The UN speech was supposed to focus mostly on WMD. Weapons of mass destruction programs were, as Colin once put it, in the UN’s “in-box”—in other words, something it was concerned about and responsible for—because Saddam had so consistently ignored United Nations sanctions. The White House staff, however, seemed especially keen on including material about terrorism. In addition to their own piece on WMD, Scooter Libby had provided Powell with a forty-page paper of unknown origin entitled “Iraq’s Dangerous Support for Terror,” which the secretary promptly dismissed. They kept suggesting language so far over the top (for example, suggesting possible Iraqi-9/11 connections) that I finally pulled aside Phil Mudd, the then deputy chief of our Counterterrorism Center, and told him to write the terrorism piece of the speech himself.
“It is highly unusual, hell, it is practically inappropriate,” I told him, for us to write a speech for policy makers. “But if we don’t do it, the White House will cram some crap in here that we will never live down.” Mudd wrote the terrorism portion of the speech, and he did a damn good job of it. Despite some problems, that piece of Powell’s remarks stands up much better today than does the larger portion on Iraq and WMD.
The process of working on the speech was difficult right up to the end. A handful of senior CIA analysts and I went to New York on February 4 along with Powell and his staff and joined them as he continued to refine and rehearse the remarks he planned to give the next day. The one fax machine capable of sending and receiving classified material broke down, and we struggled to get last-minute information from Washington and from Powell’s staff across town. I stayed up until about two o’clock the night before—actually the morning of—the presentation, working on the terrorism portion of the speech. At last, though, we were all able to agree on a text. After all the back-and-forth, we believed we had produced a solid product.
If Colin had any reservations about giving the speech, he did not tell me. Once he had agreed to undertake the mission, he was going to give it his best shot. Late in the process, Colin asked me to sit behind him at the UN. That was about the last place I wanted to be—I had been scheduled to make an overseas trip to the Middle East at the time—but Powell and his deputy, Rich Armitage, were two of my closest colleagues in the administration. If he wanted me there, I was going to be there, even if my presence was more than a little odd for a serving DCI.
Walking into the UN General Assembly on the morning of February 5 was a surreal moment for me. I sat next to John Negroponte, who at the time was the U.S. ambassador to the UN. After Colin finished what I thought was an extraordinary performance, and other council members began to speak, I left the chamber mentally and physically exhausted.
It was a great presentation, but unfortunately the substance didn’t hold up. One by one, the various pillars of the speech, particularly on Iraq’s biological and chemical weapons programs, began to buckle. The secretary of state was subsequently hung out to dry in front of the world, and our nation’s credibility plummeted.
One particularly damning part of the speech is now so notorious that it deserves special attention. The story begins in 1998, when an Iraqi chemical engineer wandered into a German refugee camp. Within a year or so, he had earned his German immigration card by agreeing to cooperate and provide information to the German Federal Intelligence Service, or BND. The Germans gave the man his perversely prescient code name: Curve Ball.
As intelligence services generally do with their spies, the BND kept its engineer under tight wraps, but eventually shared with the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency some of the information he was providing them. Curve Ball alleged that Iraqi scientists had a biological weapons program located in mobile laboratories that could be moved to evade UN weapons inspectors.
Because BND controlled the asset tightly and because DIA had responsibility for intelligence from Iraqi refugees in Germany, CIA was twice removed from the source. It was a situation far from ideal. The Germans would not permit either DIA or CIA to have direct access to Curve Ball. They told us that he did not speak English and that he disliked Americans. (It later turned out that his English was pretty good.) We did have one opportunity to observe him when a German-speaking U.S. doctor evaluated him during a physical. The doctor noted that the man appeared hungover and he expressed doubts about his reliability. Those doubts seem prophetic now, but I must say that if we dismissed everything we heard from sources with drinking problems, some accurate intelligence would be thrown out the window.
I’ve since learned that there were debates between our analysts and our intelligence collectors about the case. Some of the collectors from our Directorate of Operations didn’t like the way the case “felt”—they had a gut instinct that there was something wrong with Curve Ball, but little more to go on. The analysts believed passionately that the science Curve Ball was describing was accurate—too accurate to be dismissed. There was the fine detail of Curve Ball’s reporting—he clearly knew what a mobile lethal-germ lab looked like—and the ever-increasing value of his information as the search for Saddam’s WMD mounted.
On balance, and in the absence of any other red flags from the Germans or DIA, Curve Ball appeared to be an invaluable asset. He wasn’t. As the Silberman-Robb Commission, a presidential panel looking into Iraq intelligence shortcomings, would report in March 2005, sirens should have been going off all over the place. Whether they were or not is a matter of fierce debate.
Jim Pavitt, the then deputy director of operations and head of the clandestine service, instructed Tyler Drumheller, head of the European Division, to ask for a CIA officer to be allowed to have a face-to-face meeting with the engineer. In late September or early October 2002, Drumheller met with his German counterpart over lunch at a Washington restaurant to convey the request, but got nowhere.
Drumheller, whom I always considered to be a capable officer, now says the German told him, “You do not want to see him [Curve Ball] because he’s crazy. Speaking to him would be ‘a waste of time.’” The German reportedly went on to say that his service was not sure whether Curve Ball was telling the truth, that he had serious doubts about Curve Ball’s mental stability and reliability. Curve Ball, he said, may have had a nervous breakdown. Further, the BND representative worried that Curve Ball was “a fabricator.” According to Drumheller’s account, the German cautioned, however, that the BND would publicly and officially deny these views if pressed, because they did not wish to be embarrassed.
If that is true, this is how it should have played out: What the German had to say at that lunch in late September or early October 2002 should have been immediately and formally disseminated as a matter of record in a report that would have alerted intelligence and policy officials to the potential problem with Curve Ball. A second, corresponding formal report also should have been instantly sent across the intelligence and policy communities to analysts and policy makers who had received previous Curve Ball reporting. The transmittal of these two reports would have immediately alerted experts doing the work on Iraq WMD issues across the intelligence community to a problem requiring resolution. No such report was disseminated, nor was the issue ever brought to my attention. In fact, I’ve been told that subsequent investigations have produced not a single piece of paper anywhere at CIA documenting Drumheller’s meeting with the German. The lead analyst on this case in our Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation, and Arms Control Center (WINPAC) insists she was never told about the meeting.
Issuing “burn notices,” as they are called, on questionable sources is how the system is supposed to work. Because this didn’t happen in this instance, we’re forced to rely now on the recollection of individuals as to what may or may not have been said or what did or did not occur.
In his testimony before the Silberman-Robb Commission and in interviews subsequent to publication of the commission’s findings in early April 2005, Drumheller insisted that the news of the German lunch hit Langley like a small bombshell.
In an April 26, 2005,
L.A. Times story, he was even more insistent that word of his meeting with the German had spread broadly through the Agency. He admitted not telling me personally, but he said, “Everyone in the chain of command knew exactly what was happening…. Literally inches and inches of documentation,” including “dozens and dozens of e-mails and memos,” would show that warnings had been sent to John McLaughlin’s office and to WINPAC, and that Curve Ball’s credibility had been seriously questioned in numerous meetings.
Drumheller has told the media in various interviews that he personally went to see John McLaughlin about the time of Colin Powell’s UN speech to express concern about Curve Ball’s information. He has said he doesn’t remember John’s exact response but that it was something to the effect of “Oh my, I hope that’s not true.” John is convinced that this did not happen. I have absolute confidence that had such a meeting taken place, John would have pursued the matter in the meticulous style for which he is well known. He fought steadfastly against White House attempts to stretch the evidence on Iraq–al-Qa’ida ties. He understood the importance being placed on Curve Ball’s information, and he would have battled just as hard to keep Curve Ball’s information out of the Powell speech had someone made the case to him that it posed problems.
If Drumheller or anyone had brought to John McLaughlin or me these doubts about Curve Ball’s credibility, let alone his sanity, we would have gone to great lengths immediately to resolve the matter. Unfortunately, the first either of us learned of Tyler Drumheller’s lunch with the German BND official and of the latter’s supposed warnings—and his refusal to stand publicly behind them—was when we were interviewed by the Silberman-Robb Commission as it prepared its March 2005 report, two years too late to do a damn thing about it. Our senior officer in Germany at the time says Drumheller never apprised him of the luncheon conversation, nor did the Silberman-Robb Commission ever interview him. The German BND representative was asked by CIA officers in 2005 about his 2002 lunch with Drumheller. He denied ever having called Curve Ball a “fabricator” and said he only warned that he was a “single source” whose information the Germans could not independently verify.
A search of CIA records in 2005 revealed that a cable did come in to our headquarters from our rep in Germany on December 20, 2002. The cable went to Drumheller’s office for action. It contained a letter addressed to me from the chief of the BND saying that Curve Ball would not agree to go public himself and that CIA would not be able to debrief him in person. It said that the Germans did not object to the public use of Curve Ball’s information, as long as we protected the source. The letter went on to explain how the Germans had shared his information with at least two other foreign intelligence services and three U.S. intelligence agencies. It said they found his information “plausible” but that they could not independently verify what he was saying.
As far as I can tell, that cable never left Drumheller’s desk in the European Division at Langley. Our senior officer in Berlin was expecting to get a response from me to my German counterpart, because he cabled and e-mailed our headquarters numerous times seeking one. That, too, would be standard protocol. But none was forthcoming. I had never seen the German letter but had simply been told that the German BND had cleared our use of the Curve Ball material.
On January 27, 2003, right before the Powell UN speech, our man in Germany sent another cable, this one expressing his own reservations about the source. He did so because he had received no response to his December 20 cable. Curve Ball’s reporting was problematic, he said, and should be relied on only after “most serious consideration.” This cable, too, went to Drumheller for action. In the three days and nights we sat at headquarters working on the secretary’s speech, nobody ever told us of our senior man in Germany’s reservations or of the letter from the BND chief.
Finally, frustrated at the lack of response to the December 20 cable, on the day of Colin Powell’s UN speech, February 5, 2003, our Berlin rep translated the original letter from the BND chief and sent it, along with the original in German, via diplomatic pouch to headquarters. It arrived on February 26 and was delivered to Drumheller’s European Division. My successor, Porter Goss, asked his staff to run down the Curve Ball story. They found in 2005 that the letter, located in the European Division, had not been formally logged in as received. Despite extensive searching, no records have been found that the letter was sent to either John McLaughlin or me.
Above and beyond the formalities, cables, and letters, though, were a number of critical break points—before, at the outset of, and during the Iraq war—when this information clearly was of vital importance. I did not believe that there could be any doubt among senior CIA officials at the time that the Agency was depending heavily on Curve Ball’s information. Why so many opportunities to sound the alarm were missed is a mystery to me. Powell’s UN speech was one such moment, but there were many others, such as when the National Intelligence Estimate was being written and approved. It was precisely during this time or just shortly afterward when Drumheller presumably had his revelatory lunch with the German. The issue could also have been mentioned when my staff was helping prepare my multiple testimonies before the Senate Intelligence, Foreign Relations, and Armed Services Committees. But it was not.
In May 2003, CIA and DIA issued a report following the discovery of a trailer found in Iraq that closely matched the one described by Curve Ball. We went back to the Germans, again through Drumheller’s division, and had them show Curve Ball a spread of photos of trailers—much as you would display in a criminal lineup. Curve Ball picked out the picture of the trailer we found in Iraq and said, “That’s it.” Even then, neither Drumheller nor anyone else said to John or me, “Stop. This is a fabricator, you cannot rely on him.”
In February of 2004 and in subsequent appearances before the Senate Intelligence Committee in closed session on March 4, 2004, I raised the subject of our concerns about Iraq’s capability to produce biological weapons in the trailers cited by Curve Ball. Every presentation of the “evidence” for such a capability was vetted far and wide through the upper echelons of the Agency. Yet at no time did anyone in the analytic or operational chain of command come forward to tell me of the specific information supposedly imparted by the German BND to the CIA European Division chief in the fall of 2002.
In 2005 Drumheller told the Silberman-Robb Commission that he spoke with me on the telephone around midnight when I was in New York on the eve of Colin Powell’s UN presentation in February 2003. In a Frontline special in 2006, Drumheller claimed that he said, “Boss…there’s a lot of problems with that German reporting, you know that?” And that I replied, “Yeah, don’t worry about it; we’ve got it.” I remember no such midnight call or warning. Drumheller and I did speak very briefly earlier in the evening, but our conversation had nothing to do with Curve Ball; rather it involved getting clearance from the British to use some of their intelligence in the speech. According to a CIA memorandum for the record, in speaking to Senate Intelligence Committee staffers in 2005, Drumheller said that “way too much emphasis” was being placed on the phone call, and when asked if he could confirm that I understood what he was trying to convey in the purported phone call about Curve Ball, he responded, “No, not really.”
Drumheller had dozens of opportunities before and after the Powell speech to raise the alarm with me, yet he failed to do so. A search of my calendar between February 5, 2003, the date of the Powell speech, and July 11, 2004, the date of my stepping down as DCI, shows that Drumheller was in my office twenty-two times. And yet he seems never to have thought that it might be worth telling the boss that he had reason to believe a central pillar in the case against Saddam might have been a mirage.
In fact, it seemed that just the opposite was communicated. In May 27, 2003, the head of the German BND, August Hanning, paid me a visit in Washington. My office received an e-mail from Drumheller’s deputy, with a copy that went to Tyler, recommending that I be sure to thank Hanning for
agreeing to allow us to use the Curve Ball material in our public discussions.
In advance of Hanning’s visit, I received a memo laying out our goals for the session, a matter of course before every meeting with a foreign intelligence official. The memo was signed by Tyler Drumheller. The first page included a list of five suggested talking points to advance our goals. Number three, all in bold, suggests that I:
Thank Dr. Hanning for the Iraqi WMD information provided by the BND asset “Curve Ball.” Inform Dr. Hanning that we would like to work with the BND to craft an approach to Curve Ball to secure his cooperation in locating evidence of Iraq’s biological weapons (BW) programs, and about the direct involvement of Dr. Rihab Taha al-Azzawi in Iraq’s mobile BW program.
If the chief of the European Division believed that it was a mistake for us to use the Curve Ball material and knew that the Germans had warned us off it, why was he asking me to thank the Germans?
The meeting happened, and I presume I used the talking point that was suggested. In any case, Drumheller sat there through that meeting, and a lunch in Hanning’s honor that followed, and never mentioned any concerns.
How can you explain these huge disconnects? Why would good men and women argue behind closed doors about Curve Ball’s reliability, yet not come forward to express their concerns at an appropriate level? I’ve asked myself that question dozens of times. We were under enormous pressure to meet our own standards of excellence and from an administration that was moving toward war. But were we, as an institution, in some sort of meltdown? I don’t believe that for a second.
At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA Page 40