More epitaphs for Ahmad Chalabi.

“We never provided any classified information from the U.S. to Iran, and neither I nor anyone in the INC. And that is a charge being put out by George Tenet.”

--Chalabi on CNN's Late Edition

“Indeed we have had many meetings with the Iranian government, but we have passed no secret information, no classified documents to them from the United States. Furthermore we have not had any classified information given to us by the United States.”

--Chalabi on Meet the Press.

"We gave no information about weapons of mass destruction, we introduced the U.S. government agencies to defectors at the request of the U.S. government agencies -- three defectors. It was up to them to analyze this (information), and the responsibility for reporting to the president after analyzing the information is not mine.”

--Chalabi on ABC's This Week.

Chalabi also claimed on Meet the Press to not know who the identity of the INC-provided defector code-named "Curveball" is. Indeed, to hear Chalabi tell it, Curveball may be a figment of the West's imagination.

But this LA Times article reminds us how Curveball came into circulation, and played an absolutely crucial role in deceiving the US government into believing that Saddam had mobile biological weapons labs.

Curveball's story has since crumbled under doubts raised by the Germans and the scrutiny of U.S. weapons hunters, who have come to see his code name as particularly apt, given the problems that beset much of the prewar intelligence collection and analysis.

U.N. weapons inspectors hypothesized that such trucks might exist, officials said. They then asked former exile leader Ahmad Chalabi, a bitter enemy of Hussein, to help search for intelligence supporting their theory.

Soon after, a young chemical engineer emerged in a German refugee camp and claimed that he had been hired out of Baghdad University to design and build biological warfare trucks for the Iraqi army...

Only later, U.S. officials said, did the CIA learn that the defector was the brother of one of Chalabi's top aides, and begin to suspect that he might have been coached to provide false information. Partly because of that, some U.S. intelligence officials and congressional investigators fear that the CIA may have inadvertently conjured up and then chased a phantom weapons system.

David Kay, who resigned in January as head of the CIA-led group created to find illicit weapons in Iraq, said that of all the intelligence failures in Iraq, the case of Curveball was particularly troubling...

"This is the one that's damning," he said...Curveball turned out to be an "out-and-out fabricator," he added.

So who is Curveball? And how did he come to the attention of western intelligence? It's uncanny, that it happened in the months after the UN inspectors came to Chalabi in 1997 asking for help getting information on Saddam's suspected biological weapons labs. As the LA Times reports:

The Curveball case began in 1992, when weapons inspectors from the U.N. Special Commission in Iraq, frustrated at their failure to find Iraq's germ weapon factories, wrote an internal report in which they speculated that Baghdad could have hidden small, mobile versions in modified vans or trucks...

In December 1997, [UN weapons inspector Scott] Ritter said, he and his deputy, a former British army major attached to the U.N. team, flew to London to ask Chalabi for help. They met for three hours over dinner at Chalabi's Mayfair residence with the influential Iraqi exile and Ahmed Allawi, who headed intelligence operations for the Iraqi National Congress.

"Chalabi outlined what he could do for us," Ritter recalled. "His intelligence guy outlined their sources and said he had people inside the government. They told us they had the run of Iraq. Just tell them what we needed. So we outlined the gaps in our understanding of the Iraqi program, including the mobile bioweapons labs. Basically, we gave them a shopping list."

"They began feeding us information," Ritter said. "We got hand-drawn maps, handwritten statements and other stuff flowing in. At first blush, it looked good. But nothing panned out. Most of it just regurgitated what we'd given them. And the data that was new never checked out."

...U.S. officials say Curveball apparently showed up in Germany in 1998, but it is unclear how he got there...What is clear is that by 2000, Curveball had provided a vast array of convincing detail about the illicit program he claimed to manage.

He outlined how each office was set up and the names on each door. He described how walls were moved to help hide trucks. He identified several dozen fellow team members — even a lowly aide who rented their cars. He provided diagrams showing how stainless steel tanks, pumps, compressors and other parts were configured on nickel-plated flooring in each truck.

U.N. weapons hunters who returned to Iraq in November 2002...checked every site Curveball had identified, as well as others picked by U.S. intelligence. They tested waste lines in food-testing vans, took samples from refrigerator trucks, and searched for truck parts, blueprints, purchase orders or other evidence in factories, laboratories and elsewhere.

"We didn't find anything," the former inspector said...

During the summer [of 2003], Kay's investigators visited Curveball's parents and brother in Baghdad, as well as his former work sites. They determined that he was last in his class at the University of Baghdad, not first as he had claimed. They learned he had been fired from his job and jailed for embezzlement before he fled Iraq.

"He was wrong about so much," Kay recalled. "Physical descriptions he gave for buildings and sites simply didn't match reality. Things started to fall apart."

But to hear Chalabi tell it on the Sunday morning talk shows today, Curveball is an apparition, a mystery, a figment of everyone's imagination. This exchange between Chalabi and Fox News' Chris Wallace April 25 2004 captures how Chalabi is able to deny the very existence, the very identity, of one of the four individuals the INC delivered to western intelligence that became the principal human sources for the fabricated WMD intelligence the US went to war on.

WALLACE: Dr. Chalabi, when this war began, you were a favorite of the Pentagon and of Vice President Cheney. Your group still gets -- although there's talk about cutting it off -- I think it's $340,000 a month for intelligence gathering.

But there are increasing complaints here in -- among Bush administration officials that you gave the U.S. bad information into the lead-up to the war, that your organization coached defectors to tell horror stories to U.S. intelligence, that basically you sold the U.S. a bill of goods.

CHALABI: Of course these are false charges. They were hyped up by people, journalists with an agenda and people who have tried to do blame shifting...

WALLACE: Dr. Chalabi, let me give you one example that people cite, however. And this is the question of Saddam Hussein putting biological weapons labs on trucks.

According to U.S. intelligence officials, the two prime sources for that information were people that your organization provided. One of them turned out to be a known fabricator, and the other, the prime source, who was code named Curveball, just turned out to be the brother of one of your top lieutenants.

CHALABI: That's a lie. There is no Curveball that is the brother of any member of the INC leadership at the high level or at the low level. We don't know who he is, we never heard of him, and we have nothing to do with this information, and we never saw him.

As for the other person, we presented him to the United States and they took his information.

We did not coach him. They met him a few times, and they decided whether to take this information or not. We did not press him on them. We thought that it may be useful for them to talk to him...

The point is, this Curveball incident is an example of the blame-shifting and the lies that have been spread about our role in this.

It is almost dizzying to witness how utterly this guy fabricates, to apprehend what a black hole of lies he is. But it is even more staggering to think how for 12 years, US intelligence and, under this administration, the very highest levels of the US government, were played by this guy. And just perhaps, played by whoever was running him.

Posted by Laura at May 23, 2004 01:02 PM