveball debriefing reports to a U.S. military intelligence unit, the Defense HUMINT Service, which then circulated the reports throughout the U.S. intelligence community. Defense HUMINT distributed the reports without any vetting of Curveball’s information. The CIA decided it was willing to accept these thirdhand reports.

With no ability to question Curveball and almost no way to corroborate what he was saying, the U.S. intelligence community still fully embraced Curveball’s assertions. The October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction concluded that Iraq has “transportable facilities for producing bacterial and toxin BW agents.” The NIE said it had multiple sources for that assertion, but in fact it was based almost entirely on Curveball.

But even as Curveball’s reports were being given the stamp of approval in the NIE, Tyler Drumheller was beginning to hear warnings about the source—from the Germans themselves. As chief of the DO’s European Division, Drumheller was in charge of the agency’s liaison relationships with Western European intelligence services, and so in the fall of 2002, he had lunch with the Washington station chief of the German intelligence service. With war looming, Drumheller asked if the Germans were now willing to grant the Americans direct access to Curveball. The German station chief replied that meeting the source wasn’t worthwhile, because Curveball was crazy. It would be a waste of time. The German told Drumheller that his service wasn’t sure Curveball was telling the truth, and worse, that there were questions about his mental stability and reliability, particularly since he had suffered a nervous breakdown. The message was painfully clear: the Americans shouldn’t use Curveball’s information.

Drumheller passed on these warnings to top CIA managers, thinking that would be the end of Curveball’s reporting. “I said it is going to make us look stupid if we don’t validate this,” Drumheller recalled.

But Drumheller hadn’t reckoned on the strength of the agency’s embrace of Curveball and his pro-WMD intelligence. By January 2003, Drumheller was shocked to learn that Curveball’s reporting was going to be included in Colin Powell’s UN presentation, scheduled for early February.

One week before Powell made his presentation, Drumheller was shown a draft of his speech. It didn’t mention Curveball or the Germans, but it did include assertions about the existence of Iraqi mobile bioweapons trailers that came straight from Curveball. Drumheller wasn’t a technical bioweapons expert, but he did know about intelligence operations, and he knew that the tradecraft in the Curveball case was shoddy at best.

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