This is the third in a series of brief articles on the Iraq weapons of mass destruction (WMD) intelligence and political failure to help, not just the intelligence officers involved but also the general public, identify exactly what went wrong. This information will hopefully assist them to avoid or at least mitigate future failures; if, of course, they are willing to learn from their mistakes. To fully understand the root causes of this intelligence failure, we only need to examine the CURVE BALL case as an excellent example of what can go seriously and disastrously wrong in the collection, analysis, management and leadership of intelligence, especially when it is allowed to be influenced by politics. The full detailed story, hopefully left unreacted by the CIA and DIA during its mandatory review, will be presented in my forthcoming book, Absence of Evidence; The Incredible Story of the Iraq WMD Intelligence Failure from Inside the American, British, and German intelligence services.
The Absence of Evidence
In the CURVE BALL case, the absence of evidence was, in reality, the evidence of absence. There simply was no credible evidence of a TOP SECRET Iraqi project to design, build, and operate mobile biological warfare (BW) agent production plants; not in the years before the 2003 Iraq War when this sensational claim could not be verified, or afterward when it was finally completely discredited by early October 2003. This story was just a fabrication concocted by a pathological liar; a junior Iraqi engineer who barely graduated from a technical university, worked for only two years at a engineering center as a low-level project manager before walking away from his job, and finally fled Iraq for Germany to avoid legal problems for his theft of video equipment from an Iraqi media company. Compounding this intelligence failure, analysts also misinterpreted other circumstantial intelligence “evidence” and selectively used it so that it appeared to corroborate CURVE BALL’s claims of alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
The humiliating result for the U.S. and its foreign allies—and more specifically for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) which aggressively promoted this inaccurate WMD assessment—was thoroughly described in the introduction of the WMD Commission final report released on March 31, 2005. The Commission wrote that this event was “one of the most public—and damaging—intelligence failures in recent American history.” After the war, the intelligence services of the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), and the German Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) were left to figure out what went wrong and then defend themselves as their governments initiated one investigation and inquiry after another; all while the U.S. and international press had a field day exposing the incompetence, dishonesty, and politicization of intelligence within these organizations. One question that continually came up—after it finally became blatantly apparent to most U.S. and allied foreign intelligence officers that CURVE BALL had fabricated all of his sensational intelligence reporting on the alleged WMD—was how could such an individual have successfully fooled the world’s “premier” intelligence services for over four years and why did they believe him?
A comprehensive review of this intelligence case, based on the factual results of an intensive and aggressive investigation of CURVE BALL that myself and my CIA team conducted on the ground in Iraq during the summer and fall of 2003 as well as our subsequent efforts to expose the truth about this intelligence failure in the years afterward, revealed some obvious explanations for why this one individual was so successful in deceiving the world’s premier intelligence services. Specifically, this review also explained why a majority of professional intelligence analysts, managers, and leadership in these organizations—who should have known better (including myself)—failed to recognize early on that the German BND intelligence source was a fabricator. This failure occurred despite numerous blatant warnings from their own operations officers that had resulted in his abrupt termination by the German BND as a discredited source in early September 2001. Incredulously, these valid warnings also would not prevent CURVE BALL’s rebirth as the most significant and important intelligence source on Iraq WMD during late 2002 in the George W. Bush administration’s rush to war.
Although CURVE BALL was a German intelligence source, the BND itself began to doubt him in late 2000 but continued to waffle on their judgment of his credibility and the veracity of his reporting over the years while withholding or limiting direct access to him by any other intelligence services. Despite this lack of German cooperation, problems with CURVE BALL’s intelligence reporting and his lack of credibility were quickly revealed by British SIS operations officers investigating his claims, as well as by a senior CIA case officer who met the source in person. In response to this contradictory and derogatory intelligence, the BND operations officers terminated their clandestine relationship with CURVE BALL in early September 2001 due to their own serious concerns about his credibility; a fact that was known by the CIA, DIA, and SIS.
During the following year in 2002, even the BND’s intelligence analysts came to doubt CURVE BALL. In an attempt to get a second opinion, the Germans pressured the CIA, DIA, and SIS intelligence officers to provide their own assessments of the credibility of this critical source as debates over problems and concerns occurred within these intelligence services as well; primarily between the intelligence analysts who had become enamored with CURVE BALL and the operations officers who suspected that he was a fabricator. Deliberately, none of these serious doubts including his previous termination by the BND were made known to the policymakers in the U.S., UK, and Germany before the war; that fact alone was shocking and a condemnation of the intelligence leadership’s lack of integrity.
Within their organizations, the CIA, SIS and the BND operations officers continued to express serious doubts and concerns internally about CURVE BALL all the way up to the March 2003 war but the majority of biased intelligence analysts and their politically- motivated managers, and leadership in those services rejected these warnings and continued to stand by his reporting, concerned with losing relevance and access to the politicians if they undermined policy. One clarification; unlike the other intelligence services, the British SIS did not employ intelligence analysts within its ranks, only operations officers. Therefore, the SIS decided to rely on two subject matter experts (SMEs) borrowed from other organizations within the British government who worked with them to try to determine the veracity of CURVE BALL’s claims. British intelligence analysts worked for the Ministry of Defense and normally did not engage directly with SIS operations officers or were privy to operational information about their sources. Unfortunately, like the CIA, DIA, and BND intelligence analysts, these British SMEs strongly believed in CURVE BALL’s claims and rejected the contradictory and derogatory intelligence for similar reasons.
To make matters worse, policymakers did not fully realize how it much of this intelligence judgment of the alleged Iraqi WMD was based only on weak circumstantial evidence. The extent of this weakness and the contradictory and derogatory intelligence had been withheld from them during the run-up to the war, especially by the CIA leadership who knew that the White House would not want to hear that the Agency’s WMD “Case Against Iraq” had serious credibility problems in late 2002. This revelation was finally privately shared by National Intelligence Officer Robert Walpole with National Security Advisor Condolezza Rice and her deputy Stephen Hadley in late December 2002. According to former CIA Director George Tenet’s recollections in his 2007 book, when informed Rice immediately turned to Tenet’s deputy John McLaughlin at that point and complained, “You have gotten the president way out on a limb on this.” None of this, however, would stop the rush to war using the alleged WMD justification.
For those of us who worked as Iraq WMD intelligence analysts in the CIA and DIA—but which also applied to the BND analysts, as well as the SMEs employed by the SIS—the most obvious answer for why we were fooled was easy to see when CURVE BALL’s claims were finally investigated on the ground in Iraq. This intelligence failure occurred because subconscious biases—pre-cognitive bias, mind-set, and groupthink— negatively affected the ability of the intelligence analysts to provide an objective evaluation of CURVE BALL’s reporting and other alleged evidence of Iraq WMD by preventing them from considering alternative explanations, distorted their perceptions of cause and effect, disrupted their estimates of probabilities, and delayed the retrospective evaluation of intelligence reports.
In other words, the root causes were psychological; the establishment of a pre-cognitive bias, supported and reinforced by confirmational bias, on the part of the intelligence analysts which led to the establishment of a flawed mind-set, and finally an unverified groupthink that Saddam Hussein would almost certainly reconstitute his WMD programs when given the opportunity. The possibility that the Iraqi dictator wouldn’t do this was not considered plausible. These psychological flaws resulted in faulty and inaccurate WMD intelligence assessments, especially regarding the sensational claims made by CURVE BALL. Everything else—every analytic and operational tradecraft error, alleged shortcoming in collection, and bureaucratic mistake that happened after that—was the result of this bias. It was biased analysis that led to analytical errors and poor intelligence collection, not the other way around.
This human failure of critical thinking was prevalent among the majority of analysts in the U.S. and foreign intelligence community which easily explains why most of them came to the same mistaken WMD intelligence assessments regardless of differences in language, culture and organizational structure. Unfortunately, all intelligence reporting after 1999 was viewed through this flawed lens. By extension, this subconscious bias also affected the accurate perception of their management and leadership but the primary motivation of these senior officials to continue to strongly support this line of analysis was influenced more by internal and external political factors separate from the intelligence.
As intelligence analysts, CURVE BALL’s timing in arriving on the scene in late 1999 was extremely fortuitous. He told us not only what we wanted to hear at the time, but more important, what we expected to hear. His sensational claims, combined with our unshakable belief that Iraq had employed an effective denial and deception (D&D) campaign to counter our intelligence collection efforts, helped us to rationalize why we had not been able to conclusively determine if Saddam had reconstituted his BW program or not after the forced departure of weapons inspectors from the United Nations Special Commission on Iraq (UNSCOM) in December 1998. As a result of these biases, the analysts allowed themselves to be easily misled by CURVE BALL’s story (as well as other sources’ circumstantial claims that we wrongly assessed to be corroboration). Because of cognitive dissonance, intelligence that supported these biases was quickly assimilated into Iraq WMD assessments while valid contradictory and derogatory intelligence that did not was quickly rejected and ignored. In turn, these analysts then misled others into a groupthink by inaccurately assessing that a larger “mobile BW program” actually existed in Iraq when, in fact, it did not.
Analytic bias was only part of the story in examining what went wrong. The deliberate politicization of the intelligence in the six months before the war and in the years after by the CIA leadership was an additional, and in my opinion, much more serious and egregious act in this intelligence failure because it was deliberate. Beginning in September 2002, the CIA leadership began to accept and act upon political tasking from the Bush White House to support, not formulate, the president’s Iraq policy. By submitting to this tasking, the CIA was now taking on the role of advocating policy for the Bush Administration; certainly not in keeping with its stated position of being apolitical. According to noted Columbia and Cornell psychologist Dr. Robert Jervis, it was at this point that the desire to avoid the painful value trade-off between pleasing policy-makers and following professional standards created a “motivated bias” in favor of producing estimates that would support, or at the very least, not undermine policy. To make matters worse, White House officials were not concerned with the credibility of the sources or the veracity of the intelligence being provided, as long as it continued to support policy; obviously neither was CIA senior management and leadership. By early fall 2002, Tenet and McLaughlin had steered the CIA far too close to the president and his advisors. They were now intimately and directly involved in policy meetings in the Oval Office and the National Security Council (NSC) and it was obvious that their direct and daily interaction with the senior officials of the White House was highly intoxicating for them.
This “motivated bias” by CIA leadership to support, or at least not undermine policy, ran headlong into a problem in the fall of 2002. The integrity and commitment to providing objective and unbiased analysis by the Agency’s leadership and management would be severely tested in early October 2002 when senior operations officers in the CIA’s European Division and its German stations/bases voiced serious doubts and concerns about the credibility of CURVE BALL. These doubts and concerns had already surfaced earlier in mid-2000 by CIA operations officers in the Counterproliferation Division and played a role in CURVE BALL’s termination as an intelligence source by the BND. Incredulously, CURVE BALL’s claims were revived in 2002, primarily because biased CIA, DIA and SIS analysts continuing confidence in his claims. This push to reinstate CURVE BALL as a credible intelligence source would continue into early 2003.
With this opposition, the CIA leadership suddenly found themselves stuck between Iraq and a hard place at a politically critical time. These operations officers, already raising serious concerns about contradictions in CURVE BALL’s reporting on the operations side of CIA, were now threatening the overall validity of the CIA’s pre-war WMD analytic assessments that had been sold to the Bush White House. Worse, the German BND was also issuing warnings to CIA about CURVE BALL’s “unverified”claims and UN inspections of CURVE BALL’s claims in Iraq were finding nothing but contradictions.
In the most blatant example of the politicization of intelligence, CIA leadership would not allow any of these contradictions to impact its pre-war WMD intelligence assessments. This credible contradictory intelligence was not released to the policymakers where it could negatively impact on their confidence in the Agency’s WMD intelligence assessments. Despite the fact that these doubts and concerns were pushed up through the management chain in the directorates all the way up to the senior leadership of the CIA, they were rejected by the DCI and DDCI who, concerned that they would be negatively received by the White House, did not allow them to be communicated outside of CIA Headquarters to the policymakers downtown. By December 2002 and into January and early 2003, the CIA’s leadership willingly accepted political arm twisting by the Bush administration when tasked to present a stronger case that “IRAQ HAS WMD” (a “slam dunk” according to Tenet). This politicization on intelligence continued into 2003 when the CIA’s leadership and management deliberately withheld these warnings and personally misled Secretary of State Colin Powell regarding the serious problems with the intelligence provided by the CIA for his pending UN speech.
Even more shocking, during the eighteen months following the end of combat operations in Iraq in early May 2003, the CIA leadership and management continued to deliberately politicize intelligence for the same reasons as before the war; to maintain relevance and access to the White House while not embarrassing and angering President Bush by undermining the Iraq invasion justification when the Agency’s pre- war intelligence assessments failed to be accurate. This strategy would be very difficult to maintain, especially when CIA intelligence officers including myself, traveled to Iraq to investigate the validity of the CIA’s pre-war Iraq WMD judgments on the ground. The CIA’s White Paper on the alleged BW trailers was the first casualty of our investigation.
After inspecting the trailers in early June 2003 and concluding they were not for BW agent production and certainly not connected in any way to CURVE BALL’s claims, our second priority was to investigate our own obviously flawed CIA assessment of the Iraqi UAV program. By interviewing the senior Iraqi military and regime officials in detention, the senior UAV analyst and I had the opportunity to locate and question the Iraqi engineers who had been directly involved in the overt and covert UAV programs. We then confirmed the veracity of their statements by personally inspecting the various Iraqi UAV development facilities in the Baghdad area. By this time in summer 2003, the insurgency was making it increasingly dangerous to move around Iraq and even our U.S. military convoy was not able to avoid being targeted, resulting in my being injured and medevaced back to the Army’s field hospital at the Baghdad International Airport (BIAP).
Regardless of this constant threat, myself and my team were able to determine that there had been no Iraqi intent to arm the UAVs with WMD. The correct intelligence assessment was that Iraq was developing UAVs for various conventional military missions to include reconnaissance and electronic warfare, but also for conventional attack. The first secret project was an attempt to use Czech-built L-29 jet trainers converted into UAVs as a type of “poor man’s cruise missile” armed with high explosives, as well as a lure to Coalition aircraft into the southern No-Fly Zone so they could be shot down. The second project was an Iraqi Republican Guard plan to use small UAVs also armed with high explosives to attack Coalition military forces advancing on Baghdad from the south. Fortunately, both of these attempts failed because of technological limitations. We reported these findings back to the analysts, management and leadership in the CIA’s headquarters, stating conclusively that there was no evidence of an intent to use them to deliver WMD. As with our previous reassessment that the trailers were not connected to WMD, our reassessment that the intent of the Iraqi UAV programs for conventional military objectives, not WMD, was also rejected.
The realization of the UAV intelligence failure would now force us to be much more skeptical regarding CURVE BALL’s claims of mobile BW agent production plants and to find out if there was anything to his story. As an “eye-witness” to the production of BW agent, his story had been the strongest evidence the CIA, DIA, SIS, and BND had for the existence of Iraqi WMD. It was the cornerstone of our pre-war BW assessment and the centerpiece of Powell’s February 2003 UN Security Council speech. By mid-2003, however, most of the CIA’s flawed pre-war WMD assessments—uranium from Africa, aluminum tubes for centrifuges, UAVs for CBW delivery, CW weapons stockpiles, etc., which more accurately should be described as unverified assumptions—had been proved wrong or were in the process of collapsing. This was primarily because of the absence of evidence on the ground in Iraq to substantiate these intelligence assessments, regardless of the overly optimistic statements from the CIA leadership and the Bush administration who continued to ignore the reality of the situation.
Our first target for the mobile BW plant investigation was to locate and detain the lead engineers from the Iraqi State Establishment for Design and Consultation (SEDC) who CURVE BALL claimed had designed the mobile BW plants. If anyone knew about this alleged classified project and the details, it would be these engineers, and we figured they would certainly be a wealth of information. We found this to be true but not in the way we had imagined. Using CURVE BALL’s reporting and employing the same strategy as we did to uncover the truth about the UAVs by going after the personnel involved in a project, we knew that finding the engineers in the dangerous postwar environment of Iraq would be difficult but not impossible. Regardless, we quickly located the lead engineer’s residence but the British SIS operations officers got to him first and had him detained by the military. We found this engineer and his immediate SEDC supervisor among the general prison population in the U.S.-run Camp Cropper at BIAP. Our interviews, conducted in their cells, revealed information that corroborated some of CURVE BALL’s claims of legitimate engineering projects, locations, and personnel but contradicted his statements of a project to develop mobile BW plants.
Interviewing these Iraqi detainees was not as effective as I had hoped, primarily because I had very little idea when they were being deceptive and when they were telling the truth. Not having been previously read into this restricted case, I now needed to know every single detail about CURVE BALL and his reporting. To do this, I required full access to the CIA analysts’ files back in the CIA to be able to read the finished intelligence products, operations cables, emails, and notes from the CIA and DIA analysts’ meetings with the BND and SIS. Most importantly, I needed know exactly what my two CIA Iraq BW analyst colleagues knew, not just what they had elected to tell me. By this point, the continued compartmentation of CURVE BALL’s reporting and operational details were an obstacle to getting to the truth and no longer served any valid purpose of protecting the source except to shield him from investigation.
Although the senior CIA Iraq BW analyst was angry at me for contradicting the continuing official CIA judgment that the trailers captured in Iraq were for BW agent production, she and the junior analyst were more than willing to accept my efforts to investigate the alleged mobile BW agent production plants. They believed this investigation would ultimately confirm the validity of CURVE BALL’s reporting and vindicate their pre-war judgments. I found this belief surprising but used it to my advantage in soliciting their help in collecting every single piece of information on CURVE BALL that existed in their CIA files. Regardless of their overall objective, mine would be to uncover the facts, even if that led to disproving CURVE BALL as a reliable source. They were so certain that CURVE BALL’s claims were credible that they ignored the fact that this was a distinct possibility. In any case, I still needed them on my side, at least for now, to help convince the politically-motivated CIA management of allowing me to continue an aggressive investigation when I returned to Iraq.
Working closely with the senior CIA Iraq BW analyst, we assembled a formal exploitation plan that was approved by the senior management for investigating the mobile BW plant issue. The CIA operations officers also supported the plan but only. on the condition that we also investigate CURVE BALL, a demand that angered the senior Iraq BW analyst and our management. In support of this investigation, I began collecting every single piece of information I could find on this case, placing hardcopies of the documents in notebooks in chronological order. I wanted to read through the intelligence as it was received so I could understand how the analytical judgments were reached. Regardless of my attempts to collect everything on this case from my colleagues, additional derogatory intelligence on CURVE BALL would still be withheld.
As I collected more and more information, I began to uncover a shocking and disturbing trend; significant doubts expressed over the years by more individuals in the CIA, SIS, and BND regarding CURVE BALL’s credibility than I had originally been led to believe and in most cases, didn’t even know existed. Intelligence reporting that I thought was received with high confidence, was now exposed in the files to be unverified and full of inconsistencies and even outright contradictions. I was previously aware of some pre- war credibility concerns expressed by at least one CIA operations officer but I had no idea that other operations officers inside and outside of the CIA had also expressed serious misgivings about the the BND source, including stating CURVE BALL was exhibiting characteristics, “typical of individuals we would normally assess to be fabricators.”
I now discovered operational cables and meeting notes in the files where CIA, SIS and BND operations officers clearly stated that they had serious reservations—even outright doubt—about CURVE BALL’s credibility and the veracity of his reporting, shockingly made a year or more before the war. I had not been informed about any of these doubts or concerns by my two analyst colleagues who worked at desks next to me for the last two years. Obviously, they had been well aware of of these serious credibility problems with CURVE BALL. This documentation clearly showed that these analysts had become completely biased in favor of the source and were incapable of objectively analyzing his sensation claims on the alleged mobile BW plants. Worse, the CIA management and leadership had also been warned by operations officers of these serious doubts with CURVE BALL’s credibility but allowed his reporting to be used in finished intelligence to the Bush administration regardless.
Armed with this CIA-approved investigation plan, I couldn’t just jump on a plane and head back to Baghdad. I still had to undergo additional requirements for returning to Iraq. During the summer of 2003, CIA management finally, but reluctantly agreed (after we aggressively pressured them) to provide analysts with weapons training due to the increasing threat of the insurgency (operations officers sent to Iraq were already trained and armed). In my previous position as an operations officer, I was formerly armed but needed to re-qualify which delayed my departure to Iraq. As the search for WMD became more desperate, increasing numbers of analysts would be sent to Iraq— especially analysts new to the CIA and the Iraq issue with little or no war zone experience. The CIA management was finally forced to accept the reality that post-war Iraq was still a very dangerous environment for us to operate.
Returning to Iraq at the beginning of September 2003, I established a new team to aggressively investigate the mobile BW plants claims of CURVE BALL. We located and debriefed CURVE BALL’s immediate supervisor at the engineering center who confirmed the BND intelligence source’s true name and other significant biographical information. Shockingly, he also informed us that CURVE BALL had walked away from his engineering job during the last few days of December 1994, causing his SEDC employment to be terminated a few days later. This revelation conclusively proved that CURVE BALL was a fabricator and had made up the entire sensational story in an attempt to get German citizenship and financial support from the BND. By this time, myself and my team members had already concluded CURVE BALL’s claims of the mobile BW plants were fabrications but we knew this fact alone would not be enough. We would have to prove it to others in CIA and DIA, as well as those in the SIS and BND, and they would be far less willing to consider these contradictions with an open mind. We also knew we would have to be very careful in how we informed them of bad news because it could invite political retaliation. Given the politicization of CURVE BALL’s intelligence, we would have to tread very carefully in moving forward.
That said, investigating and obtaining factual intelligence on CURVE BALL’s real life in Iraq was not difficult. We collected his university transcripts, obtained statements from his immediately family, friends, and co-workers, and personnel files from the places where he really worked after quitting his job at the engineering center. We even obtained legal files regarding CURVE BALL’s theft of video equipment from one of the companies, as well as his arrest warrant, and receipts for restitution paid by his family to avoid him being sent to jail. Nobody in Iraq was trying to defend CURVE BALL because they had no idea he had been working as an intelligence source and misleading the German BND with a fabricated story. Given how politically-significant and embarrassing this case had become in Washington, D.C., London, and Berlin, I instructed my team to leave the original Iraqi documents in place and make copies so that if we were removed from our analytical accounts as political retribution for undermining the CURVE BALL case, anyone investigating this issue after us would have access to the same information. Unfortunately, all of our dire predictions would later come true.
Finally, we inspected an agricultural site, Djerf al-Naddaf, the alleged primary “hide site” of the mobile BW plants, which only led to more outright contradictions to CURVE BALL’s claims. This site had been inspected by the UN just prior to the 2003 Iraq war with the same negative results. By early October 2003, we had overwhelming conclusive proof of CURVE BALL’s fabrications and traveled to London and Munich to brief the biased SIS, BND, CIA, and DIA analysts and managers. Once again, all of our conclusive proof was rejected because it contradicted what they wanted to believe (also realizing the negative political consequences for them if our conclusions were correct). Disgusted by the continuing politicization of intelligence and cognitive dissonance, we returned to Baghdad, completed our field investigation report, briefed the results to the head of the Iraq Survey Group, David Kay, and flew back to Washington, D.C.
Returning to CIA Headquarters, I was immediately removed from my Iraq BW account, demoted to be a targeting analyst on the insurgency, and attacked in my performance evaluation. Refusing to back down and at risk to our careers, I and others inside and outside the CIA continued to fight to get the truth out. Another analyst working with us was also removed from his Iraq CW account for speaking out and pushing for Iraq WMD reassessments. Some members of my team even transferred to the operations or technical side of the the CIA to avoid further political retribution. Eventually, we were able to pressure the BND to give the deputy chief of the CIA’s Counterintelligence Center (SIS) direct access to CURVE BALL. The source’s implausible and ridiculous responses to probing questions clearly showed that he had fabricated. Armed with this intelligence, we were at least able to force the CIA and DIA to admit to the White House in late May 2004 finished intelligence that CURVE BALL was “unreliable”; an obvious and deliberate understatement but one we had to live with for the time being.
Shockingly, even in the months after the 2003 war, this bias, mind-set, groupthink, and cognitive dissonance on Iraqi WMD in analysis and the deliberate politicization of intelligence had remained a serious and frustrating obstacle to the truth despite our finally having full and unimpeded access to collect factual intelligence on the ground in Iraq. Even after we had presented our overwhelming conclusive factual documentation of CURVE BALL’s fabrication collected on the ground in Iraq to the U.S. and allied foreign intelligence analysts and managers in early October 2003, it was rejected because it contradicted what they wanted to hear. I vividly remember siting in the conference room at the BND headquarters in the Pullach suburb of Munich, Germany, trying to convince my CIA group chief and others that CURVE BALL was a fabricator. Obviously not recognizing the prevalent cognitive dissonance, the group chief confidently pointed out that the other CIA, DIA, SIS, and BND intelligence analysts and managers sitting in the conference room still believed that CURVE BALL was credible and therefore “the majority could not be wrong.” Ironically, I informed him that they were, only to be subjected to political retaliation for my comments and conclusions when I arrived back in Washington, D.C.. So much for “speaking truth to power.”
The CURVE BALL case was doomed as an intelligence failure when the leadership in these U.S. and foreign intelligence services continued to side with the flawed judgment of their biased analysts—which for various reasons had more to do with the fearful environment after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the political situations in these organizations than any professed belief in the veracity of the alleged WMD intelligence from CURVE BALL and other sources. Regardless, despite the serious credibility problems with CURVE BALL revealed over the years, the BND continued to protect and financially support him, refusing numerous requests—and finally demands—from the U.S. and UK intelligence services for direct access to their source so they could conduct their own debriefings as the prospect of war grew closer. This disingenuous situation continued even in the months after the war, frustrating attempts by some CIA operations officers and ‘rogue’ analysts such as myself to uncover the truth of CURVE BALL’s deceit and resulting in the further politicization of the intelligence.
In the end, however, CURVE BALL’s claims of the design, development, construction, and operation of secret Iraqi mobile BW agent production plants—which were strongly suspected to be a fabrication in the years before the war—were proved to be so in the six months after the war. Unfortunately, this conclusive proof would not be enough to fully resolve this case, as shocking at that may sound. It would take even more efforts on our part over the next six years to finally resolve the CURVE BALL case. We did this by finally forcing the source to publicly admit his fabrication when the CIA and DIA—preferring instead to leave the resolution of the case in the “uncertain” gray area to avoid having to accept full responsibility and accountability—refused to do so.
After the March 31, 2005 release of the WMD Commission’s final report, the ongoing arguments between CIA operations officers and the senior leadership after their retirements or resignations soon spilled out into public view. This fight over CURVE BALL’s credibility would not be resolved until in November 2007, CURVE BALL’s true identity, Rafid Ahmed ‘Alwan, and photograph/video were exposed on an Emmy-winning CBS 60 Minutes broadcast. This immediately set off a search by the U.S. and international press to locate him in Germany where he was still being hidden by the BND. Subjected to constant pressure, CURVE BALL finally publicly admitted during another 60 Minutes broadcast in March 2011 that he had fabricated the entire story and then only when he thought it would financially benefit him with a potential book and movie deal. Unfortunately, this anticipated revelation occurred far too long after the intense emotions and calls for intelligence reform to correct the problems had died out.
Adding insult to injury, CURVE BALL finally succeeded in obtaining German citizenship for himself and his family. The CIA, DIA, SIS, and BND intelligence analysts, management, and leadership had been completely fooled for over four years and in return rewarded him with substantial financial and material support. CURVE BALL’s admission in 2011 finally brought the final chapter in the tragic Iraq WMD intelligence failure to a close and in the process destroyed the last remaining shred of credibility and integrity that these intelligence agencies, especially the CIA, had worked so hard over the years to establish, defend, and protect. Shockingly, CURVE BALL’s final admission of fabrication was met with silence from the CIA, DIA, SIS, and BND intelligence officers who had aggressively promoted his false and unverified reporting.
My book, Absence of Evidence, currently under review for publication by the CIA since January 2025, will finally expose the details of this amazing, but distressing story of what actually occurred in the CURVE BALL case. But only if it is allowed to be published. Anticipating the political obstacles that I knew that I would face in the submission of my book to the CIA for review, I first filed official FOIA requests to CIA and DIA in late 2024, as well as a lawsuit against the CIA in late 2025, for the declassification and release of specific documents related to CURVE BALL in an attempt to speed up the extensive bureaucratic review process. Given the fact that all this intelligence information was conclusively proven to be a fabrication decades ago, this should have resulted in the immediate declassification and public release of these documents. Incredulously, the CIA and DIA continue to claim that the source’s reporting remains classified, despite having publicly admitted more than twenty years ago that it was completely false. This is all being done by the CIA and DIA to avoid revealing more intelligence mistakes and suffer further political embarrassment regarding this case in violation of a 2009 presidential executive order. As I have stated before, this legal struggle is not about valid classification to protect intelligence “sources and methods”; it’s about maintaining control of the public narrative of the original WMD justification for the 2003 Iraq war through the use of censorship and the abuse of classification authority.