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German Officials Say U.S. Exaggerated Iraq Intel
The White House and the CIA exaggerated claims made by the source known as “Curveball” on prewar Iraq’s alleged WMD efforts and ignored warnings on his unreliability, the Los Angeles Times reported yesterday (see GSN, April 8). The Iraqi defector was the primary source for U.S. claims that Saddam Hussein’s regime was operating a biological weapons program. However, his handlers in German intelligence said his information was vague, secondhand and could not be confirmed. “This was not substantial evidence,” said a senior German intelligence official, one of five to speak to the Times. “We made clear we could not verify the things he said.” The official who supervised Curveball’s case said the informant had mental difficulties. “He is not a stable, psychologically stable guy,” the official said. While Curveball’s role has been well documented regarding the collection of bad intelligence on Iraq, the Times said its investigation shows that mistakes in the case were far worse than previously reported. The Bush administration ignored U.N. evidence contradicting almost all of Curveball’s claims, instead issuing dramatic warnings about biological weapons before the war, the Times reported. The CIA, although not able to verify the source’s claims, accepted them and punished agency personnel who questioned his assertions, according to the Times. With the CIA’s support, President George W. Bush in his 2003 State of the Union address said Iraq had “mobile biological weapons labs” that could produce “germ warfare agents.” In a radio speech a month later the president said Iraq “has at least seven mobile factories” for making biological weapons. However, Curveball told German intelligence officials that he had helped put together only one truck and had heard of others. He was unable to say what the equipment did, according to the Times. “His information to us was very vague,” one German official said. Then-Secretary of State Colin Powell in a February 2003 presentation on Iraq to the United Nations warned, based on information provided by Curveball, that the trucks could produce enough biological agents “in a single month to kill thousands upon thousands of people.” The German supervisor said he was surprised to hear Powell use the information. “We were shocked,” the official said. “Mein Gott! We had always told them it was not proven.” Powell also said at the United Nations that Curveball was present at a 1998 accident that killed 12 Iraqi weapons technicians. German intelligence officials said Curveball “only heard rumors of an accident.” The CIA has now acknowledged that the information provided by Curveball was a mix of fact, information taken from the Internet and “water cooler gossip.” He provided the information in hopes of receiving a German visa, the Times reported (Drogin/Goetz, Los Angeles Times, Nov. 20). Meanwhile, Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) said last week that weapons of mass destruction might still be buried somewhere in Iraq, the Anchorage Daily News reported. Postwar searches of the country have found no evidence of an ongoing WMD program. “Our troops found 30 Iraqi planes buried in the sands of the al-Taqqadum airfield, west of Baghdad — 30 planes!” Stevens said in a floor speech, using pictures of the buried aircraft to illustrate his comments. “If Saddam Hussein's troops buried one-tenth of their combat aircraft in the desert, who is to say there were no weapons of mass destruction similarly buried?” Stevens noted Iraq is the size of California. “The materials needed to make weapons of mass destruction could fit in a container the size of a family bathtub,” he said (Liz Ruskin, Anchorage Daily News, Nov. 18). Also in Washington, Senator Carl Levin (D-Mich.) last week accused former Defense Undersecretary Douglas Feith of deceiving Congress about links between Iraq and al-Qaeda, the Associated Press reported. Levin said Feith had provided “really erroneous and distorted intelligence” about links between terror groups and Iraq. The Defense Department’s inspector general is looking into whether Feith “provided a separate channel of intelligence, unbeknownst to the CIA, to the White House — which he did,” Levin said (see GSN, Nov. 18). The inspector general has asked the Pentagon to identify points of contact for the investigation by Dec. 1. “The overall objective will be to determine whether personnel assigned to the Office of Special Plans from September 2002 through June 2003 conducted unauthorized, unlawful or inappropriate intelligence activities,” the inspector general’s office wrote in a letter to Feith’s successor, Eric Edelman, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s intelligence chief, Stephen Cambone. Feith on Friday rejected the allegations. “These matters have been carefully reviewed already,” he said, referring to a 2004 bipartisan congressional inquiry. “They concluded that my office worked properly and that it in fact improved the intelligence product by asking good questions. I'm confident the Defense Department inspector general will come to the same conclusion.” Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said the Office of Special Plans, which was set up by Feith to review Iraq intelligence, had already been the focus of numerous inquiries. “The Office of Special Plans has been the subject of a high degree of scrutiny over the last several months, and one in which every inquiry into it has yielded no findings of improper or unlawful activity,” he said (Robert Burns, Associated Press I/Yahoo!News, Nov. 18). Meanwhile, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Representative Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.) wants millions of documents on Iraq to be declassified, the Associated Press reported. These documents, written in Arabic, have not been translated because the United States lacks personnel with Arab language skills. “Most people have acknowledged that we are never going to get through them,” Hoekstra said. He wants to put the documents online as a resource for journalists, academic and researchers, according to AP. Hoekstra said one document contains information about Iraq’s WMD programs and its connections to terrorist organizations, although he is unsure of its authenticity. “I am not asserting that this will prove one thing or another,” he said. “One thing it will surely do is give us a much clearer insight into what was going on in the former Iraqi regime than we have today” (Katherine Shrader, Associated Press II/Detroit News, Nov. 18).
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