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Lies revealed: pretext for war fabricated, dead wrong The London Guardian | April 1, 2005 A presidential commission investigating the intelligence debacle that preceded the Iraq invasion reported yesterday that the damage done to US credibility would "take years to undo". American intelligence was described by the report as being in chaos, often paralysed by the rivalry of 15 different spy agencies and affected by unchallenged assumptions about Baghdad's supposed weapons of mass destruction. The incompetence described in the report occasionally descends into farce, particularly over an Iraqi defector codenamed Curveball, whose fabricated tales about mobile biological laboratories and their influence on US decision-makers were reminiscent of Graham Greene's accidental spy in Our Man in Havana. Despite warnings that he was "crazy", "a waste of time", and that he had not even been in Iraq at the time of an event he supposedly saw, his claims became the subject of almost 100 Defence Intelligence Agency reports and a focus of the National Intelligence Estimate in October 2002. Article continues Curveball's story has already been told in part, but yesterday's account is the most comprehensive. He was an Iraqi chemical engineer who was first debriefed in 2000 by a foreign liaison service - not named in yesterday's report but elsewhere reported as being German intelligence. Before the war, the Germans refused to let US interrogators question Curveball directly, saying that he "would refuse to speak to Americans"; they just passed on his claims, according to the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction. Warning signs emerged in May 2000 when a military intelligence officer was allowed to visit Curveball. He reported: "I do have a concern with the validity of the information, based on Curveball having a terrible hangover the morning of [the meeting]." The warning fell on deaf ears, but by autumn 2002 the CIA was growing increasingly nervous, knowing it had not met an important source. So a meeting was arranged between the local CIA division chief and German intelligence officers. When the division chief asked whether US agents could question the defector, "the foreign intelligence service responded with words to the effect of 'You don't want to see him because he's crazy' - furthermore, the [German] representative said that he worried that Curveball was 'a fabricator'." The division chief passed on this alarming news to his superiors, but George Tenet, then CIA chief, and his deputy, John McLaughlin, both denied having been told of it. On the eve of Mr Powell's UN speech, Mr Tenet and senior intelligence officers were cloistered with the secretary of state in New York, going over the administration's claims. At midnight Mr Tenet called the division chief at home, but the two men have different recollections of the conversation. "Although he did not remember his exact words, the division chief says that he told Mr Tenet something to the effect of 'You know that the [foreign service] reporting has problems'. According to the division chief, Mr Tenet replied with words to the effect of 'Yeah, yeah' and that he was 'exhausted'," the report says. It continues: "The division chief said that when he listened to the speech... he was surprised the information from Curveball had been included." Questioned by the commission, however, Mr Tenet denied that the subject of Curveball had ever been raised. Curveball is reportedly related to a senior member of the Iraqi national congress (INC), then an exile group. However, the commission found that the INC had not brought him forward. The report is another nail in the coffin of Mr Tenet's reputation and clears the White House and Pentagon of trying to shape intelligence to justify war. It concludes: "The commission found no evidence of political pressure to influence the intelligence community's prewar assessments of Iraq's weapons programmes." It warns only of the dangers of intelligence leaders becoming too close to the president and risking the loss of objectivity. In other words, the commission found that Mr Tenet had been too eager to please. Prewar Intelligence "dead wrong"WASHINGTON: The commission of inquiry set up by President George Bush to probe the charges of misjudgment on the part of U.S. intelligence agencies on Iraq, has categorically ruled that the U.S. intelligence was "dead wrong in almost all of its pre-war judgments about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction". In a damning report just released, the commission found that the pre-war claims that Iraq had a stockpile of biological weapons were based on statements by a defector codenamed "Curveball", who has at times been defined as "crazy" by U.S. intelligence agents themselves and "a congenital liar" by some of his very own friends. The commission said in spite of huge funding for intelligence systems after the September 11, 2001 attacks, the country's 15 intelligence services were still "often unable to gather intelligence on the very things we care the most about". The 601-page report, compiled after more than a year of investigations, castigated the claims of American intelligence system and found that there are serious shortcomings still in the operations of the country's spy agencies. "This was a major intelligence failure," it concluded. At one point it said: "Across the board, the intelligence community knows disturbingly little about the nuclear programs of many of the world's most dangerous actors." The commission, better known as the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, appointed in the wake of bitter criticism that the U.S. intelligence had failed in Iraq, and headed by a judge of the U.S. appeals court, Laurence Silberman, and Democratic senator from Virginia, Charles Robb, recommended substantial overhaul of the intelligence system. After accepting the report from Judge Silberman and Senator Robb in the Executive Office Building of the White House, President Bush told journalists: "The central conclusion is one that I share: America's intelligence community needs fundamental change." And he immediately promised action on the commission's 74 recommendations and directed Homeland Security Adviser Fran Townsend to review the findings. "We will correct what needs to be fixed, and build on what the commission calls solid intelligence successes," said the President. The commission, in a separate letter to the President, came down heavily on the CIA and the FBI, describing these national agencies as remaining "too comfortable with a 'business as usual' approach to intelligence gathering." There is, however no direct blame on the President or Vice President Dick Cheney. The defector, whose identity has never been made public and on whose revelations the intelligence agencies based their recommendations, was found to have been not even in Iraq at the time when he had claimed he had participated in the biological weapons work. These so-called revelations and the evident lack of credibility of his claims form the crux of the report, which underlines in no small measures the failures of the U.S. intelligence system. It summarized the situation thus: "Worse than having no human sources is being seduced by a human source who is telling lies.". However, in a post 911 USA, isn't it still better to be be safe, rather than very sorry indeed?
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