Via Jason Sigger, Der Spiegel has a fantastic series on "Curveball" and German intelligence. The story is fairly simple; Curveball was looking for a way out of a refugee camp, and succeeded in doing so by making up a story that the Germans wanted to hear...
Among the numerous Iraqis in the camp, the rumor was making the rounds that one easy way out was via the branch office of the German secret service located just outside the Zirndorf gates. The agents there routinely questioned asylum seekers from Iraq...Read the rest; it includes the story of how US intel assets and administration political hacks picked up on and pushed the story, even though there was no external verification. Eli Lake, among others, has attempted to foist US failures onto the Germans, but of course this misses the point; the administration was looking for information that supported its case for war, and not for a genuine appraisal of the state of Iraqi chemical and biological weapons.But did he really destroy all of his weapons? That was the claim made by Hussein Kamil Hassan, Saddam's son-in-law who had defected to Jordan in 1995. The BND also interviewed Kamil, and was told that there was "nothing, absolutely nothing left at all." But the agents in Germany refused to believe a single word of Kamil’s account. The "Doctor" was particularly skeptical. Indeed he was well known in the BND for his conviction that Saddam was still producing weapons of mass destruction.
“Curveball” was, for the “Doctor,” flesh and blood validation for his deep-seated doubts. Rafed could not only map out every single office in the secret fifth floor of the Baghdad CEDC Center and say who worked in them, but he even chatted away about the amorous adventures of his superiors.
The BND (German Foreign Intelligence Service) has yet to grapple with the failure that Curveball represents. There are a couple of reasons for this, I think. First, a considerable bond of loyalty develops between an intelligence asset and a case officer, such that the personal feelings can get in the way of a serious appraisal of the value of a source. Second, the kind of information that Curveball supplied can make careers. Burning him now would mean re-evaluating the careers of any number of German intelligence personnel, as well as bringing the integrity of the organization into question. Of course, the integrity of the organization is already in question, but this isn't how it looks from the inside; better to hunker down than to let the light in.
--Robert Farley
