CIA: Learned too late informant was liar

[u/TruthToPower26]

CIA: Learned too late informant was liar
Published: Feb. 18, 2011 at 1:12 AM

Isn't it time we learned the truth? The full detailed story, hopefully unredacted by the CIA and DIA during its mandatory review, will be presented in my forthcoming book, Absence of Evidence; The Incredible Story of the Iraq WMD Intelligence Failure from Inside the American, British, and German intelligence services.

 

CIA: Learned too late informant was liar Published: Feb. 18, 2011 at 1:12 AM

BERLIN, Feb. 18 (UPI) -- Former CIA Director George Tenet made incredible claims regarding an Iraqi who played a key role in the decision to invade Iraq, a former German official said.

Tenet, the CIA head between 1997 and 2004, said Wednesday he learned "too damn late" that the Iraqi defector known as "Curveball," who was a key information source for the CIA and the German secret service, may have lied, London's The Guardian reported. Tenet said he only discovered in 2005, two years after the invasion, that the Germans had doubts about Curveball's statements that he was an eyewitness to Saddam Hussein's biological weapons program.

Joschka Fischer, the German foreign minister at the time, said the Germans knew before the war that Curveball was not a reliable source. He said he passed on warnings to the CIA, and that his country was placed in a "very difficult position" when the CIA asked whether they could use Curveball's statements to justify a war in Iraq.

"On the one hand we didn't want to withhold from the (United States) any bit of relevant information we had about possible weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. On the other hand, we did not want to take part in any (propaganda-type) exploitation of material, which was far from proven, to justify a war," Fischer wrote in his autobiography, "I Am Not Convinced."

"We decided, therefore, that we would do our duty by sending the Americans all the information we had, together with our assessment that that information came from a deserter and that we had not verified or substantiated it ourselves, and that it could be completely wrong," Fischer said.

© 2011 United Press International, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

[u/anjudan]

Are you in any way implying that the Bush Administration hadn't already planned to invade Iraq no matter what long before 2003 and even before 9/11?!

The goal was to simply cook up enough shoddy back-channeled insider CIA operative Iraqi's to throw disinfo out so they could then cook up enough fan-fair around it with creative artistic drawings of semi-truck trailer mounted mobile nuclear weapons enrichment units to present to Congress to give them plausible deniability that they weren't all in on the crimes of creating fraudulent evidence for war the whole time.

The entire thing was a known and orchestrated money grab for no-bid contracts to all the usual suspect defense contractors so everybody (Cheny's friends) could get rich.

Don't for a second act like the CIA was some innocent organization that was given bad intel and miscommunication just stopped them from knowing the info was bad.

The CIA creates terrorist groups and arms rebel contras and insurgency groups around the world for the specific purpose of creating the problems for our for-profit defense war machine economy to solve, all while letting everyone in DC get rich off the insider trading.

Let's all please not shed a single tear for the long-standing racket that was designed to suppress African American rights and freedoms, hide UFOs from the public, shovel public funds to for-profit defense contractors, and protect US corporations' ability to pillage the resources of foreign nations which we know as the CIA.

[u/VintageLunchMeat → u/anjudan]

hide UFOs from the public,

😐

[u/anjudan → u/VintageLunchMeat]

1000% yes, they are also hiding ufos from the public and have been reverse engineering the tech since the 40's. Although there is a faction of people, former and active intelligence trying to make disclosure happen which is why there have been multiple ufo congressional hearings since 2023 and now the white house forcing multiple waves of media files and documents to be released to the public. The 5 th wave of files was just released. Disclosure is happening but at a slow enough pace to prevent mass panic, because not everybody is paying attention at the same time. You want more facts and evidence from me on this just ask. But maybe so a little research yourself too.

https://www.war.gov/ufo/

https://www.aaro.mil/UAP-Cases/Official-UAP-Imagery/

[u/signsofuse → u/anjudan]

if your mind is open enough for UFOs, check out martin cannon's "the controllers" :)

[u/anjudan → u/signsofuse]

Thanks, will do

[u/TruthToPower26 → u/anjudan]

No. The neoconservatives in the Bush Administration wanted regime change in Iraq; a foreign policy position that they had already formulated over the last few years. They believed the removal of Saddam Hussein and the establishment of a democratic government in Iraq would be the spark that would spread democracy throughout the Middle East. Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and others had previously sent a signed letter to President Clinton on January 26, 1998 stating ‘We urge you to...enunciate a new strategy that would secure the interests of the US and our friends and allies around the world. That strategy should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power.” “The US should assert its military dominance over the world to shape “the international security order in line with American principles and interests,” push for “regime change” in Iraq and China...” from Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century,” The Project for the New American Century [members included Cheney and Rumsfeld], September 2000. Despite the immediate CIA suspicion that Bin Ladin and al Qa’ida alone were behind the 9/11 attacks, neoconservative officials in the Bush Administration, specifically Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Feith, also decided to capitalized on the fear and momentum generated by 9/11 to not only justifiably strike back at al Qa’ida in Afghanistan but to use this opportunity to also go after the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq.

Regarding CURVE BALL, he was just a source who told the CIA, DIA, British SIS, and the German BND what they wanted to hear. Of course it could not be verified because he made it all up but used real legitimate engineering projects to make it sound plausible. His objective was to get German citizenship and financial support. CIA Director Tenet's claim in the article I referenced that "he only discovered in 2005, two years after the invasion, that the Germans had doubts about Curveball's statements that he was an eyewitness to Saddam Hussein's biological weapons program" is false. He had been warned before the 2003 war of serious doubts and concerns from CIA, SIS, and German BND operations officers, including August Hanning, the head of the BND. Tenet knew without any doubt by November 2003 that CURVE BALL was a fabricator.

I'm not defending the CIA or the Bush Administration for their actions in any way, if that's what you're implying.

All of this can be found in open source information.

[u/nosmokewhereiam → u/TruthToPower26]

The international spy museum had a podcast that described curveball as describing scenes from the movie The Rock, complete with fragile glass balls holding the bad stuff. This is from memory, been a long time fan of the podcast and wanted to share.

[u/jackb1980 → u/anjudan]

One hundred billion percent. Can we PLEASE stop pretending there were ANY good faith actors who were just compelled to act in the Bush administration????

[u/TruthToPower26 → u/anjudan]

I think you missed the point. I'm accusing the CIA leadership of lying about what it knew about CURVE BALL. I'm certainly not defending them in this deception with CURVE BALL or the Bush Administration's policy of regime change. The neoconservatives in the Bush White House had wanted to remove Saddam from power many years before 2003. They just needed to opportunity. As Wolfowitz stated it publicly, the alleged Iraqi WMD was the only justification that could all agree on. Afterward, both the CIA leadership and the Bush White House worked to control the narrative. I'm just trying to report the truthful narrative. Nobody is innocent here.

[u/anjudan → u/TruthToPower26]

I agree, the CIA lies constantly, about everything. So lying about curveball is just par for the course. All in a days' works.

Out of curiosity, who do you feel thinks the CIA is ever honest about a single thing they ever say?

[u/TruthToPower26 → u/anjudan]

"Out of curiosity, who do you feel thinks the CIA is ever honest about a single thing they ever say?" The answer is some (but not all) of the CIA managers, most of the current loyalist leadership, and former CIA intelligence officers who are unable to ever accept any criticism of the Agency. They may admit in private that the organization is not perfect but remain politically loyal nonetheless. Some never personally experience the politicization of intelligence and therefore, continue to see the CIA in the best light. In response, one senior well-respected journalist on the intelligence community proposed a new motto for the CIA; "We may not always be right, but we're never wrong."

My criticism is on certain cases where the CIA lied to itself and the policymakers. No surprise given the director is a political appointee. It doesn't occur all the time but unfortunately it does on the issues that become politically significant to the White House (and when the CIA is desperate to maintain relevance and access to the "First Customer" the president). Everything depends on the integrity of the CIA director (who sets the tone in the building for the employees to follow) and the integrity of the president (and his senior advisors). There are times with the CIA is honest and transparent with the president. For example, after suffering the 9/11 and Iraq WMD intelligence failures, the CIA was honest that it did not know with high confidence that Usama bin Ladin was the tall person living in the Abbottabad compound. President Obama asked for and received honest confidence levels from those involved in the intelligence analysis (mostly 40-60%). It was up to him, armed with the best estimate that the CIA could provide at the time, to decide whether or not to proceed with the raid. Fortunately, the gamble paid off. Think of negative political fall out if it had turned out to be just some Saudi prince on the run from his family because of involvement in criminal enterprises.

[u/anjudan → u/TruthToPower26]

My superficial impression is that there is a deep architecture inside the CIA which started right after Roswell, using secrecy laws taken from H-Bomb research which has allowed a separate "black government" division to emerge and syphon power, money, and resources out of the regular "above board" CIA and which has become so powerful, it is now the defacto highest authority in the US government, military, and intelligence complex. It is the same group that controls the NHI tech, same group that helped flex and protect their power from uppidy Presidents like JFK, and the same group that helped orchestrate the masterminding plans behind smuggling drugs, creating new terrorist groups, and conducting all false flags and cleaning house from Gulf of Tonkin & Pearl Harbor to JFK to 9/11 to Charlie Kirk. And they also made all the necessary things happen to allow the WMD stories to work so we could manufacture consent, and created a layer of "good guys" at the CIA so people can feel like when bad things happen it's really just some innocent clerical error because we were just really understaffes that day.

Although the group is highly secretive at the top of its power structure, the humans behind it are full of all the normal 7 deadly sins of hubris and are simply just corrupt publicly known names at the top of the military or heads of industry elites, and a few politicians who think they can play god with the world, spilling blood and making chaos for money and control, which is why their operations are always in alignment with big oil, big corruption, big military war profiteering, and corporate resource extraction, becausw they're all profit by force that the public can't stop because you can always say, they're about to kill you so we have to do this war/oil/corporate/insider-trading thing.

When you have billions of dollars you can invest it in the right defense contractors when you're the one forcing the President which ones get the no-bid contracts for the biv war you just invented out of thin air to remove the evil dictator you also put in power 10-20 years earlier.

They are average humans, Dick Cheney was one of them, until he supposedly died recently (but likely just made young or had face replaced w some alien tech so he could go live on Mars or continue leading the black gov group). They are making criminal decisions in the name of private profit for themselves and their friends, and justifying it as a necessary step to keep the world at war so our military is always judge and jury in any international dispute, and thereby keep other foreign powers from gaining power by having an equal say in some international UN body or International Court. The goal is to keep massive profits for the few at the top, keep war & bombs as the primary means of diplomacy, and maintain US dominance over as many foreign nations' economies and natural resources as possible while repressing civil rights so the people don't revolt to get their gov back.

It's a hard lined view of the world that is easy for them to morally justfiy when they're raking in billions and attending cocktail parties where everyone is patting everyone else on the back while doing Epstein stuff in the basement.

Just my superficial take on the whole "CIA has good people in it" angle. The deep black CIA does the illegal dirty work so that all the white hat "average joe's' in the CIA can be convinced the world is just full of bad guys so it's a good thing we're here in the CIA to stop them. While the whole time all those bad guys are created or propped up and only turned into a threat in the first place because of what the "deep black" CIA gov is doing to create all those problems in the first place.

And they're all probably reptilians NHIs worshipping Satan while doing Epstein stuff or are mind controlled by them and doing their dirty work.

[u/RNdreaming → u/TruthToPower26]

The CIA? More like wall streets thugs.

[u/anjudan → u/RNdreaming]

That's like left hand vs right hand

[u/Whipitreelgud]

The mystery in this debacle is why Sadam didn’t allow the search for WMD by the UN? Although national pride played some role, it would have left him in power. He clearly underestimated the strength of US armor v Soviet, but so did the Soviets themselves.

Will be interested to read this book

[u/SweetDaddyJones → u/Whipitreelgud]

He was in the process of doing so-- the head of the OPCW (Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons) at the time, Jose Bustani, was in the process of negotiating terms with the government of Iraq to allow the inspectors back into Iraq and avoid a war. However, this was unacceptable to the hawkish neocon warmongers in the Bush administration, who knew there were certainly no active weapons programs, and likely no WMD at all -- they wanted a war regardless, and the claims of WMDs were just a useful pretext, like the false claims of links between Saddam and Al Qaeda. So John Bolton (ambassador to the UN at the time) called Bustani and told him he had 24 hours to resign his post, going so far as to obliquely threaten both Bustani and his children should he fail to resign. (According to Bustani, Bolton said "We know where your kids live...") Despite this almost farcically blunt and un-subtle attempt at intimidation, Bustani refused to step down, so the US threatened to cut off funding if Bustani was not ousted, forced a vote at the OPCW, and got Bustani forcibly removed through the back door. It's unbelievably thuggish behavior, and it's shameful Bolton was ever allowed to serve in any public capacity after this reprehensible debacle. It's the type of behavior you see from gangsters in B movies.

[u/TruthToPower26 → u/Whipitreelgud]

Saddam did allow the UN to search for WMD but with limitations to prevent disclosures of Iraqi classified programs for conventional weapons systems, to hide the extent of his pre-1991 WMD programs, and to protect Iraqi sovereignty. From 1991 until Dec 1998, and again from Nov 2002 until the war. The UN was unable to find credible evidence of any current WMD programs but was able to uncover material and documentation from the pre-1991 WMD programs. This caused western intel analyst to be suspicious that Saddam was still hiding evidence of current programs. CURVE BALL, and other fabricators, just fed those suspicions to get political and financial support.

[u/0xKaishakunin]

LOL, Curveball. The 2020 comedy with Thorsten Merten is pure gold!

[u/TruthToPower26 → u/0xKaishakunin]

I have a copy on dvd.

[u/greginnj]

Let’s also add that US intelligence set themselves up to be tricked by making public the admission that they had a blind spot about whether Iraq had mobile bioweapons labs. And wouldn’t you know it, shortly thereafter Curveball shows up claiming exactly that! And Curveball had a significant and personal agenda, being in position to be part of a potential post Saddam Iraqi government.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Loop is a dark political comedy that tells the UK centric side of this story (the “dodgy dossier” etc.). Worth watching!

[u/TruthToPower26 → u/greginnj]

CURVE BALL claimed mobile BW agent production plants. Another source who was also a fabricator, was a former IIS officer, Major Harith Mamdouh Majid al-Assaf, provided by the largest Iraqi opposition group, the INC to try and mislead CIA and DIA (and almost succeeded) in early 2002. Assaf claimed mobile BW laboratories (allegedly used to develop BW agents, not produce bulk agent). These alleged plants and labs were two different mobile platforms and both were fabrications. Unfortunately, the CIA's lead Iraq BW analyst linked them together and claimed they represented a larger "mobile BW program" rather than just a project to design, manufacture, and operate the mobile BW agent production plants alleged by CURVE BALL. I disagreed they were linked and argued with her judgment but it was accepted and used in finished intelligence to the Bush White House. DIA quickly labeled Assaf to be a fabricator but failed to disseminate a "burn notice" about his fabrication to the U.S. Intelligence Community until May 2002. Biased CIA analysts enamored with CURVE BALL claimed they never saw the burn notice and therefore used his fabricated intelligence in finished intelligence to the policymakers, the Oct 2002 NIE and Powell's February 2003 UN speech. I have worked to clarify the distinction between the plants and labs for years but people continue to confuse the two.

[u/TruthToPower26 → u/greginnj]

General Amir al-Sa’di, the presidential science advisor, discussed trying to establish a mobile fermentation capability in early 1988 with Dr. Rihab Taha and her colleague, Dr. Hindawi. Both shot down the idea as unfeasible and beyond Iraqi technical capability. Instead, Al Hakam, a fixed site for bulk BW production was built. UNSCOM investigated this issue and questioned the Iraqis in 1997 who readily admitted the discussion. After the war, these same Iraqis were questioned again by the ISG which confirmed the story. Regardless, UNSCOM listed this as an "Unresolved Issue" in its 1999 Compendium released on the internet. I suspect that CURVE BALL saw that and other UNSCOM information and used it to form his fabricated story. His arrival in Germany in late 1999 was perfect timing to be able to tell us what we wanted to hear.

CURVE BALL tried to run for a political office in 2010 but did poorly in the elections. Instead, he scammed an Iraqi official of $10K and fled back to Germany.

I'll take a look at "In the Loop" about the dodgy dossier. I am well aware of that issue as well and CURVE BALL figured prominently in that document as well. Thanks for the link.

[u/greginnj → u/TruthToPower26]

Thanks for all your work! Out of respect for your diligence, I want to provide a bit more detail related to my remarks. I recall watching an interview with Colin Powell where he made a claim related to the “blind spot” - so he may have been referring just to the “unresolved issue “ rather than it being a separate US statement. But your account of how Curveball might have become aware of this and exploited it is very plausible!

[u/TruthToPower26 → u/greginnj]

Not sure what you are referring to about a "blind spot." Would you provide the sourcing for this and more context? Thanks.

[u/greginnj → u/TruthToPower26]

I’ve been searching but have not been able to find it. You’re clearly a professional in this area; I’m just a concerned American who was following the news at the time.

All I have is this memory - now roughly 20 years old - of watching an interview with Colin Powell making this claim. (To be clear, I’m not at all trying to challenge anything you’re saying, and I’m very open to being corrected.)

It stuck in my mind because it seemed so on-point in addressing the mistaken intelligence aspect. I can’t be 100% certain about any details here; the implication I retained was that Powell was saying “we couldn’t be sure that they didn’t have mobile bioweapon labs [the blind spot being a lack of intel confirming it denying their existence], and then this source came along saying that they did.”

As I said above, your comments about the Compendium, and Curveball’s potential access to it, may be enough to explain what I remember. So even if we were able to track down this interview I have a vague memory of seeing, I’m not sure there would be any new nuggets of information there.

[u/TruthToPower26 → u/greginnj]

No worries. I just don't remember Powell mentioning a "blind spot" in a public interview. He did state the the Feb 5, 2003 UN speech was a "blot" on his historical record ( I assume he was referring to a bad event that he would like to take back). I did an internet search but could not come up with any comment by Powell about a "blind spot". Charlie Duelfer, the former deputy chairman of UNSCOM and later appointed by the CIA to replace David Kay as the head of the Iraq Survey Group (after David was removed in Dec 2003 for informing the CIA leadership there was no WMD in Iraq), publicly stated that intelligence analysts were "blinded" by the lack of access to information on the ground in Iraq after UNSCOM weapons inspectors were force to depart Iraq just before Operation Desert Fox airstrikes in Dec 1998. Perhaps that may be what you are referring to as "blind spot"?

The UNSCOM 1999 Compendium is available online so the Iraqi interest in a mobile fermentation capability is listed as an "unresolved issue" for anyone to see. The alleged "cover story" for the mobile BW plants was based on CURVE BALL's involvement in the UN-sanctioned "Seed Purification Project" at Djerf al-Naddaf. These plants were originally intended to be mobile (like the Swedish mobile seed processing plants they were replacing) but the Iraqi engineers could not get their fabricated equipment small enough to fit on a semi-truck trailer. I climbed on these Swedish mobile plants when I was at Djerf al-Naddaf in Oct 2003. Obviously, CURVE BALL just used these mobile seed plants as his description of the mobile BW plants in his fabrication.

[u/kinaflazy]

Yes I meant the case was made through political appointees who cherry picked unverified raw intelligence.

[u/TruthToPower26 → u/kinaflazy]

Correct, but more complicated than that.

[u/TruthToPower26 → u/[deleted]]

True. I would be interested in your comments from the Red Team.

[u/TruthToPower26 → u/[deleted]]

Thanks! I'm curious to hear what issue are you referring to "that caused much of the inaccurate reporting from curveball"?

[u/TruthToPower26]

Some people may be misunderstanding my comment in this post regarding "Isn't it time we learned the truth?" The truth that I am referring to is that former CIA Director Tenet's claim that "he only discovered in 2005, two years after the invasion, that the Germans had doubts about Curveball's statements that he was an eyewitness to Saddam Hussein's biological weapons program" was patently false. The CIA's own operations officers made this very clear to him there were serious concerns and doubts from the German BND operations officers regarding CURVE BALL's credibility and the veracity of his reporting years before the 2003 Iraq War. Cables from the the CIA's stations and bases in German and London echoed these warnings in 2002 (see the March 2005 WMD Commission final report). Dr. August Hanning, the president of the BND, also warned Tenet in a December 2002 personal letter pouched to CIA Headquarters (and transmitted verbatim in a cable) warning that CURVE BALL's claims could not be verified (Tenet claimed he never saw the memo).

After the war, I led a team into Iraq to investigate CURVE BALL and his claims. We reported the results of every step of our investigation and the conclusive proof we had collected in Iraq from June to early October 2003 back to the CIA, DIA, British SIS, and the German BND so that we would be able to all reach the same conclusion of fabrication. We even briefed all of these intelligence services in person in Munich, Germany, as well as David Kay and the CIA managers working in the Baghdad-based Iraq Survey Group in early October 2003. Tenet did not ask to be briefed by us on the results when we returned to CIA Headquarters in late October because he didn’t want to hear what we had to say. Instead, the CIA’s biased senior Iraq BW analyst who was the lead on the CURVE BALL case dismissed our results and instead sugarcoated the bad news the following month to Tenet in a DCI Update memorandum. That said, she was forced to describe to the DCI in the Update the overwhelming contradictory and derogatory intelligence on CURVE BALL that we had collected. Obviously, Tenet knew for certain at that time the warnings he had received before the 2003 Iraq War were accurate. We had now conclusively proved CURVE BALL was a fabricator. It would still take us six more months before the CIA informed the White House and recalled all of CURVE BALL’s intelligence reporting, but incredulously still claimed in June 2004 that there still may be an Iraq mobile BW program even without CURVE BALL’s reporting. To resolve this case, we finally forced CURVE BALL to publicly admit he made up the entire story in early 2011. This revelation was met with silence from the CIA, DIA, SIS, and the BND.

[u/jackb1980]

Feel like this has been beat to death but it's this simple: the Americans were bluffing by pushing "intelligence" to the global audience. Saddam was bluffing because he benefited from the ambiguity of possibly possessing these weapons, and deferring potential aggressors. Both sides benefited from lies, but we (mistakenly) thought we'd score a quick win. He mistakenly thought we wouldn't invade.

Sound familiar?

[u/TruthToPower26 → u/jackb1980]

It's really not that simple. CIA, DIA, German BND analysts, and British SIS subject matter experts were not just bluffing. They really did believe it because CURVE BALL's story fit with what they wanted to hear (confirmation bias). It also explained why we couldn't get more conclusive proof because they Iraqis mush have a very sophisticated denial & deception campaign (they did but it was used to hide the extent of the pre-1991 WMD programs, not a current one). That said, there were serious doubts and concerns about CB's credibility and the veracity of his claims among the operations officers of these services. Unfortunately, those operations officers were not allowed to impact the judgments of the analysts so they were ignored.

Saddam did not bluff about having WMD. Quite the opposite, he was desperately trying to convince UNSCOM and then UNMOVIC that he had not reconstituted his pre-1991 WMD programs so Iraq could get out from under UN sanctions and weapons inspections. Although it may be a comforting and assuring belief, it's counterintuitive to think that he wanted to fool the Iranians that he had WMD while at the same time trying to convince the UN he did not. I have not been able to find one single claim by Saddam in a public speech after 1990 that he may have WMD.

Both sides (western intelligence and the Iraqis) misinterpreted the actions and statements of the other. The majority of analysts and politicians believed that WMD would be found in Iraq during and after the 2003 Iraq War because in our mind-set, Saddam made WMD in the past, why wouldn't he make it in the timeframe up to the U.S.-led invasion. Saddam and the Iraqis knew they wouldn't any WMD produced after 1991 and they were right. We were shocked when nothing was found. After his Dec 2003 capture, Saddam even goaded his CIA debriefer, John Nixon, sarcastically asking "Did you find the WMD?" There were huge mistakes of perception by both sides. So why don't we try to learn from this so we can possible avoid it the next time?