A horrifying "he said, he said" LAT post-mortem of a dispute within the CIA over whether CIA handlers told top CIA officials of overwhelming doubts about Curveball's credibility. Tyler Drumheller, former chief of the CIA Europe division, and James Pavitt, former deputy director of operations, insist that their bosses, then CIA director George Tenet and deputy John McLaughlin, were informed that Curveball was a fabricator, and had no idea that so much weight was being given by the White House to Curveball's information. Tenet and McLaughlin can't recall any such doubts being raised:

"My people were saying: 'We think he's a stinker,' " Pavitt said. But CIA bioweapons analysts, he said, "were saying: 'We still think he's worthwhile.' " Pavitt said he didn't convey his own doubts to Tenet because he didn't know until after the March 2003 invasion of Iraq that Curveball was "of such import" in prewar CIA assessments provided to the president, Congress and the public.

"Later, I remember the guffaws by myself and others when we said, 'How could they have put this much emphasis on this guy? … He wasn't worth [anything] in our minds," Pavitt said.

There's so much astonishing in here, about how a fairly obvious fabricator manages to find a few key defenders in US policy circles, because he provides information they desperately want to hear. With a miniscule supply of worthy intelligence sources on Iraq, and an infinite appetite, even the obvious junk becomes prized. (I've written about another case here). For instance, from the LAT piece:

*German authorities didn't let US intelligence officials interview Curveball, their source, until March 2004, a year after the Iraq invasion.

*German authorities told CIA Europe director Drumheller flat out at a lunch in October 2002, "Don't even ask to see him [Curveball] because he's a fabricator and he's crazy."

*The only US official who met with Curveball before the war, a DIA medical technician, also expressed doubts about Curveball.

*Despite all these doubts from Curveball's own handlers in Germany and those they liaised with directly at the CIA and DIA, the person considered most expert on Curveball at the CIA, an analyst in the WINPAC division, won out at a December 2002 CIA meeting to discuss Curveball:

The Curveball expert from WINPAC angrily argued back and apparently prevailed, the commission found. An official summary of the meeting later "played down" any doubts and said Curveball had been judged credible "after an exhaustive review."

*Despite all that, Tenet and McLaughlin insist they don't recall two separate specific warnings about Curveball from Drumheller.

Several weeks later, Drumheller discovered that his warning had been ignored when his executive officer brought him an advance copy of Powell's Feb. 5, 2003, speech to the U.N.

Drumheller said he then arranged a meeting in McLaughlin's office and described what the German operative had told him over lunch several months earlier. After listening for 10 minutes, Drumheller said, McLaughlin responded by saying, "Oh my! I hope that's not true."

McLaughlin, who retired in January after 32 years at the CIA, said he did not recall the meeting and denied that Drumheller told him Curveball might be a fabricator.

"I have absolutely no recall of such a discussion. None," McLaughlin said in a statement Friday. "Such a meeting does not appear on my calendar, nor was this view transmitted to me in writing." He said he was "at a loss" to explain the conflicting accounts.

But another red flag appeared. On Jan. 27, 2003, the CIA's Berlin station warned in a message to headquarters that Curveball's information "cannot be verified."

Drumheller, meanwhile, said he never heard from McLaughlin or anyone else to confirm that Curveball's material had been deleted from Powell's speech. So when Tenet called him at home on another matter the night before Powell was to speak in New York, Drumheller said he raised the Curveball case.

"I gave him the phone number for the guy he wanted," Drumheller recalled. "Then it struck me, 'I better say something.' I said, 'You know, boss, there's problems with that case.' He says, 'Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm exhausted. Don't worry about it.' "

Of course, Curveball's information featured prominently in Powell's speech.

It will be worthwhile to see what our German colleagues can turn up about who really is Curveball, how he made his way into the German intelligence system, and how German authorities seemed to screw up mightily on their own end as well in giving him political asylum for his bogus information, determining him "crazy and a fabricator" fairly late in the game.

As to the political atmosphere in which this kind of horse manure was elevated to justify policy, Spencer Ackerman argues in this piece today that every administration is vulnerable to it, and the Silberman-Robb panel recommendations do nothing to ward against it:

Though the problem has been particularly pronounced in the Bush administration, Bush officials are hardly the only ones vulnerable to these temptations. Policymakers across the political spectrum have every reason to hold fast to their cherished theories--after all, they're often what officials owe their prominence to. Reforming the nation's intelligence apparatus won't only stumble on the shoals of recalcitrant agencies, but on the fixed ideas of policymakers who see no need to similarly reevaluate their approach to intelligence.

Update: Here's a year old piece from Der Spiegel that has a few more details about Curveball and Germany's BND.

Posted by Laura at April 2, 2005 11:51 AM