Curveball

September 3, 2007
In 1999, an Iraqi refugee, soon code-named Curveball, told German intelligence agents of his work on an ongoing Iraqi program that produced biological weapons in mobile laboratories. His claims electrified the CIA, which had little good intelligence about Saddam Hussein's regime and was fixated on the threat of Iraqi WMDs, which later became a centerpiece in the Bush administration's case for invading Iraq. It was only after American occupation forces failed to find any mobile germ-warfare labs—or other WMDs—that prewar warnings about Curveball's heavy drinking and mental instability, and the nagging gaps and contradictions in his story, were taken seriously. In this engrossing account, Los Angeles Times
correspondent Drogin paints an intimate and revealing portrait of the workings and dysfunctions of the intelligence community. Hobbled by internal and external turf battles and hypnotized by pet theories, the CIA—including director George Tenet, whose reputation suffers another black eye here—ignored skeptics, the author contends, and fell in love with a dubious source who told the agency and the White House what they wanted to hear. Instead of connecting the dots, Drogin argues, “the CIA and its allies made up the dots.”

September 15, 2007
Los Angeles Times reporter Drogin chronicles how the CIA fell for a bogus informant in its case that Iraqwas producing biological weapons. He was an Iraqi engineer who defected to Germany in 1999. Taking readers into the intelligence worlds halls of mirrors, Drogin recounts the mans interrogation by the Germans and the excitement the debriefings provoked in American intelligence. Amazingly, the Germans refused to permit the CIA direct access to Curveball, as he was code-named, which forced CIA bioweapons experts to corroboratehis claims indirectly. Curveball said he designed and built mobile anthrax factories, and the expertsagreed his design was feasible; inevitably, ancillary evidence from satellites and other defectors came to support a different conclusion. Drogins narrativeelaborates how those experts fit intelligence inferences into their belief, which wasembraced by the Bush administration, and the experts postinvasion consternation when nothing that Curveball said existed could be found. Seemingly well wired to the principal players, Drogin delivers a startling account of this fateful intelligence snafu.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2007, American Library Association.)