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Unfolding Nature Shop: Unfolding Nature: Being in the Implicate Order

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InvisibleLuddite
I watch Fox News
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Registered: 03/23/06
Posts: 2,946
Its all curveball's fault
    #7595524 - 11/04/07 05:40 PM (16 years, 2 months ago)

The man who sold the war

"Curveball" author Bob Drogin talks about the Iraqi defector responsible for much of the CIA's bogus prewar intelligence about Iraqi WMD.

By Alex Koppelman

Oct. 16, 2007 | For some, it can be tempting to lay the blame for the Iraq war at the feet of a small, disingenuous neoconservative cabal. In reality, the debacle was a collective effort, involving legions of people, some dishonest, others well-intentioned. But there is one man, still obscure, whose claim to being the prime mover in the selling of the war is at least as strong as that of any Beltway hawk, and whose agenda was wholly personal, not political.

In his new book, "Curveball: Spies, Lies, and the Con Man Who Caused a War," Los Angeles Times reporter Bob Drogin gives the most comprehensive account to date of the man who was the source of much of the faulty intelligence about weapons of mass destruction that was used to justify the U.S. invasion. Drogin explains how "Curveball," a still-anonymous Iraqi who defected to Germany in 1999, came to be a principal source for American intelligence, even though the CIA didn't even know who he really was until after the war had begun. Drogin's narrative is simpler and sadder and, in some ways, more disturbing than if this really was just a tale about a known liar and the neocons who loved him. Instead, it's the story of a man desperate for political asylum and what he was willing to say to get it; of German intelligence officers who wanted to tweak their American rivals; and of American intelligence officers who were determined to give their bosses what their bosses wanted. Salon spoke to Drogin by telephone.

Who is Curveball?


Curveball is an Iraqi engineer, a very low-level engineer, who defected to Germany in 1999 and was plucked out of a refugee line. He was in an asylum camp. And he began to spin a rather fantastic story. They interviewed him and interrogated him through most of 2000 and 2001. And his story was unconfirmed and unverified. He was never vetted in the sense of people going to Baghdad and tracking down to see whether his background was what he claimed it to be -- because under those conditions it was impossible to do. But after 9/11 his story suddenly was literally plucked out of a safe at the CIA, and within weeks the official CIA analysis of Saddam's threat from biological weapons changed quite dramatically. This is in 2001. And by the time we get to the fall of 2002 and the real run-up to the war, his information is so dominant at the CIA that they virtually hang all of the biological weapons information on him, despite the fact that they had never met him and didn't even know his name. All the information was coming from the Germans.

By the time we get to the president's State of the Union speech in 2003 before the war, that contained some of the information from Curveball. And, as we all remember, when [then-Secretary of State] Colin Powell spoke to the U.N. Security Council in February 2003 just before the war, these pictures of trucks, these cartoon drawings of trucks that the CIA had prepared, were the highlight of his presentation. He referred to this eyewitness who had worked directly on these trucks, who had witnessed an accident that had killed a dozen people. And ... [Powell] told me later, it was the most important part, the most credible part of his entire speech. Unfortunately it was all a fraud. So that's who Curveball was.


How does this all go so wrong? How does the Bush administration and the CIA come to see Curveball as this incontrovertible source?

My take on the CIA is that it's a lot like any other bureaucracy, except that the people there are trained to lie, cheat and steal. But in terms of motivations -- in terms of what drives decisions -- it's not a whole lot different from perhaps what drives Enron. That is, there are a lot of ambitious people, there are a lot of rivalries, there's a lot of bureaucratic infighting, not only within the agency, but between the CIA and its rivals in Washington -- the Defense Intelligence Agency and some of the others. And especially between the CIA and ... foreign intelligence services belonging to other governments. And what happened in this case was a confluence of those forces, those really rather tawdry forces, combined with really spineless leadership, which allowed this unconfirmed information to rise to the top.

And what's fascinating to me is that we now know in retrospect that a huge amount of the prewar intelligence did rest on Curveball's shoulders. And the reason I say this is because, if you go back to just before the war, the CIA did not claim that Saddam had nuclear weapons. They said he was eight to 10 years out. And the International Atomic Energy Agency, the director, Mohamed El-Baradei, went up to the U.N. Security Council on March 7 and announced that we have been to all of these sites, and there is no evidence of the kinds of infrastructure you would need to build nuclear weapons. And also, by the way, [El-Baradei said,] the evidence that has been furnished to us, the documents, was what he referred to as "not authentic," which translated as forged. This was the American paperwork that was given to him.


So the nuclear stuff had all fallen apart. That left only the chemical and the biological. All of the postwar investigations in this country and in Britain said basically that all of the bad intelligence on biological weapons came from Curveball, that without him they really had no case whatsoever. But the surprise was that, at least at the CIA, the analysts in the chemical weapons department, the third leg of this triad, if you will, before the war they were unsure of what they had. They thought the evidence was quite ambiguous on the chemical weapons. They said they were "drifting."

In the 1980s Saddam had a huge chemical weapons program and he only really started up -- he had a crash program for the production of biological warfare agents just before the 1991 war. So, in this case what happens is that when they see that the biological weapons people are claiming with high confidence that Saddam not only has a robust biological weapons program but that it's even larger and more developed than it was before the first Gulf War, they looked around and said, "Well, geez, if he's got that, then he must have chemical weapons, too, because that's the way he did it last time." And so they just ramped up their conclusions. They basically said, "Well, forget about our doubts, it must be true." And so it all sort of pinpoints back down to this one guy. He's obviously not the only reason we went to war. He wasn't the only pretext. But, more and more, the evidence seems to hang on his shoulders, ironically.

I was struck by something you wrote in your epilogue, which is that the defector didn't con the spies so much as the spies conned themselves.

You know, I came out of this almost sympathetic to Curveball. In the sense that he is, as best I can tell, not a whole lot different from -- that he was basically a shlub. Here's a guy who's basically a middle-class guy, he's running away from tyranny to find freedom in the West. You know, my great-grandparents did that, most Americans have somebody in their background who did that. And he gets there and he does something in Germany that is very common there, because -- I looked at this at some length. Because, you know, Germany is the most popular place anywhere in Europe to apply for asylum ... but still, it's a very tricky thing to do. Only one in 25 applicants in general gets asylum in Germany. It's better for Iraqis, but still it's only one in 25 overall. So what he tried to do was jump the line. He told some lies, and he jumped the line. And the reason I say they conned themselves is because, when you look at what he actually said -- to the extent that's available -- and you look at how it got twisted by the time Colin Powell is telling the world about it, there's a big difference. I'm not suggesting that Colin Powell made that up. What I'm saying is that the passage of information -- the way it came down the bureaucracy, the rivalries, the problems of translation, the problems of perception, the problems of who was analyzing what -- they managed to not only embrace his account, they twisted and they magnified it, until it really took on a life of its own and became something very different from what his original account was.

Next page: "When the CIA found out about the brother, they freaked out because they thought, 'Oh my God, we've been set up"

http://www.salon.com/books/int/2007/10/16/curveball/


Edited by Luddite (11/04/07 05:44 PM)


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Unfolding Nature Shop: Unfolding Nature: Being in the Implicate Order


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