The man who sold the war

[unhappycamper]

The man who sold the war
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 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 ... 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.

~snip~

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, 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.



Rest of article at: http://www.salon.com/books/int/2007/10/16/curveball/