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http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1184172,00.html
Germans accuse US over Iraq weapons claim

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.

below timeline at same link

1994

Curveball graduates last in his class from engineering school at Baghdad University and is hired to work at the Chemical Engineering and Design Center. [Los Angeles Times, 12/20/2005]

People and organizations involved: Curveball
January 2000 - September 2001

Two German intelligence (BND) case officers debrief Iraqi defector “Curveball” with help from a team of chemists, biologists, and other experts. Curveball claims to have knowledge of a clandestine Iraqi biological weapons program (see November 1999). He speaks to his BND debriefers in Arabic through a translator, and also in broken English and German. Curveball says that he worked for Iraq’s Military Industrial Commission after graduating first in his class from engineering school at Baghdad University in 1994 (He actually graduated last (see 1994)). A year later, he says, he was assigned to work for “Dr. Germ,” British-trained microbiologist Rihab Rashid Taha, to construct mobile biological weapons labs. But Curveball never says that he actually produced biological weapons or witnessed anyone else doing so and the BND is unable to verify his claims. Curveball’s statements are recorded in German, shared with a local Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) team, and sent to the US, where they are translated into English for analysis at the DIA’s directorate for human intelligence in Clarendon, Va. “This was not substantial evidence,” one senior German intelligence official later recalls in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. “We made clear we could not verify the things he said.” The reports are then sent to the CIA’s Weapons Intelligence, Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Center (WINPAC), whose experts analyze the data and share it with artists who use Curveball’s accounts to render sketches. The Clarendon office sends a total of 95 reports to WINPAC during this period. US spy satellites are directed to take pictures of sites named by Curveball as biological weapons facilities. According to a later investigation by the Los Angeles Times, “At the CIA, bio-warfare experts viewed [Curveball’s] reports as sophisticated and technically feasible. They also matched the analysts’ expectations.” [Los Angeles Times, 12/20/2005] The Germans also share some of Curveball’s allegations with the British. However, according to Robin Butler, head of the British inquiry into prewar intelligence, what the Germans provided was “incomplete.” For instance, German intelligence misled them to believe that the alleged mobile weapon labs were capable of producing weapons-grade bio-agents such as anthrax spores, when Curveball’s actual statements only suggested they had the capability to produce a liquid slurry that would not be suitable for bombs or warheads. [Los Angeles Times, 12/20/2005]

People and organizations involved: Central Intelligence Agency, Bundesnachrichtendienst, Defense Intelligence Agency