Michael de Laine

By Michael de Laine, Copenhagen, 17 November 2008

Denmark’s reasons for joining the US-led coalition in the invasion of and war with Iraq in March 2003 are “silly” and “a tautology”, says the American author of a book telling the story behind the invasion told the Copenhagen Voice.

If weapons of mass destruction were not the reason for going to war, why did Denmark support UN Security Council resolutions requiring Saddam Hussein to co-operate with inspectors looking for the weapons?

In ‘Curveball – Spies, Lies and the Con Man who Caused a War’, a book published last year in the US, one of the leading journalists in the United States, Bob Drogin, relates the story of an Iraqi chemical engineer wanting asylum in Germany, who duped the world’s leading intelligence agencies and national leaders into war against Iraq.

Formerly the national security correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, Drogin visited Denmark in connection with the launch of the Danish translation of his book. He spoke with Michael de Laine and the Copenhagen Voice, where the videoed interview can be seen.

The story is one of the most remarkable and strangest narratives of recent years.

Using his security and intelligence community sources, Drogin tried to piece together the truth about the lies and self-deception that led the US, Britain, Denmark and several other nations into a military and political nightmare in Iraq – a situation that might be resolved early in US President Elect Barack Obama’s term of office.

In 1999, a mysterious young Iraqi chemical engineer applied for political asylum in Munich. Offering compelling testimony of Saddam Hussein’s secret programme to build weapons of mass destruction, the Iraqi claimed during questioning in 2000 and 2001 that Saddam had constructed germ factories on trucks, creating a deadly hell on wheels. His grateful German hosts passed his account to their CIA counterparts but denied the Americans access to their superstar informant.

The Americans gave the defector his unforgettable code name: Curveball.

The case lay dormant until after 9/11, when the Bush administration turned its attention to Iraq. Determined to invade, Bush’s people seized on Curveball’s story about mobile germ labs – even though it had begun to fall apart.

Ignoring a flood of warnings about the informant’s credibility, the CIA allowed President Bush to cite Curveball’s unconfirmed claims in a State of the Union speech. The Iraqi engineer’s information became the focal point of Bush’s statement. Finally, Secretary of State Colin Powell highlighted the Iraqi’s “eyewitness” account during his historic address to the UN Security Council.

Yet everything was based on a fraud. America’s vast intelligence apparatus conjured up demons that did not exist. And the proof was clear before the war.

Drogin said that the situation up to the invasion was characterised by the most difficult task of all: proving that nothing exists.

“One of the problems in this case is that it is impossible to prove a negative,” Drogin told the Copenhagen Voice. “There was no-one, I repeat: no-one, except the Iraqis, who were saying they had no weapons of mass destruction. Hans Blix, head of the UN weapons inspectors, said we haven’t found them, that’s not saying we don’t believe he has them; he said the inspectors needed more time to cover the outstanding issues. ElBaradei, of the International Atomic Energy Agency, came closer on the nuclear programme.”

Saddam was saying that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, while intelligence agencies and so on said he had – and then Curveball entered the picture.

By making up a story containing a grain of truth, that German companies were involved, Curveball was able to dupe the German intelligence service (BND) for some time. (Weapons inspectors later found German equipment on trailers, but not trucks, which were not used in any way as weapons of mass destruction.)

The Germans passed on the information to the American intelligence community; but bad relations between the BND and the Americans led the Germans to refuse the CIA access to the Iraqi. And while the BND slowly realised that the Iraqi’s story was a concoction, it failed to admit this in broader circles. The CIA equipped Secretary of State Colin Powell with information for a speech to the UN Security Council.

That the intelligence communities trusted Curveball is a classic example of the situation that you hear want you want to hear and therefore you switch off all critical thought, is Drogin’s brief explanation.

“Although this information was never confirmed and his background was never checked,” Drogin said, “the information met the preconceptions of the US intelligence people who were trying to study the situation about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. It was given greater and greater credence as it moved from agency to agency, from Arabic to German to English, from analyst to analyst and became more and more frightening, especially after the September 11 attacks it was viewed as a terrifying story.”

Drogin adds the President Clinton bombed Iraq for four days in December 1998 on the belief that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, but he didn’t go to war. “After 9/11 the Bush administration reviewed the same assessments, but on a new background.”

Bob Drogin does not subscribe to any conspiracy theory, for instance that George W Bush was trying to right the image of his father, who felt humiliation after the 1991 war, or that Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld wanted to finish off the job that felt they were prevented from doing in the previous invasion.

The American journalist simply states that the people who left Saddam in power in 1991 - Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld - this time around were determined to get rid of him.

“Saddam clearly misunderstood that,” Drogin said. “In the interrogations of Saddam, he said he believed he had been left in power in 1991 because, in his view, the Americans viewed him as a bulwark to check the power of the Iranians. Saddam believed they would do it again. He miscalculated how Washington had changed, particularly after 9/11.”

Among his comments, Drogin called the Danish explanation for its participation in the coalition war on Iraq ‘silly’ and ‘a tautology’.

Efforts to investigate the foundation for Denmark’s participation in the coalition have so far been rejected by Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen. He says that the weapons of mass destruction were not the reason Denmark went to war – the reason was Saddam Hussein’s failure to comply with UN resolutions to allow the weapons inspectors to work in the country.

“I don’t know enough about the Danish situation,” Drogin said to the Copenhagen Voice. “In general, to say that you didn’t go to war because of the weapons of mass destruction, but you went to war on the Security Council resolutions is silly. All the Security Council resolutions were about weapons of mass destruction. The whole point was trying to get Saddam to disarm, to comply with the promises he had made after the ceasefire in 1991. If they didn’t believe he had weapons programmes after 1991, none of those other resolutions would have been passed. It’s a tautology to say you don’t believe he had weapons of mass destruction but want to enforce the resolutions - why do you support the resolutions if you don’t believe he had the weapons?”

It was a comment by CIA boss George Tenet in a speech in February 2004, that the CIA did not have direct access to the source, which caught Drogin’s attention and sparked a stream of Curveball-related news articles in the Los Angeles Times and then Drogin’s book.

In Curveball, Bob Drogin does not deal with the political aspects, judgements or misjudgements that led to war, nor with the purported Al-Qaeda and 9/11 link with Iraq. We have to wait for a similarly thorough analysis of those points.

Curveball – Spies, Lies and the Con Man who Caused a War, by Bob Drogin. Published in the US by Random House, October 2007; ISBN 978-1-4000-6583-7 (1-4000-6583-6)

Danish translation published in Denmark by Jyllands-Postens Forlagshuset, November 2008; ISBN: 9788776922047