Chalabigate
"Weapons of Mass Deception"
2004-03-28
How the weapons evidence crumbled
By Bob Drogin, Greg Miller
Washington
March 29, 2004
The Bush Administration's prewar claims that Saddam Hussein had built a fleet of trucks and railway wagons to produce anthrax and other deadly germs were based chiefly on information from a now discredited Iraqi defector codenamed "Curveball", according to current and former intelligence officials.
US officials never had direct access to the defector, and didn't even know his real name until after the war. Instead, his story was provided by German agents, and his file was so thick with detail that US officials thought it confirmed long-standing suspicions that the Iraqis had developed mobile germ factories to evade weapons inspections.
Curveball's story has since crumbled under doubts raised by the Germans and the scrutiny of US arms hunters, who have come to see his code name as particularly apt, given the problems that plagued much prewar intelligence collection and analysis.
UN inspectors first hypothesised that such trucks might exist, officials said. Then they asked former exile leader Ahmed Chalabi, a bitter enemy of Saddam, to help search for intelligence supporting their theory.
Soon afterwards, a young chemical engineer emerged in a German refugee camp and claimed he had been hired to design and build bio-warfare trucks for the Iraqi army.
Based largely on his account, US President George Bush and his aides repeatedly warned of the shadowy germ trucks, and they became a crucial part of the White House case for war - including US Secretary of State Colin Powell's dramatic presentation to the UN Security Council just weeks before the war began.
Only later, US officials said, the CIA discovered that the defector was the brother of one of Mr Chalabi's top aides, and began suspecting that he might have been coached to provide false information. Partly as a result, US intelligence officials and congressional investigators fear that the CIA inadvertently conjured up and then chased a phantom weapons system.
David Kay, who resigned in January as head of the CIA-led group created to find illicit weapons in Iraq, said that of the intelligence failures in Iraq, the case of Curveball was particularly troubling.
Mr Kay said in an interview that the defector "was absolutely at the heart of a matter of intense interest to us". But Curveball turned out to be an "out-and-out fabricator", he said.
Last May, the CIA announced it had found two of the suspect trucks in northern Iraq, but the agency later backtracked. However, in the absence of any other evidence to support its prewar claims, the Bush Administration has continued to cling to the possibility that bio-warfare trucks might still exist.
Vice-President Dick Cheney as recently as January referred to the trucks as proof that Iraq was producing weapons of mass destruction. CIA director George Tenet later told a Senate committee that he called Mr Cheney to warn him that the evidence was increasingly suspect.
Mr Tenet gave the first hint of the underlying problem in a speech at Georgetown University on February 5.
"I must tell you we are finding discrepancies in some claims made by human sources" about mobile bio-weapons production, he said. "Because we lack direct access to the most important sources on this question, we have as yet been unable to resolve the differences."
US and British intelligence officials have acknowledged since the war that lies or distortions by Iraqi opposition groups in exile contributed to numerous misjudgements about Iraq's suspected weapons programs. Mr Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress is blamed most often, but the rival Iraqi National Accord and Kurdish groups also channelled dubious defectors to Western intelligence, officials say.
Still, the Curveball case may be uniquely damaging because no other credible defector provided first-hand confirmation that Iraq modified vehicles to produce germ agents, and no separate proof was found before or after the war.
Iraqi officials interrogated since the war have denied the program's existence.
The story of Curveball is now under review by an internal panel at the CIA, as well as House and Senate oversight committees. All seek to determine why so much of the prewar intelligence now appears flawed.
The Curveball case began in 1992, when UN weapons inspectors, frustrated at their failure to find germ weapon factories, wrote an internal report that speculated that Iraq could have hidden small, mobile versions in modified or trucks.
Based on that hypothesis, the UN weapons hunters, and US intelligence analysts studying U-2 spy plane and high-altitude satellite images of Iraq, were instructed to watch for a potential "signature" of a germ factory on wheels - pairs of 10-metre-long trucks, working in tandem, parked parallel, with communications gear, high security and a water source.
Eavesdropping on Iraqi military communications had already proved that they were moving sensitive documents to avoid detection.
But when UN weapons hunters who returned to Iraq in November 2002 checked every site Curveball had identified, they found nothing.
- Los Angeles Times
This story was found at: http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/03/28/1080412234079.html
This site may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
Washington
March 29, 2004
The Bush Administration's prewar claims that Saddam Hussein had built a fleet of trucks and railway wagons to produce anthrax and other deadly germs were based chiefly on information from a now discredited Iraqi defector codenamed "Curveball", according to current and former intelligence officials.
US officials never had direct access to the defector, and didn't even know his real name until after the war. Instead, his story was provided by German agents, and his file was so thick with detail that US officials thought it confirmed long-standing suspicions that the Iraqis had developed mobile germ factories to evade weapons inspections.
Curveball's story has since crumbled under doubts raised by the Germans and the scrutiny of US arms hunters, who have come to see his code name as particularly apt, given the problems that plagued much prewar intelligence collection and analysis.
UN inspectors first hypothesised that such trucks might exist, officials said. Then they asked former exile leader Ahmed Chalabi, a bitter enemy of Saddam, to help search for intelligence supporting their theory.
Soon afterwards, a young chemical engineer emerged in a German refugee camp and claimed he had been hired to design and build bio-warfare trucks for the Iraqi army.
Based largely on his account, US President George Bush and his aides repeatedly warned of the shadowy germ trucks, and they became a crucial part of the White House case for war - including US Secretary of State Colin Powell's dramatic presentation to the UN Security Council just weeks before the war began.
Only later, US officials said, the CIA discovered that the defector was the brother of one of Mr Chalabi's top aides, and began suspecting that he might have been coached to provide false information. Partly as a result, US intelligence officials and congressional investigators fear that the CIA inadvertently conjured up and then chased a phantom weapons system.
David Kay, who resigned in January as head of the CIA-led group created to find illicit weapons in Iraq, said that of the intelligence failures in Iraq, the case of Curveball was particularly troubling.
Mr Kay said in an interview that the defector "was absolutely at the heart of a matter of intense interest to us". But Curveball turned out to be an "out-and-out fabricator", he said.
Last May, the CIA announced it had found two of the suspect trucks in northern Iraq, but the agency later backtracked. However, in the absence of any other evidence to support its prewar claims, the Bush Administration has continued to cling to the possibility that bio-warfare trucks might still exist.
Vice-President Dick Cheney as recently as January referred to the trucks as proof that Iraq was producing weapons of mass destruction. CIA director George Tenet later told a Senate committee that he called Mr Cheney to warn him that the evidence was increasingly suspect.
Mr Tenet gave the first hint of the underlying problem in a speech at Georgetown University on February 5.
"I must tell you we are finding discrepancies in some claims made by human sources" about mobile bio-weapons production, he said. "Because we lack direct access to the most important sources on this question, we have as yet been unable to resolve the differences."
US and British intelligence officials have acknowledged since the war that lies or distortions by Iraqi opposition groups in exile contributed to numerous misjudgements about Iraq's suspected weapons programs. Mr Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress is blamed most often, but the rival Iraqi National Accord and Kurdish groups also channelled dubious defectors to Western intelligence, officials say.
Still, the Curveball case may be uniquely damaging because no other credible defector provided first-hand confirmation that Iraq modified vehicles to produce germ agents, and no separate proof was found before or after the war.
Iraqi officials interrogated since the war have denied the program's existence.
The story of Curveball is now under review by an internal panel at the CIA, as well as House and Senate oversight committees. All seek to determine why so much of the prewar intelligence now appears flawed.
The Curveball case began in 1992, when UN weapons inspectors, frustrated at their failure to find germ weapon factories, wrote an internal report that speculated that Iraq could have hidden small, mobile versions in modified or trucks.
Based on that hypothesis, the UN weapons hunters, and US intelligence analysts studying U-2 spy plane and high-altitude satellite images of Iraq, were instructed to watch for a potential "signature" of a germ factory on wheels - pairs of 10-metre-long trucks, working in tandem, parked parallel, with communications gear, high security and a water source.
Eavesdropping on Iraqi military communications had already proved that they were moving sensitive documents to avoid detection.
But when UN weapons hunters who returned to Iraq in November 2002 checked every site Curveball had identified, they found nothing.
- Los Angeles Times
This story was found at: http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/03/28/1080412234079.html
This site may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
Milton Frihetsson, 07:35
