Truespeak

As promised, Truespeak will be taking a closer look at the section of the report from The Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction that discusses Iraq's biological weapons (BW) capabilities. A word of warning: It's not pretty.

At the beginning of this section of the report, the commission states its "Biological Warfare Summary Finding." It reads:

The Intelligence Community seriously misjudged the status of Iraq's biological weapons program in the 2002 NIE and other pre-war intelligence products. The primary reason for this misjudgment was the Intelligence Community's heavy reliance on a human source--codenamed "Curveball"--whose information later proved to be unreliable.

If there were an award given for the year's biggest understatement, this particular statement would have to be considered the odds-on favorite to win.

It appears that Curveball came onto the scene in early 2000 through a foriegn liaison service and quickly endeared himself to the Intelligence Community by telling them exactly what they wanted to hear. His information was passed on to senior policymakers and was incorporated into the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE). By October, 2001, with the attacks of September 11 still fresh in everyone's memory, Curveball's information about Iraq's mobile BW facilities and their continued efforts to pursue BW agents seemed more appropriate than ever. And by the following year, his information, seemingly corroborated by other sources, became the basis for the October 2002 NIE.

The October 2002 NIE reflected the shift from the late-1990s assessments that Iraq could have biological weapons to the definitive conclusion that Iraq "has" biological weapons, and that its BW program was larger and more advanced than before the Gulf War. ²⁴³ Information about Iraq's dual-use facilities and its failure to account fully for previously declared stockpiles contributed to this shift in assessments. ²⁴⁴ The information that Iraq had mobile BW production units, however, was instrumental in adjusting upward the assessment of Iraq's BW threat. ²⁴⁵ And for this conclusion, the NIE relied primarily on reporting from Curveball, who, as noted, provided a large volume of reporting through Defense HUMINT channels regarding mobile BW production facilities in Iraq. ²⁴⁶ Only in May 2004, more than a year after the commencement of Operation Iraqi Freedom, did CIA formally deem Curveball's reporting fabricated and recall it. ²⁴⁷ At the time of the NIE, however, reporting from three other human sources--who provided one report each on mobile BW facilities--was thought to have corroborated Curveball's information about the mobile facilities. ²⁴⁸ These three sources also proved problematic, however, as discussed below.

Another asylum seeker (hereinafter "the second source") reporting through Defense HUMINT channels provided one report in June 2001 that Iraq had transportable facilities for the production of BW. ²⁴⁹ This second source recanted in October 2003, however, and the recantation was reflected in a Defense HUMINT report in which the source flatly contradicted his June 2001 statements about transportable facilities. ²⁵⁰ Though CIA analysts told Commission staff that they had requested that Defense HUMINT follow-up with this second source to ascertain the reasons for his recantation, DIA's Defense HUMINT Service has provided no further information on this issue. ²⁵¹ Nor, for that matter, was the report ever recalled or corrected. ²⁵²

Another source, associated with the Iraqi National Congress (INC) (hereinafter "the INC source"), was brought to the attention of DIA by Washington-based representatives of the INC. Like Curveball, his reporting was handled by Defense HUMINT. He provided one report that Iraq had decided in 1996 to establish mobile laboratories for BW agents to evade inspectors. ²⁵³ Shortly after Defense HUMINT's initial debriefing of the INC source in February 2002, however, a foreign liaison service and the CIA's Directorate of Operations (DO) judged him to be a fabricator and recommended that Defense HUMINT issue a notice to that effect, which Defense HUMINT did in May 2002. Senior policymakers were informed that the INC source and his reporting were unreliable. The INC source's information, however, began to be used again in finished intelligence in July 2002, including the October 2002 NIE, because, although a fabrication notice had been issued several months earlier, Defense HUMINT had failed to recall the reporting. ²⁵⁴

[...]

Secretary of State Colin Powell's speech to the United Nations Security Council on February 5, 2003, relied on the same human sources relied upon in the NIE. ²⁵⁸ Secretary Powell was not informed that one of these sources-- the INC source --had been judged a fabricator almost a year earlier. And as will be discussed at length below, serious doubts about Curveball had also surfaced within CIA's Directorate of Operations at the time of the speech--but these doubts also were not communicated to Secretary Powell before his United Nations address.

So basically Powell was going to the UN with bullshit. Kind of lends credence to all those reports of Powell's tirade prior to the presentation, doesn't it?

Now we all know what the post-war inspectors found. Jack Squat! (I have to attribute that quote to the late Chris Farley's character Matt Foley.) But let's let the commission tell us what they think.

The Iraq Survey Group found that the Intelligence Community's pre-war assessments about Iraq's BW program were almost entirely wrong. The ISG concluded that "Iraq appears to have destroyed its undeclared stocks of BW weapons and probably destroyed remaining holdings of bulk BW agent" shortly after the Gulf War. ²⁶¹ According to the ISG, Iraq initially intended to retain elements of its biological weapons program after the Gulf War. UNSCOM inspections proved unexpectedly intrusive, however, and to avoid detection, Saddam Hussein ordered his son-in-law and Minister of the Military Industrial Commission Hussein Kamil to destroy, unilaterally, Iraq's stocks of BW agents. ²⁶² This took place in either the late spring or summer of 1991.

Now you might be asking yourself, "How could we have possibly got things so wrong?" Obviously our intelligence agencies are smart enough to check out the validity of any intelligence that comes accross their desk, right? Well, apparently not. The failure to vet any of this newly acquired information provided by Curveball appears to be how we got ourselves into war. Not only was the information not confirmed, but doubts about its veracity were roundly ignored. The commission's Biological Warfare Finding 1 states:

The DIA's Defense HUMINT Service's failure even to attempt to validate Curveball's reporting was a major failure in operational tradecraft.

Did you catch that? They didn't even attempt to validate this information. God damn I feel safe! But wait, it gets worse.

Curveball was not a source who worked directly with the United States; rather, the Intelligence Community obtained information about Curveball through a foreign service. The foreign service would not provide the United States with direct access to Curveball, claiming that Curveball would refuse to speak to Americans. ²⁷⁴ Instead, the foreign intelligence service debriefed Curveball and passed the debriefing information to DIA's Defense HUMINT Service, the human intelligence collection agency of the Department of Defense.

The lack of direct access to Curveball made it more difficult to assess his veracity. [...] Defense HUMINT, however, did not even attempt to determine Curveball's veracity. A Defense HUMINT official explained to Commission staff that Defense HUMINT believed that it was just a "conduit" for Curveball's reporting--that it had no responsibility for vetting Curveball or validating his information.

Commission's Biological Warfare Finding 2:

Indications of possible problems with Curveball began to emerge well before the 2002 NIE. These early indications of problems--which suggested unstable behavior more than a lack of credibility--were discounted by the analysts working the Iraq WMD account. But given these warning signs, analysts should have viewed Curveball's information with greater skepticism and should have conveyed this skepticism in the NIE. The analysts' resistance to any information that could undermine Curveball's reliability suggests that the analysts were unduly wedded to a source that supported their assumptions about Iraq's BW programs.

Unduly wedded. That's just a fancy way of saying they refused to listen to dissenting opinions. I apologize for the length of the next quote, but the incompetence exhibited by the intelligence community is truly frightening.

The first CIA concerns about Curveball's reliability arose within the DO [Directorate of Operations] in May 2000, when a Department of Defense detailee assigned to the DO met Curveball. The purpose of the meeting was to evaluate Curveball's claim that he had been present during a BW accident that killed several of his coworkers by seeing whether Curveball had been exposed to, or vaccinated against, a BW agent. ²⁸⁴ Although the evaluation was ultimately inconclusive, ²⁸⁵ the detailee raised several concerns about Curveball based on their interaction.

First, the detailee observed that Curveball spoke excellent English during their meeting. ²⁸⁶ This was significant to the detailee because the foreign service had, on several earlier occasions, told U.S. intelligence officials that one reason a meeting with Curveball was impossible was that Curveball did not speak English. Second, the detailee was concerned by Curveball's apparent "hangover" during their meeting. The detailee conveyed these impressions of Curveball informally to CIA officials, and WINPAC BW analysts told Commission staff that they were aware that the detailee was concerned that Curveball might be an alcoholic. ²⁸⁷ This message was eventually re-conveyed to Directorate of Operations supervisors via electronic mail on February 4, 2003--literally on the eve of Secretary Powell's speech to the United Nations. The electronic mail stated, in part:

I do have a concern with the validity of the information based on Curveball having a terrible hangover the morning of [the meeting]. I agree, it was only a one time interaction, however, he knew he was to have a [meeting] on that particular morning but tied one on anyway. What underlying issues could this be a problem with and how in depth has he been vetted by the [foreign liaison service]? ²⁸⁸

By early 2001, the DO was receiving operational messages about the foreign service's difficulties in handling Curveball, whom the foreign service reported to be "out of control," and whom the service could not locate. ²⁸⁹ This operational traffic regarding Curveball was shared with WINPAC's Iraq BW analysts because, according to WINPAC analysts, the primary BW analyst who worked on the Iraq issue had close relations with the DO's Counterproliferation Division (the division through which the operational traffic was primarily handled). ²⁹⁰ This and other operational information was not, however, shared with analysts outside CIA. ²⁹¹

A second warning on Curveball came in April 2002, when a foreign intelligence service, which was also receiving reporting from Curveball, told the CIA that, in its view, there were a variety of problems with Curveball. The foreign service began by noting that they were "inclined to believe that a significant part of [Curveball's] reporting is true" in light of his detailed technical descriptions. ²⁹² In this same message, however, the foreign service noted that it was "not convinced that Curveball is a wholly reliable source," and that "elements of [Curveball's] behavior strike us as typical of individuals we would normally assess as fabricators." ²⁹³ Even more specifically, the foreign service noted several inconsistencies in Curveball's reporting which caused the foreign service "to have doubts about Curveball's reliability."

[...]

But none of the expressed concerns overcame analysts' ultimate confidence in the accuracy of his information. Specifically, analysts continued to judge his information credible based on their assessment of its detail and technical accuracy, corroborating documents, confirmation of the technical feasibility of the production facility designs described by Curveball, and reporting from another human source, the fourth source mentioned above. ²⁹⁶ But it should be noted that during the pre-NIE period--in addition to the more general questions about Curveball's credibility discussed above--at least some evidence had emerged calling into question the substance of Curveball's reporting about Iraq's BW program as well. ²⁹⁷

WTF? They're being told specifically that the information is questionable, but nobody does anything about it. Instead they make Curveball the basis for their entire case.

Biological Warfare Finding 3:

The October 2002 NIE failed to communicate adequately to policymakers both the Community's near-total reliance on Curveball for its BW judgments, and the serious problems that characterized Curveball as a source.

And Biological Warfare Finding 4:

Beginning in late 2002, some operations officers within the regional division of the CIA's Directorate of Operations that was responsible for relations with the liaison service handling Curveball expressed serious concerns about Curveball's reliability to senior officials at the CIA, but these views were either (1) not thought to outweigh analytic assessments that Curveball's information was reliable or (2) disregarded because of managers' assessments that those views were not sufficiently convincing to warrant further elevation.

Basically what ensued was some extremely heated discussions between some rather high-ranking officials in the intelligence community over whether or not the information provided by Curveball was accurate. The concerns centered around the fact that as of this point Curveball had not been adequately vetted. By December of 2002, almost two months before Powell's speech the UN, this doubt led to some high-level meetings amongst the intelligence officials to discuss the problem. In an e-mail to several officers of the DO, the group chief stated:

Although no one asked, it is my assessment that Curve Ball had some access to some of this information and was more forthcoming and cooperative when he needed resettlement assistance; now that he does not need it, he is less helpful, possibly because when he was being helpful, he was embellishing, a bit. The [foreign service] ha[s] developed some doubts about him. We have been unable to vet him operationally and know very little about him.

However, her view of the situation lost out. The information was deemed credible enough, despite this lack of verification and the objections of some rather high-ranking individuals.
Biological Warfare Finding 5:

CIA management stood by Curveball's reporting long after post-war investigators in Iraq had established that he was lying about crucial issues.

Furthermore:

A team of Intelligence Community analysts was dispatched to Iraq in early summer 2003 to investigate the details of Iraq's BW program. The analysts were, in particular, investigating two trailers that had been discovered by Coalition forces in April and May 2003, which at the time were thought to be the mobile BW facilities described by Curveball. As the summer wore on, however, at least one WINPAC analyst who had traveled to Iraq, as well as some DIA and INR analysts, became increasingly doubtful that the trailers were BW-related. ³⁸⁷

The investigation also called into question other aspects of Curveball's reporting. According to one WINPAC BW analyst who was involved in the investigations, those individuals whom Curveball had identified as having been involved in the mobile BW program "all consistently denied knowing anything about this project." ³⁸⁸ Furthermore, none of the supposed project designers even knew who Curveball was, which contradicted Curveball's claim that he had been involved with those individuals in developing the mobile BW program. ³⁸⁹

Additional research into Curveball's background in September 2003 revealed further discrepancies in his claims. For example, WINPAC analysts interviewed several of Curveball's supervisors at the government office where he had worked in Iraq. Curveball had claimed that this office had commenced a secret mobile BW program in 1995. But interviews with his supervisors, as well as friends and family members, confirmed that Curveball had been fired from his position in 1995. ³⁹⁰ Moreover, one of Curveball's family members noted that he had been out of Iraq for substantial periods between 1995 and 1999, times during which Curveball had claimed he had been working on BW projects. ³⁹¹ In particular, Curveball claimed to have been present at the site of a BW production run when an accident occurred in 1998, killing 12 workers. ³⁹² But Curveball was not even in Iraq at that time, according to information supplied by family members and later confirmed by travel records. ³⁹³

By the end of October 2003, the WINPAC analysts conducting these investigations reported to the head of the ISG that they believed Curveball was a fabricator and that his reporting was "all false." But other WINPAC analysts, as well as CIA headquarters management, continued to support Curveball. ³⁹⁴ By January 2004, however, when CIA obtained travel records confirming that Curveball had been out of Iraq during the time he claimed to have been working on the mobile BW program, most analysts became convinced that Curveball had fabricated his reporting. ³⁹⁵

What? They're giving up already? Holy Shit! All the evidence was there. He was a liar! And instead of taking our time and making sure that we had it right, we said "Fuck it! We're going in!" And now here we are, over 1500 dead soldiers later, and for what? A fucking green card!

That's all I can take for tonight. Tomorrow night, we'll take a little trip in the Wayback Machine (there it is oldwhitelady) and take a look at what was said after we already knew the information was bullshit and we'll explore why this is still George W. Bush's responsibility.