Curveball: The Iraqi Defector the Bush Team Used to Sell the War

After four years watching the disastrous consequences of the invasion of Iraq unfold, it's easy to forget the atmosphere of panic in which the war was sold to the American public. All the talk of clandestine meetings in Prague, dubious connections between Iraq and 9/11, aluminum tubes and yellowcake from Niger is becoming a memory; it seems ages since we were warned that the "smoking gun" that proved Saddam's deadly intent might be in the form of a mushroom cloud rising from one of America's cities.

Yet it’s important to recall that after all the rhetoric about Saddam Hussein's monstrous legacy and Colin Powell's flashy charts and honey-smooth presentation at the UN, the heart of the Bush administration's case for invading Iraq -- or at least for its claims about massive stockpiles of biological weapons being driven around the country in high-tech mobile labs to avoid detection -- was an Iraqi defector code-named "Curveball."

In CURVEBALL: Spies, Lies and the Con Man Who Caused a War,veteran Los Angeles Times reporter Bob Drogin, who originally broke the story, paints a picture of a desperate refugee who, while trying to gain asylum in Europe, began feeding claims about Saddam's supposed weapons programs to an intelligence community that was under intense pressure from the top to come up with a case for war.

Curveball, who claimed to be an Iraqi chemical engineer with knowledge of even the country's most secret weapons programs, spilled the beans in a big way when debriefed by German intelligence officials. But, as Drogin would later report, he was a twitchy, possibly mentally disturbed drunk who was prone to rapid mood-swings and whose story tended to shift according to what he thought investigators wanted to hear. But despite that fact, and with only the "corroboration" of a few ex-patriots associated with convicted fraudster Ahmed Chalabi, Curveball's claims passed through several layers of often skeptical intelligence professionals and became 'Exhibit A' in the administration's case for war.

Drogin's account is a detailed one from the perspective of an old national security hand, with plenty of inside scoop -- the kind of reporting, brimming with internecine fighting and bureaucratic intrigue, that will give the pundits on both sides of the war some new grist for debate. It's also a page-turner that feels more like a Tom Clancy novel than most nonfiction.

AlterNet caught up with Drogin in New York City.

Joshua Holland: You've described a very unstable character, and reported that there was no shortage of people in the intelligence community who expressed deep misgivings about his reliability. Give me a sense of how the story unfolded -- how did his claims get through all those intelligence pros?

Bob Drogin: Well, the CIA heard what it wanted to hear. It saw what it wanted to see. And it told the president what he wanted to hear. Time and again, intelligence officials discounted contradictory information, filled in gaps, and made up the dots to reach the conclusion they wanted. In part, they were caught up in the climate of fear after 9/11 and felt they couldn't afford to underestimate a possible threat. In part, there was a clear understanding by late 2002 that we were going to war and it would make no difference, and probably would hurt your career, if you tried to get in the way. But mostly, I think incompetence and poor leadership allowed unconfirmed and unreliable information to move up the chain of command. Those few intelligence officers who tried to raise red flags, or issue warnings, either were ignored or treated like heretics. And by the time Colin Powell goes to the U.N. to make the case for war, he shows the world artists' conjectures based on analysts' interpretations and extrapolations of Arabic-to-German-to-English translations of summary debriefing reports of interviews with a manic-depressive defector whom the Americans had never met. Tenet told Powell that Curveball's information was ironclad and unassailable. It was a travesty.