News Show Identifies “Curveball”

The CBS news program “60 Minutes” is scheduled Sunday to air a segment identifying an Iraqi defector whose claims about Saddam Hussein’s alleged WMD programs bolstered the Bush administration’s case for war, Reuters reported (see GSN, March 15).

The man known publicly until now only as “Curveball” claimed that Iraq possessed mobile biological weapon laboratories, a charge used by then-Secretary of State Colin Powell in a prewar presentation before the U.N. Security Council.  No evidence of active WMD efforts has been found in Iraq since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

Curveball is Rafid Ahmed Alwan, who has lived in Germany since 1999, according to “60 Minutes.”  It said he was once accused of stealing from an employer in Baghdad and earned only middling grades in his university chemical engineering studies.

“To bolster his asylum case and increase his importance, he told officials he was a star chemical engineer who had been in charge of a facility at Djerf al Nadaf that was making mobile biological weapons,” according to a statement released by the program.

Former CIA Director George Tenet passed the information on to Powell, even though German intelligence officials had said in a letter that Alwan’s claim could not be verified.

“Through a spokesman, Tenet denies ever seeing the letter,” according to “60 Minutes.”

“Alwan was caught when CIA interrogators were finally allowed to question him and confronted him with evidence that his story could not be as he described it,” the program said.  “Weapons inspectors had examined the plant at Djerf al Nadaf before the fall of Baghdad and found no evidence of biological agents” (Reuters/Washington Post, Nov. 1).

Meanwhile, the former head of the British intelligence service MI6 acknowledged problems with intelligence on Iraq collected by the agency prior to the invasion, the London Times reported yesterday (see GSN, June 12).

“The intelligence that was released was believed to be correct when it was released,” Richard Dearlove said following a lecture in London.  “There were no human (intelligence) resources in Iraq who could have told us authoritatively that there were no weapons of mass destruction” (Michael Evans, London Times, Nov. 1).

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