Flame-grilled whopper

June 19, 2008 | David Steven | More on Europe, Middle East, US politics | 

Remember Curveball? The intelligence ‘source’ who supplied ‘virtually all of the [US] Intelligence Community’s information on Iraq’s alleged mobile biological programs.’

As a refresh, here’s what the US Presidential Commission on intelligence screw-ups made of the episode:

One of the most painful errors… concerned Iraq’s biological weapons. Virtually all of the weapons facilities was supplied by a source, codenamed “Curveball,” who was a fabricator. We discuss at length how Curveball came to play so prominent a role in the Intelligence Community’s biological weapons assessments. It is, at bottom, a story of Defense Department collectors who abdicated their responsibility to vet a critical source; of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analysts who placed undue emphasis on the source’s reporting because the tales he told were consistent with what they already believed; and, ultimately, of Intelligence Community leaders who failed to tell policymakers about Curveball’s flaws in the weeks before war.

Well Curveball - real name Rafid Ahmed Alwan - has just given his first media interview and it turns out that he’s even more of a sad sap than we realised. He’s remained in Germany, from where he is denying everything:

I never said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, never in my whole life. I challenge anyone in the world to get a piece of paper from me, anything with my signature, that proves I said there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

But he seems to have told some fairly obvious lies in his fifty or so meetings with German intelligence (meetings that were used in 100 or more US intelligence reports):

He claimed, for example, that the son of his former boss, Basil Latif, secretly headed a vast weapons of mass destruction procurement and smuggling scheme from England. British investigators found, however, that Latif’s son was a 16-year-old exchange student, not a criminal mastermind.

When a Western intelligence team interviewed Latif outside Iraq in early 2002, a year before the war, he warned that Alwan had been fired for falsifying invoices at work. Latif also denied that anyone produced biological weapons at the plant where he worked with Alwan.

“They thought I was lying,” Latif, who now lives in Oman, said in an interview. “But I was telling the truth. It upset me very much

A serial fraud, who had been fired from numerous jobs, Alwan fled Iraq after a warrant was issued for his arrest for the theft of cameras from his employer. But German intelligence thought he was a good source because he “was understated…the opposite of a braggart, and that was impressive.”

Colleagues at Burger King (purveyor of the Whopper) where Alwan flipped burgers were less easily fooled:

In early 2002, a year before the war, he told co-workers at the Burger King that he spied for Iraqi intelligence and would report any fellow Iraqi worker who criticized Hussein’s regime.

They couldn’t decide if he was dangerous or crazy.

“During breaks, he told stories about what a big man he was in Baghdad,” said Hamza Hamad Rashid, who remembered an odd scene with the pudgy Alwan in his too-tight Burger King uniform praising Hussein in the home of der Whopper. “But he always lied. We never believed anything he said.”

Another Iraqi friend, Ghazwan Adnan, remembers laughing when he applied for a job at a local Princess Garden Chinese Restaurant and discovered Alwan washing dishes in the back while claiming to be “a big deal” in Iraq. “How could America believe such a person?”

My thoughts exactly.

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