In a front page story, Washington Post revisits Curveball and mobile labs report today.
The background. Curveball, a former Iraqi engineer, was under German custody and he provided them info about Iraqi mobile labs for biological WMD. That info went into Bush's SOTU and Powell's UN speech. All the info later turned out to be false.
Details after the break.
Today's wapo report from Joby Warrick says George Tenet and his deputy MCLaughlin knew or should have known that the info was false before they passed it onto Colin Powell.
Wapo revisits Curveball
Who is Curveball?
[In] the fall of 2002, Curveball was living the life of an important spy. A Baghdad native whose real name has never been released, he was residing in a safe house in Germany, where he had requested asylum three years earlier. In return for immigration permits for himself and his family, the Iraqi supplied Germany's foreign intelligence service with what appeared to be a rare insider's account of one of President Saddam Hussein's long-rumored WMD programs.
Curveball described himself as a chemical engineer who had worked inside an unusual kind of laboratory, one that was built on a trailer bed and produced weapons for germ warfare. He furnished detailed, technically complex descriptions of mobile labs and even described an industrial accident that he said killed a dozen people.
The German intelligence agency BND faithfully passed Curveball's stories to the Americans. Over time, the informant generated more than 100 intelligence reports on secret Iraqi weapons programs -- the only such reports from an informant claiming to have visited and worked in mobile labs. Other informants, also later discredited, had claimed indirect knowledge of mobile labs.
Germans passed on the info, but with caveats. They told CIA's then-European Chief Tyler Drumheller that they thought he was a "fabricator". Drumheller takes that info to his bosses.
When Drumheller relayed the warning to his superiors in October 2002, it sparked what he described as "a series of the most contentious meetings I've ever seen" in three decades of government work.
Although no American had ever interviewed Curveball, analysts with the CIA's Center for Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation and Arms Control believed the informant's technical descriptions were too detailed to be fabrications.
"People were cursing. These guys were absolutely, violently committed to it," Drumheller said. "They would say to us, 'You're not scientists, you don't understand.' "
In Jan 03, CIA asked Drumheller to go back to his German counterparts and find out if the info was solid. He got the same pushback from Germans. (What I don't understand is why Germans did not let Drumheller interview Curveball - especially when they did not trust the Iraqi. Wapo doesn't say.) So he went back to CIA HQ and told them Germans couldn't verify any of the things that Curveball said.
When Drumheller listened to Bush's speech several days later, he was astonished to hear the mobile labs described in detail.
"Boom, there it was," he said.
Drumheller was asked to vet Powell's UN speech. He saw that mobile lab thing again and called HQ. He was asked to come to HQ and meet with McLaughlin.
Drumheller said he called the office of John E. McLaughlin, then the CIA deputy director, and was told to come there immediately. Drumheller said he sat across from McLaughlin and an aide in a small conference room and spelled out his concerns.
McLaughlin responded with alarm and said Curveball was "the only tangible source" for the mobile lab story, Drumheller recalled, adding that the deputy director promised to quickly investigate.
Portions of Drumheller's account of his meetings with McLaughlin and Tenet appear in the final report of the Silberman-Robb commission, which was appointed by Bush to investigate prewar U.S. intelligence failures on Iraq's weapons programs. The report cites e-mails and interviews with other CIA officials who were aware of the meetings.
The bolded sentence says that there was independent verification of the meeting, right? McLaughlin now denies it ever happened.
In responding to questions about Drumheller, McLaughlin provided The Post with a copy of the statement he gave in response to the commission's report. The statement said he had no memories of the meeting with Drumheller and had no written documentation that the meeting took place.
"If someone had made these doubts clear to me, I would not have permitted the reporting to be used in Secretary Powell's speech," McLaughlin said in the statement.
In a late-night phone call on the eve of Powell's UN speech, Drumheller told Tenet not to use the stuff.
"I said: 'Hey, boss, you're not going to use that stuff in the speech . . . ? There are real problems with that,' " Drumheller said, recalling the conversation.
Drumheller recalled that Tenet seemed distracted and tired and told him not to worry.
When Wapo went to Tenet for this story, he gave them his statement to Silberman-Robb Commission.
"Nobody came forward to say there is a serious problem with Curveball or that we have been told by the foreign representative of the service handling him that there are worries that he is a 'fabricator,' " Tenet said in his statement.
What is going on here? Wapo a few days ago, in reviewing PBS's special
Dark Side wrote this.
From the evidence here, in fact, it appears Tenet willingly sold his soul. The best quote comes from former Iraq weapons inspector David Kay, who says, "George Tenet wanted to be a player. And he understood that if you didn't give the policymakers what they wanted, you weren't a player. . . . He traded integrity for access. And that's a bad bargain anytime in life. It's a particularly bad bargain if you're running an intelligence agency."
Getting back to Powell's speech, when did Powell come to know that Curveball story was all wrong? Did any part of Powell's speech turn out to be correct? Wapo today quotes Powell's former chief of staff Larry Wilkerson.
In late summer 2003, seven months after the U.N. speech, Tenet called Powell to say that the Curveball story had fallen apart, Wilkerson said. The call amounted to an admission that all of the CIA's claims Powell used in his speech about Iraqi weapons were wrong.
"They had hung on for a long time, but finally Tenet called Powell to say, 'We don't have that one, either,' " Wilkerson recalled. "The mobile labs were the last thing to go."