The man who sold the war

Curveball has been portrayed as a tool of those in the Bush administration looking to go to war. And you see him more as a consequence of people just trying to do what they saw as their job, not as some sort of Cheney-ite plot.

I really feel quite strongly on this. It is self-evident that George Bush took us to war, that he's the one who's responsible, and that he made a political decision based on the information that he was given. Where I disagree with the conspiracy theories about all of this [is] this idea that there was this little cabal of people who were determined to do this, that they were going to twist the intelligence and that they cherry-picked the intelligence. The point of the Curveball story, and the rest of the prewar intelligence, is that they didn't have to do that. They were being served twisted intelligence by the shovel load by the CIA. If you look at the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002, it is wrong in every single statement regarding chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. They didn't have to go cherry-pick anything. They didn't need the [Pentagon's] Office of Special Plans. They didn't need these guys in the Pentagon feeding them stuff. They didn't even need [Iraqi émigré and prominent neoconservative ally Ahmed] Chalabi. They had all of this stuff coming in through the portholes.

My take on it is that, before 9/11, the accusation was that U.S. intelligence and law enforcement failed to connect the dots. With Curveball, they made up the dots. In my way of thinking, it's a much worse situation. To me, this was the worst intelligence failure in American history. Never before has America gone to war and sacrificed so much blood, treasure and prestige on chasing an utter delusion. Curveball is the defining story of the prewar intelligence period. It explains the forces that led to this fiasco, and it tells how it is and why it is that we went down this rabbit hole in Iraq.

The problem here is that for the CIA -- and, by their nature, the intelligence services -- there is accountability within the [congressional] oversight committees. But there is no public accountability. In this case, [former CIA director] George Tenet got his Medal of Freedom afterward. I mean, it's sort of bizarre to me. The whole thing would be a farce, except the stakes were so dreadfully, awfully high.

You reported on Curveball for the Los Angeles Times. How did you get interested in him in the first place?

I had been covering national security and intelligence for the paper in Washington since 1998. And in the summer of 2002, I think it was Aug. 26, Dick Cheney went to Nashville to the Veterans of Foreign Wars and gave a very bellicose speech in which he said flat-out, Saddam is two years away or so from having a nuclear weapon and there is "no doubt" that he has chemical and biological weapons. And it was sort of a shot across our bows, for anyone who was listening, that basically was saying, "OK, thanks, we're done with Afghanistan, we're now going to turn our gun sights on Iraq." And that had sort of been rumored for a while, but this was a very clear and deliberate statement. And I began at that point focusing full-time on trying to understand what it was we really knew and what it was we didn't know about Saddam's weapons program. I went to Iraq after the liberation of Baghdad and spent some time with the weapons hunters ... I went out on some of these attempts to find WMD, and came back even more disillusioned. The weapons hunts at that point just seemed to me absurd. They had no idea what they were doing, and we had been told with such certainty that these weapons existed, and we'd go out there, and they were just sort of bumbling around in the desert at that point.

So, when George Tenet gave a speech at Georgetown University in February of 2004, exactly one year after Powell's speech, he made a reference at that time that said we're still trying to get access to the chief source on the mobile and biological weapons units. And when that happened it was like a red flag, it was like, What do you mean you're still trying to get access? You mean you haven't talked to him? And I was working with a colleague, a great reporter named Greg Miller, and he and I spent a month or so trying to track that down, and that led to the first Curveball story. So we broke that in March of 2004, and followed that up with several stories, and then I wound up with a very extensive investigation with another reporter in the fall of 2005, and that led to the book.

What's the role that Ahmed Chalabi plays here?

In this case he becomes a detour. He becomes a dot. What happened here was that, after Curveball came out -- and this was not known at the time -- it turned out that he had an older brother who fled Iraq in 1992, and who had joined Chalabi's organization in England in its early stages. But he and his brother were estranged. And there's a back story here, which is that it appears that Curveball went to jail in Baghdad before he fled, for either an unpaid debt or a theft, something involving money that the brother owed. So the two brothers were estranged. And in 2001, they haven't spoken now for nearly a decade, the elder brother working for Chalabi calls up Curveball in Germany and says, "Dr. Chalabi would like to know, we heard you're in Germany, do you have any information about weapons of mass destruction that we can give to the Americans, we're trying to help them with all of this." And Curveball, who's a semi-psychotic at this point in terms of his paranoia -- I shouldn't say psychotic; his behavior was very bizarre and he was clearly terrified of assassinations and reprisals, and the Germans had to move him several times and change his name and change his address and all of that. The phone call from the brother apparently just sent him over the edge. He was convinced they had tracked him down. And so that was the end of his cooperation with the Germans.

None of this came out until after the war, when the Americans in Baghdad -- the CIA in Baghdad -- tracked down Curveball's mother and she told them about the brother, and they found him [Curveball's brother] then in Baghdad working in Chalabi's organization at a place called the Hunting Club, and they were able to confirm the telephone call. So he did have a brother who worked for Chalabi. But no one was able to prove -- and Chalabi repeatedly, angrily denied -- that he had sent Curveball out as a deliberate plant. And the reason that this is credible in this case is that Chalabi did send out numerous people -- I think 20 is the number who have been identified -- who came out through the Iraqi National Congress, and in almost every case proved to be providing false information of one kind or another. But in every one of those cases, they were handed off directly to the Americans.

When the CIA found out about the brother, they totally freaked out because they thought, Oh my God, we've been set up, Chalabi really pulled the wool over us on this one. But in the end it was determined that it was just another fluke in this case, but one that sent them all going crazy for quite a while.

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