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It turns out that only one U.S. analyst had met with the now-completely-discredited Curveball, the source of that fabrication. In a last-ditch attempt to warn his superiors the day before Powell's UN speech, this analyst wrote an e-mail to the deputy director of CIA's Task Force on WMD raising strong doubt regarding Curveball's reliability.
I personally became almost physically ill reading the cynical response from the deputy director of the CIA Task Force, but it is a sign of the mood among CIA's malleable managers at the time.
The deputy director replied: "As I said last night, let's keep in mind the fact that this war's going to happen regardless of what Curveball said or didn't say, and the powers that be probably aren't terribly interested in whether Curveball knows what he's talking about." (That e-mail message and similar material were released in July 2004 by Sen. Dianne Feinstein of the Senate Intelligence Committee.)
Tyler Drumheller, then chief of the European Division of CIA's Directorate of operations, called Tenet the evening before Powell's UN testimony, appalled when he found out that Powell intended to include Curveball's information in his speech, but also was brushed aside by Tenet.
And so, Powell ended up telling the UN Security Council, and the world, that the alleged germ-producing vehicles were "one of the most worrisome things that emerges from the thick intelligence file we have on Iraq."
Was Powell lying? On Curveball, at least, I am inclined to think that Powell was taken in by the shysters at CIA's top level, though you could argue that an experienced old hand like Powell should have known better. He might well have concluded, like the CIA Task Force deputy director, that Bush had long ago made up his mind about invading Iraq and that only a fool would stand in the way.
"Made an Honest Man of Me"
In former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan's memoir, Interventions: A Life in War and Peace, published last year, Annan reports that several weeks after the March 2003 invasion of Iraq -- and the embarrassing failure to discover WMD -- Powell visited the UN to privately exult with Annan over initial reports that U.S. forces believed they finally had found something in Iraq, those mobile weapons laboratories.
"Kofi, they've made an honest man of me," Powell declared, according to an excerpt from the book.
Writing about Powell's demeanor, Annan noted that "The relief -- and the exhaustion -- was palpable. I could not help but smile along with my friend, and wanted to share in his comfort," even though Annan remained dubious. "I could only be impressed by the resilience of this man, who had endured so much to argue for a war he clearly did not believe in."
On May 29, 2003, President Bush, while visiting Poland, also jumped at the prospect that his WMD claims had been vindicated. He declared on Polish TV, "We have found the weapons of mass destruction."
But these supposed mobile weapons labs turned out to be more sham dunk. Under mounting pressure to point to some WMD proof in Iraq, CIA analysts misrepresented a tractor-trailer outfitted to inflate balloons used for artillery as one of the promised mobile bio-labs.
On May 28, 2003, CIA analysts had cooked up a fraudulent six-page report claiming that the trailer was proof that they had been right about Iraq's "bio-weapons labs" after all. They then performed what we Army officers used to call a "night-time requisition," getting the only Defense Intelligence Agency analyst sympathetic to their position to provide DIA "coordination," to make the discovery look more legit.
When the State Department's intelligence analysts learned of this subterfuge, they "went ballistic," according to their Director, Carl Ford. It fell to Ford to tell Powell there was a serious problem -- that the President had been misinformed and that no bio weapons lab had been found.
When Tenet learned that Ford would not be part of the team -- that he would not become one of the links in the chain -- the CIA director called Ford on the carpet, literally, the following day. No shrinking violet, Ford held his ground at CIA headquarters, telling Tenet and McLaughlin, "That report is one of the worst intelligence assessments I've ever read."
This vignette -- and several like it -- are found in Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War by Michael Isikoff and David Corn, who say Ford was still angry over the fraudulent paper years later. Indeed, Ford told the book's authors that Tenet and McLaughlin had taken a personal hand in this abortive attempt to salvage some credibility for the notorious Curveball.
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