Who Forged the Niger Documents?

Editor’s Note: This is an edited transcript of an interview conducted by Ian Masters with Vincent Cannistaro, the former CIA head of counterterrorism operations and intelligence director at the National Security Council under Ronald Reagan, which aired on the Los Angeles public radio KPFK on April 3, 2005.

Ian Masters: You’ve been following President Bush’s commission’s report that came out this week, featuring fairly much, in terms of the press coverage, questions about “Curveball,” apparently a very appropriately named agent that the German intelligence was working. And, apparently his intelligence was heavily relied upon as a justification for going into war, particularly a lot of his claims ending up in the speech that Colin Powell made before the U.N.. And apparently, though, from the very beginning, the Germans were letting our side know that the guy was a fabricator and was, in fact, crazy. First of all, I didn’t think the CIA relied that heavily upon foreign intelligence. I thought there was a kind of professional sense that our taxpayers give us $30 billion dollars a year, we should be able to do this on our own and not rely on others. First of all, address that, sort of, cultural question if you will.

Well, I think in the case of Iraq, there were special circumstances, because the CIA does not have a good network of Iraqi sources in place, even though Iraq had become the forefront of U.S. policy all the way back to the Gulf War in 1991. So there was a dearth of information coming from CIA’s own sources. Secondly, there was an awful lot of so-called information coming from Iraqi exiles, primarily Ahmed Chalabi’s INC—the Iraqi National Congress. And that seemed to have a very receptive audience in some areas of the government, particularly at the Defense Department and at the vice president’s office. These were reports that tended to support the preconception of the administration that Saddam Hussein needed to be gotten rid of, and the primary reason for doing that was that he was in imminent possession of weapons of mass destruction, which could be turned against the United States of America or its allies.

So in that kind of environment — where there’s a tremendous policy need for information and you don’t have a great deal of source information that’s proprietary — then that’s how information that seems to be comprehensive, coming in from a foreign source, is overemphasized.

Well, in this case, the Germans had told the CIA’s head of the European desk on the operations side, Tyler Drumheller, who I spoke to, but he wasn’t comfortable going on the radio. He was told by Curveball’s handlers in Germany that the guy was crazy and a fabricator and the real question, I guess, is he passed this information on to the top people inside the agency, the Deputy Director McLaughlin and the Director George Tenet, both of whom are now — well, I don’t know about McLaughlin. He works for CNN. But, I believe George Tenet says he doesn’t remember the conversation.

Well, I think there’s no question that there’s a sequence of events that still remains a bit clouded, mainly because the report itself indicts the whole incident as an egregious example of a failure of intelligence.

To put it in some perspective, Curveball was an Iraqi chemical engineer, who allegedly defected and showed up at a refugee camp in Germany. He was then being exploited by German intelligence for information. Allied countries to the United States had all been alerted to the U.S. need for information on Iraq and on weapons of mass destruction programs in Iraq. And so the Germans exploited this information.