US source ‘Curveball’ invented Iraq stories

THE Iraqi defector code-named Curveball, whose false tales of biological weapons labs bolstered the US case for war, wasn’t the prominent chemical engineer he claimed to be and invented stories to help his case for asylum in Germany, a new report says.

Curveball is Rafid Ahmed Alwan, who studied chemical engineering but made poor grades and never managed a biological weapons facility, according to CBS’s 60 Minutes, which will tomorrow broadcast a report describing how Alwan became an intelligence source.

Curveball was discredited by US investigations and became an embarrassment to US spy agencies.

A presidential intelligence commission found that Curveball, who mostly told his stories to German intelligence, who passed them on to the US, was a fabricator and an alcoholic.

60 Minutes reports that Alwan arrived at a German refugee centre in 1999 and began spinning tales of a facility making mobile biological weapons in an effort to gain asylum.

His plan succeeded partially because he had worked briefly at the plant and his descriptions of it were mostly accurate. He embellished his account by saying 12 workers had been killed by biological agents in an accident at the plant.

The ploy apparently achieved his goal, and Alwan is assumed to be living in Germany today under an assumed name.

More than 100 summaries of his debriefings were sent to the CIA — along with the now-disproved Iraqi quest for uranium for nuclear weapons — for the US decision to bomb and then invade Iraq.

The CIA-director George Tenet gave Alwan’s information to Secretary of State Colin Powell to use at the UN in his speech justifying military action against Iraq.

Although German officials warned the CIA Curveball’s claims of mobile bioweapons labs were unreliable, and UN inspectors determined before the war began in 2003 that parts of his story were false, the Bush administration continued to promote the existence of such mobile labs for months after the invasion, until it was widely accepted that they could not be found.

“Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent,” said George W Bush on January 28, 2003 in his defence of war.