How U.S. Fell Under the Spell of 'Curveball'

THE CURVEBALL SAGA
How U.S. Fell Under the Spell of 'Curveball'

The Iraqi informant's German handlers say they had told U.S. officials that his
information was 'not proven,' and were shocked when President Bush and Colin L.
Powell used it in key prewar speeches.

By Bob Drogin and John Goetz, Special to The Times


BERLIN ? The German intelligence officials responsible for one of the most important
informants on Saddam Hussein's suspected weapons of mass destruction say that the
Bush administration and the CIA repeatedly exaggerated his claims during the run-up
to the war in Iraq.

Five senior officials from Germany's Federal Intelligence Service, or BND, said in
interviews with The Times that they warned U.S. intelligence authorities that the
source, an Iraqi defector code-named Curveball, never claimed to produce germ
weapons and never saw anyone else do so.


According to the Germans, President Bush mischaracterized Curveball's information
when he warned before the war that Iraq had at least seven mobile factories brewing
biological poisons. Then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell also misstated
Curveball's accounts in his prewar presentation to the United Nations on Feb. 5,
2003, the Germans said.

Curveball's German handlers for the last six years said his information was often
vague, mostly secondhand and impossible to confirm.

"This was not substantial evidence," said a senior German intelligence official. "We
made clear we could not verify the things he said."

The German authorities, speaking about the case for the first time, also said that
their informant suffered from emotional and mental problems. "He is not a stable,
psychologically stable guy," said a BND official who supervised the case. "He is not
a completely normal person," agreed a BND analyst.

Curveball was the chief source of inaccurate prewar U.S. accusations that Baghdad
had biological weapons, a commission appointed by Bush reported this year. The
commission did not interview Curveball, who still insists his story was true, or the
German officials who handled his case.

The German account emerges as the White House is lashing out at domestic critics,
particularly Senate Democrats, over allegations the administration manipulated
intelligence to go to war. Last week, Vice President Dick Cheney called such claims
reprehensible and pernicious.

In Congress, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is resuming its long-
stalled investigation of the administration's use of prewar intelligence. Committee
members said last week that the Curveball case would be a key part of their review.
House Democrats are calling for a similar inquiry.

An investigation by The Times based on interviews since May with about 30 current
and former intelligence officials in the U.S., Germany, England, Iraq and the United
Nations, as well as other experts, shows that U.S. bungling in the Curveball case
was worse than official reports have disclosed.

The White House, for example, ignored evidence gathered by United Nations weapons
inspectors shortly before the war that disproved Curveball's account. Bush and his
aides issued increasingly dire warnings about Iraq's biological weapons before the
war even though intelligence from Curveball had not changed in two years.

At the Central Intelligence Agency, officials embraced Curveball's account even
though they could not confirm it or interview him until a year after the invasion.
They ignored multiple warnings about his reliability before the war, punished in-
house critics who provided proof that he had lied and refused to admit error until
May 2004, 14 months after the invasion.

After the CIA vouched for Curveball's accounts, Bush declared in his 2003 State of
the Union speech that Iraq had "mobile biological weapons labs" designed to produce
"germ warfare agents." Bush cited the mobile germ factories in at least four prewar
speeches and statements, and other world leaders repeated the charge.

Powell also highlighted Curveball's "eyewitness" account when he warned the United
Nations Security Council on the eve of war that Iraq's mobile labs could brew enough
weapons-grade microbes "in a single month to kill thousands upon thousands of
people."

The senior BND officer who supervised Curveball's case said he was aghast when he
watched Powell misstate Curveball's claims as a justification for war.

"We were shocked," the official said. "Mein Gott! We had always told them it was not
proven?. It was not hard intelligence."

In a telephone interview, Powell said that George J. Tenet, then the director of
central intelligence, and his top deputies personally assured him before his U.N.
speech that U.S. intelligence on the mobile labs was "solid." Since then, Powell
said, the case "has totally blown up in our faces."

Many officials interviewed for this report, including the German intelligence
officers, spoke on the condition they not be identified because they were bound by
secrecy agreements, were not authorized to speak to the news media or because the
case involved classified sources and methods.

Curveball lives under an assumed name in southern Germany. The BND has given him a
furnished apartment, language lessons and a stipend generous enough that he does not
need to work. His wife has emigrated from Iraq, and they have an infant daughter.

The BND has relocated him twice because of concerns that his life was in danger.
They still watch him closely. "He is difficult to integrate" into local society,
said a BND operations officer. "We are still busy with him."

Curveball could not be interviewed for this report. BND officials threatened last
summer to strip him of his salary, housing and protection if he agreed to meet with
The Times.

"We told him, 'If you talk to anyone on the outside? you are out and you get no more
help from us,' " the BND supervisor said.

CIA officials now concede that the Iraqi fused fact, research he gleaned on the
Internet and what his former co-workers called "water cooler gossip" into a
nightmarish fantasy that played on U.S. fears after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Curveball's motive, CIA officials said, was not to start a war. He simply was
seeking a German visa.

German journey

The Curveball chronicle began in November 1999, when the dark-haired Iraqi in his
late 20s flew into Munich's Franz Josef Strauss Airport with a tourist visa.

The Baghdad-born chemical engineer promptly applied for political asylum in Arabic
and halting English. He told German immigration officials he had embezzled Iraqi
government money and faced prison or worse if sent home.

The Germans sent him to Zirndorf, a refugee center near Nuremberg once used for
Soviet defectors, where he joined a long line of Iraqi exiles seeking German visas.

Abruptly, his story changed.

He once led a team, he told BND officers, that equipped trucks to brew deadly bio-
agents. He named six sites where Iraq might be hiding biological warfare vehicles.
Three already were operating. A farm program to boost crop yields was cover for
Iraq's new biological weapons production program, he said.

Germany provided Europe's most generous benefits to Iraqi refugees, and several
hundred arrived each month. But few had useful credible intelligence on Baghdad's
suspected weapons programs. Intelligence agents became accustomed to exaggerated
claims.

"The Iraqis were adept at feeding us what we wanted to hear," said a former official
of the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency who helped debrief about 50 Iraqi
emigres in Germany before the war. "Most of it was garbage.''

But for this defector, the Germans assigned two case officers as well as a team of
chemists, biologists and other experts. They debriefed him from January 2000 to
September 2001.

Since the Iraqi had arrived in Munich, U.S. liaison with German intelligence was
assigned to the local DIA team. Their clandestine operating base was an elegant 19th
century mansion known as Munich House. There he was assigned his codename:
Curveball.

The base cryptonym "ball" was used to signify weapons, two former U.S. intelligence
officials said. An earlier informant in Germany, for example, was called Matchball.

In DIA files, Iraqi sources were listed as "red" if U.S. intelligence could
interview them. Curveball was a "blue" source, meaning the Germans would not permit
U.S. access to him.

Curveball said he hated Americans, the Germans explained.

As a result, the DIA ? like the BND ? never tried to check Curveball's background or
verify his accounts before sending reports to other U.S. intelligence agencies.
Despite that failure, CIA analysts accepted the incoming reports as credible and
quickly passed them to senior policymakers.

The reports had problems, however. The Germans usually interviewed Curveball in
Arabic, using a translator, although the Iraqi sometimes spoke English.

"But a case officer wants to speak directly to his source," said the senior BND
officer. "Curveball began to learn German, and thus there was a big mix [of
languages] that went on. This explains some of the confusion."

It got worse, like a children's game of "telephone," in which information gets
increasingly distorted. The BND sent German summaries of their English and Arabic
interview reports to Munich House and to British intelligence. The DIA team
translated the German back to English and prepared its own summaries. Those went to
DIA's directorate for human intelligence, at a high-rise office in Clarendon, Va.

Clarendon passed 95 DIA reports to the Weapons Intelligence, Non-Proliferation and
Arms Control Center, known as WINPAC, at CIA headquarters in nearby Langley. Experts
there called other specialists, including an independent laboratory, to help
evaluate the data. Spy satellites were directed to focus on Curveball's sites. CIA
artists prepared detailed drawings from Curveball's crude sketches.

The system led to confusion, not clarity.

"Analysts were studying drawings made by artists working from descriptions by a guy
we couldn't talk to," explained a former senior CIA official who helped supervise
the case and the postwar investigation. "It was hard to figure out."

"Our fear is that as it was analyzed and translated and reanalyzed and retranslated,
and comments got added, it could have gotten sexed up by accident," agreed a former
CIA operations official.

The British Secret Intelligence Service, known as MI6, blamed the BND for omitting
what a Parliamentary inquiry called "significant detail" in the reports they sent to
London. At issue were Curveball's trucks.

In an e-mail to The Times, Robin Butler, head of the British inquiry into prewar
intelligence, said "incomplete reporting" by the BND misled the British to assume
the trucks could produce weapons-grade bio-agents such as anthrax spores. But
Curveball only spoke of producing a liquid slurry unsuitable for bombs or warheads.

At the CIA, bio-warfare experts viewed the defector's reports as sophisticated and
technically feasible. They also matched the analysts' expectations.

After the 1991 Gulf War, U.N. inspectors struggled to unravel Baghdad's secret
biological weapons program. They speculated that the regime produced germs in mobile
factories to evade detection.

American U-2 spy planes looked for suspicious vehicles, and U.N. teams raided
parking lots.

In 1994, acting on tips from Israeli intelligence, U.N. inspectors even stopped red-
and-white trucks in Baghdad marked: "Tip Top Ice Cream." Inside they found ice
cream.

"We thought they could easily transport other materials around," said Rolf Ekeus,
who headed the U.N. inspectors from 1991 to 1997.

Finally, in mid-1995, Iraq officials admitted that before the Gulf War they had
secretly produced 30,000 liters of anthrax, botulinum toxin, aflatoxin and other
lethal bio-agents. They had deployed hundreds of germ-filled munitions and
researched other deadly diseases for military use. They denied they ever had mobile
production facilities.

Curveball's story to the Germans in 2000 and 2001 neatly dovetailed with that
history and continuing CIA suspicions.

The Iraqi defector said he was recruited out of engineering school at Baghdad
University in 1994 by Iraq's Military Industrial Commission, headed by Saddam
Hussein's son-in-law Hussein Kamil. He said he went to work the following year for
"Dr. Germ," British-trained microbiologist Rihab Rashid Taha, to build bio-warfare
vehicles. Kamil and Taha had headed the pre-1991 bio-weapons program.

Curveball said he was assigned to the Chemical Engineering and Design Center, behind
the Rashid Hotel in central Baghdad.

That also fit a pattern, as the center provided a cover story for Iraq's first bio-
warfare program .

Curveball said he had helped assemble one truck-mounted germ factory in 1997 at
Djerf al Nadaf, a tumble-down cluster of warehouses in a gritty industrial area 10
miles southeast of Baghdad. He helped the Germans build a scale model of the
facility, showing how vehicles were hidden in a two-story building ? and how they
entered and exited on either end.

He designed laboratory equipment for the trucks, he said, providing dimensions,
temperature ranges and other details. He sketched diagrams of how the system
operated, and identified more than a dozen co-workers.

But the story had holes .

"His information to us was very vague," said the senior German intelligence
official. "He could not say if these things functioned, if they worked."

Curveball also said he could not identify what microbes the trucks were designed to
produce.

"He didn't know ? whether it was anthrax or not," said the BND supervisor. "He had
nothing to do with actual production of [a biological] agent. He was in the
equipment testing phase. And the equipment worked."

David Kay, who read the Curveball file when he headed the CIA's search for hidden
weapons in 2003, said Curveball's accounts were maddeningly murky.

"He was not in charge of trucks or production," Kay said. "He had nothing to do with
actual production of biological agent. He never saw them actually produce [an]
agent."

But the CIA and the White House overlooked the holes in the story.

In a February 2003 radio address and statement, Bush warned that "first-hand
witnesses have informed us that Iraq has at least seven mobile factories" for germ
warfare. With these, Bush said, "Iraq could produce within just months hundreds of
pounds of biological poisons."

Curveball had told the Germans that Taha's team planned to build mobile factories at
six sites across Iraq, from Numaniyah in the south to Tikrit in the north. But he
visited only Djerf al Nadaf, he said. His information about the other sites, he told
the Germans, was second-hand.

Flawed witness

Curveball's reports were highly valued in Washington because the CIA had no Iraqi
spies with access to weapons programs at the time.

One detail particularly impressed the CIA: Curveball's report of a 1998 germ weapons
accident at Djerf al Nadaf. Powell cited the incident in his prewar U.N. speech. An
"eyewitness" was "at the site" when an accident occurred, and 12 technicians "died
from exposure to biological agents," Powell said.

Lawrence B. Wilkerson, then Powell's chief of staff, said senior CIA officials told
Powell the "principal source had not only worked in mobile labs but had seen an
accident and had been injured in the accident?. This gave more credibility to it."

But German intelligence officials said the CIA was wrong. Curveball only "heard
rumors of an accident," the BND supervisor said. "He gave a third-hand account."

The incident led to the first questions inside the CIA about Curveball's
credibility. In May 2000, the Germans allowed a doctor from the CIA's counter-
proliferation branch to meet Curveball and draw a blood sample. Antibodies in the
blood could indicate if he had been exposed to anthrax or other unusual pathogens in
the accident.

The medical tests were inconclusive, but the meeting was memorable.

The BND, insisting Curveball spoke no English and would not meet Americans,
introduced the doctor as a German. The CIA physician remained silent, because he was
not fluent in German. He was surprised, he later told others, that Curveball spoke
"excellent English" to others in the room.

Moreover, Curveball was "very emotional, very excitable," the doctor told one
colleague. And although it was early morning, Curveball smelled of liquor and looked
"very sick" from a stiff hangover.

German intelligence officials said Curveball didn't have a drinking problem. But
they had other concerns.

Like many defectors, Curveball at first seemed eager to please. He thanked his new
friends and laughed at their jokes. He was charming and clearly intelligent,
providing complex engineering details.

But as the questions intensified, Curveball grew moody and irritable. His memory
began to fail. He confused places and dates. He fretted about his personal safety,
about his parents and wife in Baghdad, and about his future in Germany.

"He was between two worlds, sometimes cooperative, sometimes aggressive," said the
BND supervisor. "He was not an easy-going guy."

Curveball largely ceased cooperating in 2001 after he was granted asylum, officials
said. He would refuse to meet for days, and then weeks, at a time. He also
increasingly asked for money.

"He knew he was important," said the BND analyst. "He was not an idiot."

Defectors are often problem sources. Viewed as traitors back home, many embellish
their stories to gain favor with spy services. In the shadow world of intelligence,
Curveball's inability or reluctance to provide many details actually helped convince
analysts he was telling the truth.

Had Curveball claimed expertise with biological weapons or direct access to other
secret programs, said the BND analyst, "It would be easier to assume he was lying."

A former British official involved with the case said Curveball's behavior should be
seen through another lens. He is convinced that Curveball was under intense stress,
terrified both that his visa scam would be exposed, and that his lies would be used
to start a war.

"He must have been scared out of his mind," he said.

But concerns about Curveball's reliability were growing. In early 2001, the CIA's
Berlin station chief sent a message to headquarters noting that a BND official had
complained that the Iraqi was "out of control," and couldn't be located, Senate
investigators found.

MI6 cabled the CIA that British intelligence "is not convinced that Curveball is a
wholly reliable source" and that "elements of [his] behavior strike us as typical of
? fabricators,'' the presidential commission reported.

British intelligence also warned that spy satellite images taken in 1997 when
Curveball claimed to be working at Djerf al Nadaf conflicted with his descriptions.
The photos showed a wall around most of the main warehouse, clearly blocking trucks
from getting in or out.

U.S. and German officials feared that Ahmad Chalabi had coached Curveball after the
defector said his brother had worked as a bodyguard for the controversial Iraqi
exile leader. But they found no evidence.

Curveball "had very little contact with his [bodyguard] brother," the BND supervisor
said. "They are not close.''

More problematic were the three sources the CIA said had corroborated Curveball's
story. Two had ties to Chalabi. All three turned out to be frauds.

The most important, a former major in the Iraqi intelligence service, was deemed a
liar by the CIA and DIA. In May 2002, a fabricator warning was posted in U.S.
intelligence databases.

Powell said he was never warned, during three days of intense briefings at CIA
headquarters before his U.N. speech, that he was using material that both the DIA
and CIA had determined was false. "As you can imagine, I was not pleased," Powell
said. "What really made me not pleased was they had put out a burn notice on this
guy, and people who were even present at my briefings knew it."

But BND officials said their U.S. colleagues repeatedly assured them Curveball's
story had been corroborated.

"They kept on telling us there were three or four sources," said the senior German
intelligence official. "They said it many times."

Behind the scenes, the CIA stepped up pressure to interview Curveball. The BND
finally accepted a compromise in the fall of 2002. They let CIA analysts send
questions, but they could not interview the Iraqi.

The frustration was intense at the CIA. But it wasn't surprising.

Relations long have been rocky between the CIA and BND, officials in both spy
services acknowledged. The friction dates to the Cold War, when the BND complained
it was treated as a second-class agency.

Spy services jealously guard their sources, and the BND was not obligated to share
access to Curveball. "We would never let them see one of ours," said the former CIA
operations officer.



Intelligence shift

Despite the lack of access or any new reports from Curveball, U.S. intelligence
sharply upgraded its assessments of Iraq's biological weapons before the war. The
shift is reflected in declassified portions of National Intelligence Estimates,
which are produced as the authoritative judgment of the 15 U.S. intelligence
agencies.

In May 1999, before Curveball defected, a national intelligence estimate on
worldwide biological warfare programs said Iraq was "probably continuing work to
develop and produce BW [bio-warfare] agents," and could restart production in six
months.

In December 2000, after a year of Curveball's reports, another national intelligence
estimate cautiously noted that "new intelligence" had caused U.S. intelligence "to
adjust our assessment upward" and "suggests Baghdad has expanded'' its bio-weapons
program.

But the caveats disappeared after the Sept. 11 attacks and the still-unsolved
mailing of anthrax-laced letters to several U.S. states.

Iraq "continues to produce at least ? three BW agents" and its mobile germ factories
provide "capabilities surpassing the pre-Gulf War era," the CIA weapons center
warned in October 2001. The CIA followed up with a public White Paper and briefings
for the White House and three Senate committees.

The CIA hadn't seen new intelligence on Iraq's germ weapons. Instead, analysts had
estimated what they believed would be the maximum output from seven mobile labs ?
only one of which Curveball said he had seen ? operating nonstop or six months. But
even Curveball's description of a single lab was a fiction.

Similar misjudgments filled the most important prewar intelligence document, the
National Intelligence Estimate issued in October 2002. It was sent to Congress days
before lawmakers voted to authorize use of military force if Hussein refused to give
up his illicit arsenal.

For the first time, the new estimate warned with "high confidence" that Iraq "has
now established large-scale, redundant and concealed BW agent production
capabilities."

It said "all key aspects" of Iraq's offensive BW program "are active and that most
elements are larger and more advanced than they were before the Gulf War."

The assessment was based "largely on information from a single source ? Curveball,"
the presidential commission concluded. It was one of "the most important and
alarming" judgments in the document, the panel added. And it was utterly wrong.

A handful of bio-analysts in the weapons center, part of the CIA's intelligence
directorate, controlled the Curveball reports and remained confident in their
veracity. But across the CIA bureaucracy, the clandestine service officers who
usually handle defectors and other human sources were increasingly skeptical.

Tyler Drumheller, then the head of CIA spying in Europe, called the BND station
chief at the German embassy in Washington in September 2002 seeking access to
Curveball.

Drumheller and the station chief met for lunch at the German's favorite seafood
restaurant in upscale Georgetown. The German officer warned that Curveball had
suffered a mental breakdown and was "crazy," the now-retired CIA veteran recalled.

"He said, first off, 'They won't let you see him,' " Drumheller said. " 'Second,
there are a lot of problems. Principally, we think he's probably a fabricator.' "

The BND station chief, contacted by The Times during the summer, said he could not
"discuss any of this." He has since been reassigned back to Germany. His BND
supervisors declined to discuss the lunch meeting.

Drumheller, a veteran of 26 years in the CIA clandestine service, said he and
several aides repeatedly raised alarms after the lunch in tense exchanges with CIA
analysts working on the Curveball case.

"The fact is, there was a lot of yelling and screaming about this guy," said James
Pavitt, then chief of clandestine services, who retired from the CIA in August 2004.
"My people were saying, 'We think he's a stinker.' "

The analysts refused to back down. In one meeting, the chief analyst fiercely
defended Curveball's account, saying she had confirmed on the Internet many of the
details he cited. "Exactly, it's on the Internet!" the operations group chief for
Germany, now a CIA station chief in Europe, exploded in response. "That's where he
got it too," according to a participant at the meeting.

Other warnings poured in. The CIA Berlin station chief wrote that the BND had "not
been able to verify" Curveball's claims. The CIA doctor who met Curveball wrote to
his supervisor shortly before Powell's speech questioning "the validity" of the
Iraqi's information.

"Keep in mind that this war is going to happen regardless of what Curve Ball said or
didn't say and the Powers That Be probably aren't terribly interested in whether
Curve Ball knows what he's talking about," his supervisor wrote back, Senate
investigators found. The supervisor later told them he was only voicing his opinion
that war appeared inevitable.

Tenet has denied receiving warnings that Curveball might be a fabricator. He
declined to be interviewed for this report.

Powell said that at the time he prepared for his U.N. speech in early 2003, no one
warned him of the debate inside the CIA over Curveball's credibility. "I was being
as careful as I possibly could," he said.

Working from a CIA conference room adjoining CIA Director Tenet's seventh-floor
office suite, Powell and his aides repeatedly challenged the credibility of CIA
evidence ? including the mobile germ factories.

"We pressed as hard as we could, and the CIA stood by it adamantly," Powell
recalled. "This is one we really pressed on, really spent a lot time on?. We knew
how important it was."



No smoking gun

On Feb. 5, 2003, Powell told the packed U.N. chamber that his account was based on
"solid sources" and "facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence." "We thought
maybe they had the smoking gun," recalled the BND supervisor, who watched Powell on
TV. "My gut feeling was the Americans must have so much from reconnaissance planes
and satellites, from infiltrated spotter teams from Special Forces, and other
systems. We thought they must have tons of stuff."

Instead, Powell emphasized Curveball's "eyewitness" account, calling it "one of the
most worrisome things that emerge from the thick intelligence file."

A congressional staffer on intelligence said she realized the case was weak when she
saw Powell display CIA drawings of trucks but not photos. "A drawing isn't
evidence," she said. "It's hearsay."

Powell's speech failed to sway many diplomats, but it had an immediate impact in
Baghdad.

"The Iraqis scoured the country for trailers," said a former CIA official who helped
interrogate Iraqi officials and scientists in U.S. custody after the war. "They were
in real panic mode. They were terrified that this was real, and they couldn't
explain it."

An explanation was available within days, but U.S. officials ignored it.

On Feb. 8, three days after Powell's speech, the U.N.'s Team Bravo conducted the
first search of Curveball's former work site. The raid by the American-led
biological weapons experts lasted 3 1/2 hours. It was long enough to prove Curveball
had lied.

Djerf al Nadaf was on a dusty road lined with auto repair shops and small factories,
near the former Tuwaitha nuclear facility and a sewage-filled tributary of the
Tigris River.

Behind a high wall, a two-story grain silo adjoined the warehouse that Curveball had
identified as the truck assembly facility.

"That's the one where the mobile labs were supposed to be," said a former U.N.
inspector who worked with the U.S. and other intelligence agencies. "That's the one
we were interested in."

The doors were locked, so Boston microbiologist Rocco Casagrande climbed on a white
U.N. vehicle, yanked open a metal flap in the wall, and crawled inside. After
scrambling over a huge pile of corn, he scraped two samples of residue from cracks
in the cement floor, two more from holes in the wall and one from a discarded shower
basin outside.

Back at the Canal Hotel that afternoon, he tested the samples for bacterial or viral
DNA. He was searching for any signs that germs were produced at the site or any
traces of the 1998 bio-weapons accident. Test results were all negative.

"No threat agents detected," Casagrande wrote in his computer journal that night.
"Got to climb on a jeep and crawl into buildings and play second-story man, but
otherwise spent the day in the lab."

A British inspector, who had helped bring the intelligence file from New York, found
another surprise.

Curveball had said the germ trucks could enter the warehouse from either end. But
there were no garage doors and a solid, 6-foot-high wall surrounded most of the
building. The wall British intelligence saw in 1997 satellite photos clearly made
impossible the traffic patterns Curveball had described.

U.N. teams also raided the other sites Curveball had named. They interrogated
managers, seized documents and used ground-penetrating radar, according to U.N.
reports.

The U.N. inspectors "could find nothing to corroborate Curveball's reporting," the
CIA's Iraq Survey Group reported last year.

On March 7, 2003, Hans Blix, the chief U.N. inspector, told the Security Council
that a series of searches had found "no evidence" of mobile biological production
facilities in Iraq. It drew little notice at the time.

The invasion of Iraq began two weeks later.



Phantom labs

Soon after U.S. troops entered Baghdad, the discovery of two trucks loaded with lab
equipment in northern Iraq brought cheers to the CIA weapons center.

Curveball examined photos relayed to Germany and said that while he hadn't worked on
the two trucks, equipment in the pictures looked like components he had installed at
Djerf al Nadaf.

Days later, the CIA and DIA rushed to publish a White Paper declaring the trucks
part of Hussein's biological warfare program. The report dismissed Iraq's
explanation that the equipment generated hydrogen as a "cover story." A day later,
Bush told a Polish TV reporter: "We found the weapons of mass destruction."

But bio-weapons experts in the intelligence community were sharply critical. A
former senior official of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research
called the unclassified report an unprecedented "rush to judgment."

The DIA then ordered a classified review of the evidence. One of 15 analysts held to
the initial finding that the trucks were built for germ warfare. The sole believer
was the CIA analyst who helped draft the original White Paper.

Hamish Killip, a former British army officer and biological weapons expert, flew to
Baghdad in July 2003 as part of the Iraq Survey Group, the CIA-led Iraqi weapons
hunt. He inspected the truck trailers and was immediately skeptical.

"The equipment was singularly inappropriate" for biological weapons, he said. "We
were in hysterics over this. You'd have better luck putting a couple of dust bins on
the back of the truck and brewing it in there."

The trucks were built to generate hydrogen, not germs, he said. But the CIA refused
to back down. In March 2004, Killip quit, protesting that the CIA was covering up
the truth.

Rod Barton, an Australian intelligence officer and another bio-weapons expert, also
quit over what he said was the CIA's refusal to admit error. "Of course the trailers
had nothing to do with Curveball," Barton wrote in a recent e-mail.

The Iraq Survey Group ultimately agreed. An "exhaustive investigation" showed the
trailers could not "be part of any BW program," it reported in October 2004.

The now-discredited CIA White Paper remains on the agency's website. A CIA spokesman
said the report was posted because it was part of the historical record.

After U.S troops failed to find illicit Iraqi weapons in the days and weeks after
the invasion, the CIA created the Iraq Survey Group to conduct a methodical search
in June 2003.

Tenet appointed Kay to head it. The pugnacious Texan was convinced that Baghdad had
hidden mobile germ factories. Kay's teams returned to Djerf al Nadaf and other sites
identified by Curveball.

One CIA-led unit investigated Curveball himself. The leader was "Jerry," a veteran
CIA bio-weapons analyst who had championed Curveball's case at the CIA weapons
center. They found Curveball's personnel file in an Iraqi government storeroom. It
was devastating.

Curveball was last in his engineering class, not first, as he had claimed. He was a
low-level trainee engineer, not a project chief or site manager, as the CIA had
insisted.

Most important, records showed Curveball had been fired in 1995, at the very time he
said he had begun working on bio-warfare trucks. A former CIA official said
Curveball also apparently was jailed for a sex crime and then drove a Baghdad taxi.

Jerry and his team interviewed 60 of Curveball's family, friends and co-workers.
They all denied working on germ weapons trucks. Curveball's former bosses at the
engineering center said the CIA had fallen for "water cooler gossip" and "corridor
conversations."

"The Iraqis were all laughing," recalled a former member of the survey group. "They
were saying, 'This guy? You've got to be kidding.' "

Jerry tracked down Curveball's Sunni Muslim parents in a middle-class Baghdad
neighborhood.

"Our guy was very polite," Kay recalled. "He said, 'We understand your son doesn't
like Americans.' His mother looked shocked. She said, 'No, no! He loves Americans.'
And she took him into [her son's] bedroom and it was filled with posters of American
rock stars. It was like any other teenage room. She said one of his goals was to go
to America."

The deeper Jerry probed, the worse Curveball looked.

Childhood friends called him a "great liar" and a "con artist." Another called him
"a real operator." The team reported that "people kept saying what a rat Curveball
was."

Jerry and another CIA analyst abruptly broke off the investigation and took a
military flight back to Washington. Kay said Jerry appeared to be nearing a nervous
breakdown.

"They had been true believers in Curveball," Kay said. "They absolutely believed in
him. They knew every detail in his file. But it was total hokum. There was no truth
in it. They said they had to go home to explain how all this was all so wrong. They
wanted to fight the battle at the CIA."

Back home, senior CIA officials resisted. Jerry was "read the riot act" and accused
of "making waves" by his office director, according to the presidential commission.
He and his colleague ultimately were transferred out of the weapons center.

The CIA was "very, very vindictive," Kay said.

Soon after, Jerry got in touch with Michael Scheuer, a CIA analyst who felt he had
been sidelined for criticizing CIA counterterrorism tactics. Scheuer would quit
within a year.

"Jerry had become kind of a nonperson," Scheuer recalled of their meeting. "There
was a tremendous amount of pressure on him not to say anything. Just to sit there
and shut up."

A CIA spokeswoman confirmed the account, but declined to comment further. Jerry
still works at the CIA and could not be contacted for this report. His former
supervisor, reached at home, said she could not speak to the media. "What was done
to them was wrong," said a former Pentagon official who investigated the case for
the presidential commission. "But we didn't see it so much as a cover-up as an
expression of how profoundly resistant to recognizing mistakes the CIA culture was."



Kay's findings

In December 2003, Kay flew back to CIA headquarters. He said he told Tenet that
Curveball was a liar and he was convinced Iraq had no mobile labs or other illicit
weapons. CIA officials confirm their exchange.

Kay said he was assigned to a windowless office without a working telephone.

On Jan. 20, 2004, Bush lauded Kay and the Iraq Survey Group in his State of the
Union Speech for finding "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities?.
Had we failed to act, the dictator's weapons of mass destruction program would
continue to this day."

Kay quit three days later and went public with his concerns.

In Germany, the BND finally agreed to let the CIA interview Curveball. The CIA sent
one of its best officers, fluent in German and gifted at working reluctant sources.

They met at BND headquarters in Pullach, a suburb of Munich, in mid-March 2004 ? one
year after the Iraq invasion.

Alone with Curveball at last, the CIA officer steadily reviewed details and picked
at contradictions like a prosecutor working a hostile witness. He showed spy
satellite images and other evidence from the sites Curveball had identified.

Each night, he would file an encrypted report to CIA headquarters on his computer,
and then call Drumheller.

"After the first couple of days, he said, 'This doesn't sound good,' " Drumheller
recalled. "After the first week, he said, 'This guy is lying. He's lying about a
bunch of stuff.' "

But Curveball refused to admit deceit. When challenged, he would mumble, say he
didn't know and suggest the questioner was wrong or the photo was doctored. As the
evidence piled up, he simply stopped talking.

"He never said, 'You got me,' " Drumheller said. "He just shrugged, and didn't say
anything. It was all over. We told our guy, 'You might as well wrap it up and come
home.' "

It took more than a month to track and recall every U.S. intelligence report ? at
least 100 in all ? based on Curveball's misinformation. In a blandly worded notice
to its stations around the world, the CIA said in May 2004:

"Discrepancies surfaced regarding the information provided by ? Curveball in this
stream of reporting, which indicate that he lost his claimed access in 1995. Our
assessment, therefore, is that Curveball appears to be fabricating in this stream of
reporting."

The CIA had advised Bush in the fall of 2003 of "problems with the sourcing" on
biological weapons, an official familiar with the briefing said. But the president
has never withdrawn the statement in his 2003 State of the Union speech that Iraq
produced "germ warfare agents" or his postwar assertions that "we found the weapons
of mass destruction."

U.S., British and German intelligence officials still debate what Curveball really
saw, and what he really did. One possible answer was buried in records the Iraq
Survey Group recovered at the engineering and design center in Baghdad.

They show that Iraqi officials considered installing seed handling gear on trucks in
1995, but instead put the machinery in warehouses, like those at Djerf al Nadaf.
Perhaps Curveball heard about the modified trucks and spun them into a bio-weapons
system for gullible intelligence agencies.

"You're left at the end with uncertainty," said the former CIA official who helped
supervise the Curveball case and the postwar investigation. "We know what he said.
We know we don't believe him. But was he making it all up? Was he coached? Did he
hear something and then embellish it? These things are still unresolved."

Not for Curveball. "He is convinced his story is true," said the BND analyst. "He
has no doubts to this day."

*


Drogin is a Times staff writer. Goetz is a special correspondent. Also contributing
to this report from Baghdad was staff writer Jeffrey Fleishman.

*

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Key developments

1991

Gulf War ends

Saddam Hussein loses the Gulf War and orders aides to destroy stocks of germ-filled
bombs. Regime officials lie to U.N. inspectors about prewar program and hide
evidence of biological warfare factories.

1992

U.N. acts

A U.N. weapons inspector speculates in a memo that Iraq may be using mobile germ
production facilities to hide its bio-warfare program. U.N. launches unsuccessful
raids to find the suspected germ trucks.

1994

Curveball gets job

Curveball is hired out of engineering school at Baghdad University to work at the
Chemical Engineering and Design Center. He says he is first in his class, but
records later show that he was last in his class.

May 1995

Enter 'Dr. Germ'

Curveball says he is assigned to help his boss, Dr. Rihab Taha, also known as "Dr.
Germ," as she begins planning for secret assembly of vehicles that can brew deadly
germs and avoid detection.

July 1995

An Iraqi admission

Regime officials admit to U.N. inspectors that Iraq produced and weaponized anthrax,
botulinum toxin, aflatoxin and other biological poisons before the Gulf War. CIA
analysts suspect Baghdad has secret mobile labs.

July 1997

Germ truck

Curveball says he helped assemble a germ-production unit on trucks at Djerf al
Nadaf. But the Iraqi says he did not see the unit in use, and did not know what
germs it was designed to produce.

Fall 1998

Accident rumors

Curveball says an accident at Djerf al Nadaf kills 12 bio-warfare technicians. The
CIA later says Curveball witnessed the accident and was injured, but Germans say he
only heard "rumors" of incident.

November 1999

Move to Germany

Curveball applies for political asylum in Germany. He tells German intelligence for
first time that he built germ weapons trucks. U.S. investigators later conclude he
conjured up story to obtain visa.

January 2000

Curveball talks

German intelligence officers first interrogate Curveball. They refuse to let U.S.
operatives meet him. But summaries of his information are quickly provided to senior
U.S. policymakers.

May 2000

Doubts raised

Doubts emerge about Curveball. A CIA doctor, posing as a German, meets the defector
and reports he spoke "excellent English." German officials say Curveball has
emotional problems.



September 2001

9/11 raises profile

The Germans complete interrogations of Curveball. 9/11 terror attacks raise U.S.
concerns about Saddam Hussein. CIA reassesses Curveball reports and sharply
increases warnings of Iraq's germ weapons.

Fall 2002

A CIA warning

A German intelligence official tells Tyler Drumheller that Curveball may be a
fabricator. Drumheller tries to warn others at the CIA. But U.S. intelligence
concludes that Iraq has greater bio-warfare capabilities.

February-March 2003

Powell speaks

Colin Powell warns U.N. that the mobile labs Curveball described can kill thousands
of people. U.N. inspectors visit Djerf al Nadaf and other sites in Iraq but find no
evidence. U.S. invades Iraq.

May 2003

Bush affirms WMD

U.S. find two trucks with lab equipment. Curveball identifies some items. President
Bush announces finding weapons of mass destruction. CIA determines the vehicles
cannot be used for biological weapons.

Fall 2003

Story unravels

CIA-led investigators discover Curveball was fired in 1995, and could not have
worked on bio-weapons. Friends call him a liar and a fraud. "Jerry," a CIA official,
tries to convince senior officials of their mistake.

March-May 2004

CIA closes case

Germans allow the U.S. to interview Curveball. He refuses to admit deceit, but CIA
case officer is convinced he is lying. CIA declares Curveball a fabricator and
withdraws all reports based on his accounts.