Curveball Exchanges Bogus Intelligence For German Visa

“We were shocked. Mein Gott! We had always told them it was not proven…. It was not hard intelligence.”

- BND officer, on Powell’s U.N. claims.

“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.”

- CIA notice to global stations, May, 2004.

“Curveball's motive, CIA officials said, was not to start a war. He simply was seeking a German visa… Curveball largely ceased cooperating in 2001 after he was granted asylum… U.S. and German officials feared that Ahmad Chalabi had coached Curveball… even Curveball's description of a single lab was a fiction… 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. … 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.”

- Bob Drogin and John Goetz.

Bob Drogin and John Goetz. “How U.S. Fell Under the Spell of ‘Curveball,’” Los Angeles Times, 11/20/05.
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