THE IRAQ WAR (AGAIN ......)

There was a very good documentary on DR1 (the Danish BBC) last night about the Iraqi engineer, who provided the West with the details of Saddam Hussein's mobile chemical and biological weapons programmes. These revelations made their way into various CIA and other U.S. threat assessments, and were extensively quoted in then Secretary of State Colin Powell's famous speech to the U.N., when he made the case for war to the watching world.

There was only one problem with the revelations; they appear to have been completely made up. The engineer, known by his codename "Curveball", had sought asylum in Germany after fleeing Iraq for various misdemeanours. Judging by Danish experience, people can stay in asylum processing centres for a long time, years even. But this guy passed through in weeks, after telling his German handlers what he "knew". Over the course of the next eighteen months, he provided German intelligence with vast quantities of detail about the programmes; places, layouts, procedures, equipment design, scale models of the processing plant. Etc etc etc. While all of this was going on, he was given an apartment and money to live on, courtesy of the German state.

The transcripts of these interviews were sent on to Germany's allies, including the United States, and became part of the intelligence dossiers distributed to politicians and military planners. However, as time went on, the Germans began to distrust what they were hearing. Curveball was becoming more and more erratic, and the information stopped being internally consistent. In December 2002, a couple of months before the Iraq war started, the Germans formally warned the Americans, in the form of a letter to the head of the CIA, not to rely on any of Curveball's information. By then, however, it was too late. The U.S. establishment was already gearing up for war, and parts of Curveball's material were included in Powell's (and others') speeches.

The documentary included three very credible witnesses. The first was the Iraqi owner, also now in exile, of the Iraqi factory, which Curveball had said was the main site for the biological weapons programme. He had employed Curveball as an engineer, and said that he was "charming, but a pathological liar". Not surprisingly, when the weapons inspectors turned up post-invasion at the factory, they found an ordinary building and absolutely no evidence of anything untoward. The second was the German Ambassador to the U.N. in the lead-up to the war, who confirmed that the U.S. had been told to disregard the Curveball dossiers. The third was Powell's long-time chief of staff, who said that his boss consistently asked the head of the CIA whether he could rely 100% on the information he was getting about the weapons programmes, notably after they had had the final run-through together of the U.N. speech. Knowing what he knew today about Curveball, the chief of staff said that he thought that the head of the CIA had lied to Powell.

The German ambassador was asked why, following Powell's speech, the Germans did not make public their earlier warning to the Americans. The ambassador said that that was not how diplomacy works. Certainly it would have completely cut the rug from under Powell, leading to a huge loss of credibility and perhaps his resignation. Yet wouldn't that have been preferable to what actually happened, a war in which at least 1 million Iraqi civilians died, and which was fought in order to stop the production of weapons of mass destruction that we now know did not exist?

It is becoming clearer as time goes on that the Bush regime was set on war with Iraq, no matter what. It was unfinished business from his father's time. I suspect that history's judgement of George W. Bush as President will be extremely harsh.

There is also a troubling coda to this story. Despite being unmasked as a fraud, Curveball is still protected by the German state, as shown by the police harassment of the Danish documentary team when they finally tracked Curveball down outside his apartment. He rang to the police and they were there in minutes. As his former employer in Iraq pertinently asked, why is this man being protected?

Walter Blotscher