Who is Curveball?
Curveball is an Iraqi engineer, a very low-level engineer, who defected to Germany in 1999 and was plucked out of a refugee line. He was in an asylum camp. And he began to spin a rather fantastic story. They interviewed him and interrogated him through most of 2000 and 2001. And his story was unconfirmed and unverified. He was never vetted in the sense of people going to Baghdad and tracking down to see whether his background was what he claimed it to be — because under those conditions it was impossible to do. But after 9/11 his story suddenly was literally plucked out of a safe at the CIA, and within weeks the official CIA analysis of Saddam’s threat from biological weapons changed quite dramatically. This is in 2001. And by the time we get to the fall of 2002 and the real run-up to the war, his information is so dominant at the CIA that they virtually hang all of the biological weapons information on him, despite the fact that they had never met him and didn’t even know his name. A
