Used to Sell the War
By Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted October 22, 2007.
A interview with the author of a new book on the Iraqi defector
code-named "Curveball," whose made-up intelligence on Saddam's WMD
programs was central to the Bush Administration's case for invasion.
After four years watching the disastrous consequences of the invasion
of Iraq unfold, it's easy to forget the atmosphere of panic in which
the war was sold to the American public. All the talk of clandestine
meetings in Prague, dubious connections between Iraq and 9/11,
aluminum tubes and yellowcake from Niger is becoming a memory; it
seems ages since we were warned that the "smoking gun" that proved
Saddam's deadly intent might be in the form of a mushroom cloud rising
from one of America's cities.
Yet it’s im****tant to recall that after all the rhetoric about Saddam
Hussein's monstrous legacy and Colin Powell's flashy charts and
honey-smooth presentation at the UN, the heart of the Bush
administration's case for invading Iraq -- or at least for its claims
about massive stockpiles of biological weapons being driven around the
country in high-tech mobile labs to avoid detection -- was an Iraqi
defector code-named "Curveball."
In CURVEBALL: Spies, Lies and the Con Man Who Caused a War,veteran Los
Angeles Times re****ter Bob Drogin, who originally broke the story,
paints a picture of a desperate refugee who, while trying to gain
asylum in Europe, began feeding claims about Saddam's supposed weapons
programs to an intelligence community that was under intense pressure
from the top to come up with a case for war.
Curveball, who claimed to be an Iraqi chemical engineer with knowledge
of even the country's most secret weapons programs, spilled the beans
in a big way when debriefed by German intelligence officials. But, as
Drogin would later re****t, he was a twitchy, possibly mentally
disturbed drunk who was prone to rapid mood-swings and whose story
tended to ****ft according to what he thought investigators wanted to
hear. But despite that fact, and with only the "corroboration" of a
few ex-patriots associated with convicted fraudster Ahmed Chalabi,
Curveball's claims passed through several layers of often skeptical
intelligence professionals and became 'Exhibit A' in the
administration's case for war.
Drogin's account is a detailed one from the perspective of an old
national security hand, with plenty of inside scoop -- the kind of
re****ting, brimming with internecine fighting and bureaucratic
intrigue, that will give the pundits on both sides of the war some new
grist for debate. It's also a page-turner that feels more like a Tom
Clancy novel than most nonfiction.
AlterNet caught up with Drogin in New York City.
Joshua Holland: You've described a very unstable character, and
re****ted that there was no shortage of people in the intelligence
community who expressed deep misgivings about his reliability. Give me
a sense of how the story unfolded -- how did his claims get through
all those intelligence pros?
Bob Drogin: Well, the CIA heard what it wanted to hear. It saw what it
wanted to see. And it told the president what he wanted to hear. Time
and again, intelligence officials discounted contradictory
information, filled in gaps, and made up the dots to reach the
conclusion they wanted. In part, they were caught up in the climate of
fear after 9/11 and felt they couldn't afford to underestimate a
possible threat. In part, there was a clear understanding by late 2002
that we were going to war and it would make no difference, and
probably would hurt your career, if you tried to get in the way. But
mostly, I think incompetence and poor leader****p allowed unconfirmed
and unreliable information to move up the chain of command. Those few
intelligence officers who tried to raise red flags, or issue warnings,
either were ignored or treated like heretics. And by the time Colin
Powell goes to the U.N. to make the case for war, he shows the world
artists' conjectures based on analysts' interpretations and
extrapolations of Arabic-to-German-to-English translations of summary
debriefing re****ts of interviews with a manic-depressive defector whom
the Americans had never met. Tenet told Powell that Curveball's
information was ironclad and unassailable. It was a travesty.
Holland: You wrote about the deep distrust between the American
intelligence agencies -- especially the CIA -- and their German
counterparts. How did that contribute to the debacle?
Drogin: I became fascinated by the mostly unknown, and truly sordid
history between the CIA and its German counterpart, the BND. U.S.
authorities chose one of Hitler's top spymasters, a senior figure in
the Nazi high command, to start and run the West German intelligence
service after World War II. It became a rat line for SS, Gestapo and
even members of Adolph Eichmann's staff. Partly as a result, the BND
was repeatedly penetrated by East German and other Soviet bloc forces,
and it repeatedly betrayed U.S. and other Western intelligence
operations. By the time the Berlin Wall came down, there were just
decades of distrust and resentment between them. The new German
government tried to reign in the CIA, which enjoyed almost extra-legal
powers, and it produced a series of embarrassing scandals on both
sides. That was the state of play when Curveball defected to Germany
in 1999.
See the rest of the article:
http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/65743/
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