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It got worse, like a children's game of "telephone," in which information gets increasingly distorted. The BND sent German summaries of their English and Arabic interview reports to Munich House and to British intelligence. The DIA team translated the German back to English and prepared its own summaries. Those went to DIA's directorate for human intelligence, at a high-rise office in Clarendon, Va.
Clarendon passed 95 DIA reports to the Weapons Intelligence, Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Center, known as WINPAC, at CIA headquarters in nearby Langley. Experts there called other specialists, including an independent laboratory, to help evaluate the data. Spy satellites were directed to focus on Curveball's sites. CIA artists prepared detailed drawings from Curveball's crude sketches.
The system led to confusion, not clarity.
"Analysts were studying drawings made by artists working from descriptions by a guy we couldn't talk to," explained a former senior CIA official who helped supervise the case and the postwar investigation. "It was hard to figure out."
"Our fear is that as it was analyzed and translated and reanalyzed and retranslated, and comments got added, it could have gotten sexed up by accident," agreed a former CIA operations official.
The British Secret Intelligence Service, known as MI6, blamed the BND for omitting what a Parliamentary inquiry called "significant detail" in the reports they sent to London. At issue were Curveball's trucks.
In an e-mail to The Times, Robin Butler, head of the British inquiry into prewar intelligence, said "incomplete reporting" by the BND misled the British to assume the trucks could produce weapons-grade bio-agents such as anthrax spores. But Curveball only spoke of producing a liquid slurry unsuitable for bombs or warheads.
At the CIA, bio-warfare experts viewed the defector's reports as sophisticated and technically feasible. They also matched the analysts' expectations.
After the 1991 Gulf War, U.N. inspectors struggled to unravel Baghdad's secret biological weapons program. They speculated that the regime produced germs in mobile factories to evade detection.
American U-2 spy planes looked for suspicious vehicles, and U.N. teams raided parking lots.
In 1994, acting on tips from Israeli intelligence, U.N. inspectors even stopped red-and-white trucks in Baghdad marked: "Tip Top Ice Cream." Inside they found ice cream.
"We thought they could easily transport other materials around," said Rolf Ekeus, who headed the U.N. inspectors from 1991 to 1997.
Finally, in mid-1995, Iraq officials admitted that before the Gulf War they had secretly produced 30,000 liters of anthrax, botulinum toxin, aflatoxin and other lethal bio-agents. They had deployed hundreds of germ-filled munitions and researched other deadly diseases for military use. They denied they ever had mobile production facilities.
Curveball's story to the Germans in 2000 and 2001 neatly dovetailed with that history and continuing CIA suspicions.
The Iraqi defector said he was recruited out of engineering school at Baghdad University in 1994 by Iraq's Military Industrial Commission, headed by Saddam Hussein's son-in-law Hussein Kamil. He said he went to work the following year for "Dr. Germ," British-trained microbiologist Rihab Rashid Taha, to build bio-warfare vehicles. Kamil and Taha had headed the pre-1991 bio-weapons program.
Curveball said he was assigned to the Chemical Engineering and Design Center, behind the Rashid Hotel in central Baghdad.
That also fit a pattern, as the center provided a cover story for Iraq's first bio-warfare program .
Curveball said he had helped assemble one truck-mounted germ factory in 1997 at Djerf al Nadaf, a tumble-down cluster of warehouses in a gritty industrial area 10 miles southeast of Baghdad. He helped the Germans build a scale model of the facility, showing how vehicles were hidden in a two-story building -- and how they entered and exited on either end.
He designed laboratory equipment for the trucks, he said, providing dimensions, temperature ranges and other details. He sketched diagrams of how the system operated, and identified more than a dozen co-workers.
But the story had holes .
Clarendon passed 95 DIA reports to the Weapons Intelligence, Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Center, known as WINPAC, at CIA headquarters in nearby Langley. Experts there called other specialists, including an independent laboratory, to help evaluate the data. Spy satellites were directed to focus on Curveball's sites. CIA artists prepared detailed drawings from Curveball's crude sketches.
The system led to confusion, not clarity.
"Analysts were studying drawings made by artists working from descriptions by a guy we couldn't talk to," explained a former senior CIA official who helped supervise the case and the postwar investigation. "It was hard to figure out."
"Our fear is that as it was analyzed and translated and reanalyzed and retranslated, and comments got added, it could have gotten sexed up by accident," agreed a former CIA operations official.
The British Secret Intelligence Service, known as MI6, blamed the BND for omitting what a Parliamentary inquiry called "significant detail" in the reports they sent to London. At issue were Curveball's trucks.
In an e-mail to The Times, Robin Butler, head of the British inquiry into prewar intelligence, said "incomplete reporting" by the BND misled the British to assume the trucks could produce weapons-grade bio-agents such as anthrax spores. But Curveball only spoke of producing a liquid slurry unsuitable for bombs or warheads.
At the CIA, bio-warfare experts viewed the defector's reports as sophisticated and technically feasible. They also matched the analysts' expectations.
After the 1991 Gulf War, U.N. inspectors struggled to unravel Baghdad's secret biological weapons program. They speculated that the regime produced germs in mobile factories to evade detection.
American U-2 spy planes looked for suspicious vehicles, and U.N. teams raided parking lots.
In 1994, acting on tips from Israeli intelligence, U.N. inspectors even stopped red-and-white trucks in Baghdad marked: "Tip Top Ice Cream." Inside they found ice cream.
"We thought they could easily transport other materials around," said Rolf Ekeus, who headed the U.N. inspectors from 1991 to 1997.
Finally, in mid-1995, Iraq officials admitted that before the Gulf War they had secretly produced 30,000 liters of anthrax, botulinum toxin, aflatoxin and other lethal bio-agents. They had deployed hundreds of germ-filled munitions and researched other deadly diseases for military use. They denied they ever had mobile production facilities.
Curveball's story to the Germans in 2000 and 2001 neatly dovetailed with that history and continuing CIA suspicions.
The Iraqi defector said he was recruited out of engineering school at Baghdad University in 1994 by Iraq's Military Industrial Commission, headed by Saddam Hussein's son-in-law Hussein Kamil. He said he went to work the following year for "Dr. Germ," British-trained microbiologist Rihab Rashid Taha, to build bio-warfare vehicles. Kamil and Taha had headed the pre-1991 bio-weapons program.
Curveball said he was assigned to the Chemical Engineering and Design Center, behind the Rashid Hotel in central Baghdad.
That also fit a pattern, as the center provided a cover story for Iraq's first bio-warfare program .
Curveball said he had helped assemble one truck-mounted germ factory in 1997 at Djerf al Nadaf, a tumble-down cluster of warehouses in a gritty industrial area 10 miles southeast of Baghdad. He helped the Germans build a scale model of the facility, showing how vehicles were hidden in a two-story building -- and how they entered and exited on either end.
He designed laboratory equipment for the trucks, he said, providing dimensions, temperature ranges and other details. He sketched diagrams of how the system operated, and identified more than a dozen co-workers.
But the story had holes .
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