Reporter says war based on false info

The war in Iraq is "unique in the annals of American intelligence" because its rationale was based on information from a lone, untrustworthy refugee nicknamed "Curveball," Los Angeles Times reporter Bob Drogin said yesterday in a lecture in Dodds Auditorium.

A Pulitzer Prize winner who covers national security, Drogin described the events leading up to America's declaration of war on Iraq and argued that the intelligence backing it up was flimsy and questionable. The talk drew from his recently published book, "Curveball: Spies, Lies, and the Con Man Who Caused a War."

In 1999, Drogin said, an Iraqi refugee sought political asylum in Germany and "wanted to jump the line" to avoid the country's long, arduous citizenship process and escape months in the bleak Nirndorf refugee center. To gain asylum more quickly, the refugee told the BND, Germany's primary federal intelligence agency, that he was a head chemical engineer with information about Saddam Hussein's biological weapons program.

The refugee, nicknamed "Curveball" –– derived from "ball," a term previously applied to Soviet defectors — claimed Hussein had trucks with spray dryers that could "produce lethal agents with the kind of specificity so [that using them] would be like an asthma inhaler with biological weapons," Drogin said.

With this information in hand, the BND granted Curveball political asylum, but Curveball quickly became uncooperative once he had what he wanted, claiming he was not a head chemical engineer, but rather an engineer in training. He "forgot" other details as well and became increasingly vague.

In the meantime, Germany had passed Curveball's information to the U.S. government. Instead of investigating Curveball's information, the government accepted the intelligence as accurate, reasoning that his subsequent efforts to reverse his story signaled that he had initially been telling the truth.

But, Drogin said, because Curveball's story was translated from Arabic to German to English, the intelligence was actually quite shaky. It was, he said, "a game of telephone."

When the United States first acquired Curveball's information, Drogin said, it had no impact. After Sept. 11, 2001, however, "all of the information was seen in a new light."

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"I think without the information from Curveball, the United States would have had a very hard case making a case for the weapons of mass destruction" alleged to exist in Iraq, he said. He added that Curveball was the United States' only source of intelligence to indicate Hussein had biological weapons, even though American officials had never personally interrogated him.

In addition to the translation problems, Drogin added, Curveball's story morphed as it filtered up to leaders in U.S. intelligence agencies and government, with officials increasingly describing it as more concrete and certain.

Though Hussein had a chemical weapons program and a smaller, experimental biological weapons program that was formed a few months before the Gulf War, the United States increased its estimates of Hussein's chemical weapons program based on Curveball's intelligence, Drogin said. Intelligence officers assumed that if Hussein had chemical weapons, he must have had biological weapons, too, and that the programs must have increased in size and sophistication after the first Gulf War. "It was sheer nonsense," Drogin said.

Eventually, Drogin argued, the story culminated in Vice President Dick Cheney's assertion that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, followed by then-Secretary of State Colin Powell's famous speech to the United Nations detailing what the United States believed to be Iraq's weapon's program.

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After Powell's speech, Drogin said, inspectors went to the sites in Iraq that Curveball had claimed contained biological weapons. "They found no information to support his story," he said.

"After 9/11," Drogin added, "we heard the problem was [that] the CIA and the law enforcement community had failed to connect the dots." But the story of Curveball makes matters even worse, he said. "They literally made up the dots."