Global Security Newswire

The CIA ignored a U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency official’s warning about the questionable reliability of the Iraqi defector known as “Curveball” — the main source for claims that prewar Iraq had mobile biological weapons facilities, according to the Senate report on prewar Iraq intelligence released last week (see GSN, July 12).

The CIA described the defector as a “credible source” in the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq’s alleged WMD efforts, according to the Washington Post. However, a DIA official who met with the defector in May 2000 found him to have a “terrible hangover,” which led to questions over his reliability, according to the Senate report (see GSN, May 17).

German intelligence officials initially debriefed Curveball. In late 2002, the DIA official pressed German officials for direct access to the defector, but was told that they were unsure of the defector’s reliability, according to the Post. While the DIA official told the CIA of both his suspicions and those of German intelligence before the 2002 NIE was prepared, the information seemed to have little effect on the document, the Senate report said (Walter Pincus, Washington Post, July 13).

Meanwhile, the withheld sections of the declassified version of the Senate report include an assessment of the credibility of another Iraqi defector whose claims of prewar Iraq’s mobile biological facilities have been discredited, U.S. officials said. They said the assessment remains classified because the defector is still working for British intelligence.

In the classified version of the report, a three-page section criticizes the credibility of a defector known as “Red River,” who was one of four sources on prewar Iraq’s alleged mobile biological facilities cited by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell in a speech last year to the United Nations. The public version of the report, however, has all but one paragraph in the section redacted, the New York Times reported.

U.S. officials said that Red River failed a polygraph examination. (Douglas Jehl, New York Times, July 13).