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Curveball could not be interviewed for this report. BND officials threatened last summer to strip him of his salary, housing and protection if he agreed to meet with The Times.
"We told him, 'If you talk to anyone on the outside... you are out and you get no more help from us,' " the BND supervisor said.
CIA officials now concede that the Iraqi fused fact, research he gleaned on the Internet and what his former co-workers called "water cooler gossip" into a nightmarish fantasy that played on U.S. fears after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Curveball's motive, CIA officials said, was not to start a war. He simply was seeking a German visa.
German journey
The Curveball chronicle began in November 1999, when the dark-haired Iraqi in his late 20s flew into Munich's Franz Josef Strauss Airport with a tourist visa.
The Baghdad-born chemical engineer promptly applied for political asylum in Arabic and halting English. He told German immigration officials he had embezzled Iraqi government money and faced prison or worse if sent home.
The Germans sent him to Zirndorf, a refugee center near Nuremberg once used for Soviet defectors, where he joined a long line of Iraqi exiles seeking German visas.
Abruptly, his story changed.
He once led a team, he told BND officers, that equipped trucks to brew deadly bio-agents. He named six sites where Iraq might be hiding biological warfare vehicles. Three already were operating. A farm program to boost crop yields was cover for Iraq's new biological weapons production program, he said.
Germany provided Europe's most generous benefits to Iraqi refugees, and several hundred arrived each month. But few had useful credible intelligence on Baghdad's suspected weapons programs. Intelligence agents became accustomed to exaggerated claims.
"The Iraqis were adept at feeding us what we wanted to hear," said a former official of the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency who helped debrief about 50 Iraqi emigres in Germany before the war. "Most of it was garbage.''
But for this defector, the Germans assigned two case officers as well as a team of chemists, biologists and other experts. They debriefed him from January 2000 to September 2001.
Since the Iraqi had arrived in Munich, U.S. liaison with German intelligence was assigned to the local DIA team. Their clandestine operating base was an elegant 19th century mansion known as Munich House. There he was assigned his codename: Curveball.
The base cryptonym "ball" was used to signify weapons, two former U.S. intelligence officials said. An earlier informant in Germany, for example, was called Matchball.
In DIA files, Iraqi sources were listed as "red" if U.S. intelligence could interview them. Curveball was a "blue" source, meaning the Germans would not permit U.S. access to him.
Curveball said he hated Americans, the Germans explained.
As a result, the DIA -- like the BND -- never tried to check Curveball's background or verify his accounts before sending reports to other U.S. intelligence agencies. Despite that failure, CIA analysts accepted the incoming reports as credible and quickly passed them to senior policymakers.
The reports had problems, however. The Germans usually interviewed Curveball in Arabic, using a translator, although the Iraqi sometimes spoke English.
"But a case officer wants to speak directly to his source," said the senior BND officer. "Curveball began to learn German, and thus there was a big mix [of languages] that went on. This explains some of the confusion."
"We told him, 'If you talk to anyone on the outside... you are out and you get no more help from us,' " the BND supervisor said.
CIA officials now concede that the Iraqi fused fact, research he gleaned on the Internet and what his former co-workers called "water cooler gossip" into a nightmarish fantasy that played on U.S. fears after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Curveball's motive, CIA officials said, was not to start a war. He simply was seeking a German visa.
German journey
The Curveball chronicle began in November 1999, when the dark-haired Iraqi in his late 20s flew into Munich's Franz Josef Strauss Airport with a tourist visa.
The Baghdad-born chemical engineer promptly applied for political asylum in Arabic and halting English. He told German immigration officials he had embezzled Iraqi government money and faced prison or worse if sent home.
The Germans sent him to Zirndorf, a refugee center near Nuremberg once used for Soviet defectors, where he joined a long line of Iraqi exiles seeking German visas.
Abruptly, his story changed.
He once led a team, he told BND officers, that equipped trucks to brew deadly bio-agents. He named six sites where Iraq might be hiding biological warfare vehicles. Three already were operating. A farm program to boost crop yields was cover for Iraq's new biological weapons production program, he said.
Germany provided Europe's most generous benefits to Iraqi refugees, and several hundred arrived each month. But few had useful credible intelligence on Baghdad's suspected weapons programs. Intelligence agents became accustomed to exaggerated claims.
"The Iraqis were adept at feeding us what we wanted to hear," said a former official of the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency who helped debrief about 50 Iraqi emigres in Germany before the war. "Most of it was garbage.''
But for this defector, the Germans assigned two case officers as well as a team of chemists, biologists and other experts. They debriefed him from January 2000 to September 2001.
Since the Iraqi had arrived in Munich, U.S. liaison with German intelligence was assigned to the local DIA team. Their clandestine operating base was an elegant 19th century mansion known as Munich House. There he was assigned his codename: Curveball.
The base cryptonym "ball" was used to signify weapons, two former U.S. intelligence officials said. An earlier informant in Germany, for example, was called Matchball.
In DIA files, Iraqi sources were listed as "red" if U.S. intelligence could interview them. Curveball was a "blue" source, meaning the Germans would not permit U.S. access to him.
Curveball said he hated Americans, the Germans explained.
As a result, the DIA -- like the BND -- never tried to check Curveball's background or verify his accounts before sending reports to other U.S. intelligence agencies. Despite that failure, CIA analysts accepted the incoming reports as credible and quickly passed them to senior policymakers.
The reports had problems, however. The Germans usually interviewed Curveball in Arabic, using a translator, although the Iraqi sometimes spoke English.
"But a case officer wants to speak directly to his source," said the senior BND officer. "Curveball began to learn German, and thus there was a big mix [of languages] that went on. This explains some of the confusion."
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