http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13493736/
June 25, 2006
New details on WMD ‘fabricator’ emerge
Warnings that Iraqi was lying about bioweapons ignored, ex-CIA aide
says
By Joby Warrick
Washington Post
In late January 2003, as Secretary of State Colin Powell prepared to
argue the Bush administration's case against Iraq at the United
Nations, veteran CIA officer Tyler Drumheller sat down with a
classified draft of Powell's speech to look for errors.
He found a whopper:
a claim about mobile biological labs built by Iraq for germ warfare.
Drumheller instantly recognized the source, an Iraqi defector
suspected of being mentally unstable and a liar.
The CIA officer took his pen, he recounted in an interview, and
crossed out the whole paragraph.
A few days later, the lines were back in the speech.
Powell stood before the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5 and said:
"We have first-hand descriptions of biological weapons factories on
wheels and on rails."
The sentence took Drumheller completely by surprise.
"We thought we had taken care of the problem," said the man who was
the CIA's European operations chief before retiring last year, "but I
turn on the television and there it was, again."
While the administration has repeatedly acknowledged intelligence
failures over Iraqi weapons claims that led to war, new accounts by
former insiders such as Drumheller shed light on one of the most
spectacular failures of all:
How U.S. intelligence agencies were eagerly drawn in by reports about
a troubled defector's claims of secret germ factories in the Iraqi
desert.
The mobile labs were never found.
Drumheller, who is writing a book about his experiences, described in
extensive interviews repeated attempts to alert top CIA officials to
problems with the defector, code-named Curveball, in the days before
the Powell speech.
Other warnings came prior to President Bush's State of the Union
address on Jan. 28, 2003.
In the same speech that contained the now famous "16 words" on Iraqi
attempts to acquire uranium, Bush spoke in far greater detail about
mobile labs "designed to produce germ warfare agents."
The warnings triggered debates within the CIA but ultimately made no
visible impact at the top, current and former intelligence officials
said.
In briefing Powell before his U.N. speech, George Tenet, then the CIA
director, personally vouched for the accuracy of the mobile-lab claim,
according to participants in the briefing.
Tenet now says he did not learn of the problems with Curveball until
much later and that he received no warnings from Drumheller or anyone
else.
"No one mentioned Drumheller, or Curveball," Lawrence B. Wilkerson,
Powell's chief of staff at the time, said in an interview.
"I didn't know the name Curveball until months afterward."
Con artist taxi driver
Curveball's role in shaping U.S. declarations about Iraqi bioweapons
capabilities was first described in a series of reports in the Los
Angeles Times, and later in a March 2005 report by a presidential
commission on U.S. intelligence failures regarding allegations that
Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.
But Drumheller's first-hand accounts add new detail about the CIA's
embrace of a source whose credibility was already unraveling.
More than a year after Powell's speech, after an investigation that
extended to three continents, the CIA acknowledged that Curveball was
a con artist who drove a taxi in Iraq and spun his engineering
knowledge into a fantastic but plausible tale about secret bioweapons
factories on wheels.
But 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.
In late 2002, the Bush administration began scouring intelligence
files for reports of Iraqi weapons threats.
Drumheller was asked to press a counterpart from a European
intelligence agency for direct access to Curveball.
Other officials confirmed that it was the German intelligence service.
The German official declined but then offered a startlingly candid
assessment, Drumheller recalled.
"He said, 'I think the guy is a fabricator,' " Drumheller said,
recounting the conservation with the official, whom he declined to
name.
"He said, 'We also think he has psychological problems. We could never
validate his reports.' "
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.'"
Warning ignored
In January 2003, Drumheller received a new request from CIA
headquarters to contact the German intelligence service about
Curveball.
This time, Drumheller recalled, the U.S. spy agency had three
questions:
Could a U.S. official refer to Curveball's mobile lab accounts in an
upcoming political speech?
Could the Germans guarantee that Curveball would stand by his account?
Could German intelligence verify Curveball's claims?
The reply from Berlin, as Drumheller recalls it, was less than
encouraging: There are no guarantees.
"They said: 'We have never been able to verify his claims,' "
Drumheller recalled.
"And that was all sent up to Tenet's office."
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.
A few days later, Drumheller was handed a draft of another key speech
on Iraq: Powell's remarks to the U.N. Security Council accusing
Hussein of reconstituting his WMD programs.
This time, the speech included an obvious reference to Curveball -- an
unnamed "chemical engineer" who worked in one of the labs -- as well
as detailed drawings of mobile labs inspired by Curveball's
descriptions.
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.
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.
Wilkerson: We were suspicious
In their briefings to Powell on Feb. 4, one day before the secretary's
U.N. speech, Tenet and McLaughlin expressed nothing but confidence in
the mobile-lab story, according to Wilkerson, Powell's chief of staff,
who was present during the briefings.
"Powell and I were both suspicious because there were no pictures of
the mobile labs," Wilkerson said.
The drawings were constructed from Curveball's accounts.
But the CIA officials were persuasive.
Wilkerson said the two men described the evidence on the mobile labs
as exceptionally strong, based on multiple sources whose stories were
independently corroborated.
"They said, 'This is it, Mr. Secretary. You can't doubt this one,' "
Wilkerson said.
On the eve of the U.N. speech, Drumheller received a late-night phone
call from Tenet, who said he was checking final details of the speech.
Drumheller said he brought up the mobile labs.
"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.
The following day, Tenet was seated directly behind Powell at the U.N.
Security Council as the secretary of state presented a detailed
lecture and slide show about an Iraqi mobile biological weapons
program.
Tenet, responding to questions about Drumheller's accounts, provided
to The Post a statement he had given in response to the Silberman-Robb
Commission report in which he said he didn't learn of the problems
with Curveball until much later.
He did not recall talking to Drumheller about Curveball, and said it
was "simply wrong" for anyone to imply that he knew about the problems
with Curveball's credibility.
"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.
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."
_________________________________________________________
2,517 American troops are dead, 18,572 have been wounded, tens of
thousands of innocent Iraqis are dead and wounded in deranged Bush's
insane war.
Harry
.
|
