- BERLIN -- An Iraqi defector
nicknamed Curveball who wrongly claimed that Saddam Hussein had mobile
chemical weapons factories was last night at the centre of a bitter row
between the CIA and Germany's intelligence agency.
-
- German officials said that they had warned American colleagues
well before the Iraq war that Curveball's information was not credible
- but the warning was ignored.
-
- It was the Iraqi defector's testimony that led the Bush
administration to claim that Saddam had built a fleet of trucks and railway
wagons to produce anthrax and other deadly germs.
-
- In his presentation to the UN security council in February
last year, the US secretary of state, Colin Powell, explicitly used Curveball's
now discredited claims as justification for war. The Iraqis were assembling
"mobile production facilities for biological agents", Mr Powell
said, adding that his information came from "a solid source".
-
- These "killer caravans" allowed Saddam to produce
anthrax "on demand", it was claimed. US officials never had direct
access to the defector, and have subsequently claimed that the Germans
misled them.
-
- Yesterday, however, German agents told Die Zeit newspaper
that they had warned the Bush administration long before last year that
there were "problems" with Curveball's account. "We gave
a clear credibility assessment. On our side at least, there were no tricks
before Colin Powell's presentation," one source told the newspaper.
-
- Officially, Germany's intelligence agency, the BND, has
refused to comment.
-
- The revelation is embarrassing for the Bush administration
and appears to bolster the contention that it used dubious intelligence
in a partisan manner in the critical few weeks before the invasion of Iraq.
-
-
- It has now emerged that Curveball is the brother of a
top aide of Ahmad Chalabi, the pro-western Iraqi former exile with links
to the Pentagon.
-
- According to the Los Angeles Times, it was UN inspectors
who came up with the idea that Saddam might have developed mobile factories
to try to evade weapons inspections. They asked Mr Chalabi, a bitter enemy
of Saddam, to find evidence to support the theory.
-
- Recently, American officials have admitted that Curveball's
information was false. Meanwhile, David Kay, who resigned as head of the
Iraqi survey group in January after a fruitless nine-month search for weapons
of mass destruction, said in an interview that Curveball had been "absolutely
at the heart of the matter", but had turned out to be an "out
and out fabricator".
-
- US and British intelligence officials have acknowledged
since the war that much of the information supplied by Mr Chalabi's Iraqi
National Congress and other Iraqi groups was wrong. Yesterday, German sources
said they were bemused by the idea that they had tricked the US. "We
ask ourselves, what are they on about?" one said.
-
- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2004 http://WWW.GUARDIAN.CO.UK/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1184172,00.html
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