Al-Janabi entered Germany in late 1999 on a tourist visa, and then applied for asylum, claiming that he had embezzled Iraqi government funds and faced imprisonment or death if he returned. Once he was in the German refugee system, he began talking about his work as a chemical engineer, which immediately attracted the attention of the BND. (In his interview with the Guardian, Janabi later claimed that he didn’t mention his work until he was granted asylum in March 2000; the BND says that he actually ceased active cooperation after his asylum was granted in 2001.) He revealed that he had been part of a team that equipped trucks to brew bio-weapons, and named six sites that were already operational. Refusing to talk directly to American intelligence, the newly (and as it turned out, appropriately) code-named Curveball provided reams of material to the BND, enough to furnish ninety-five reports to Langley. There analysts evaluated the information, spy satellites checked out the sites named and drawings of the trucks were prepared. The problem, of course, was that without direct access to Curveball, no one could be absolutely sure that they were interpreting what he said correctly.
Curveball’s information was nowhere near as concrete as its use to back up Powell’s speech would suggest. ‘His information to us was very vague,’ one of his supervisors at the BND told the Los Angeles Times in 2005. ‘He could not say if these things functioned, if they worked… He didn’t know… whether it was anthrax or not. He had nothing to do with actual production of [a biological] agent. He was in the equipment testing phase. And the equipment worked.’ He admitted that he had only personally visited one site, where he said that he understood that there had been an accident in 1998 — the source of the alleged ‘eye witness’ account referred to by Powell.
Why was he taken seriously? Curveball’s information tallied with what the CIA analysts had anticipated, and, worse, seemed to be backed up by other information. When those sources were discredited, Curveball wasn’t immediately disregarded. Warnings were sent by MI6 and the BND to Washington regarding Curveball’s credibility. ‘Elements of his behaviour strike us as typical of individuals we would normally assess as fabricators,’ MI6 noted in April 2002. But by September 2002, DCI George Tenet was reporting that they had ‘a credible defector who worked in the programme’ for biochemical weapons. Despite the reservations of some within the CIA (which Tenet later vehemently denied being aware of), Curveball’s information and drawings were included in Powell’s speech — although, as was pointed out at the time by one congressional staffer, ‘a drawing isn’t evidence — it’s hearsay’. The BND assumed that the CIA had other sources to corroborate Curveball’s story, but it became clear that his testimony was the lynchpin around which the case was built.
Despite massive searches by the UN Inspectors and the Iraqis themselves, no trace of the trucks that Curveball talked about could be found in the weeks between Powell’s speech and the invasion. Hans Blix, the chief inspector, told the Security Council on 7 March 2003 that they had found ‘no evidence’, but of course many simply thought that meant Saddam had hidden it, as he purportedly had with his other WMDs.
The aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, and the subsequent discovery that Saddam did not have WMDs, continues to affect intelligence agencies and governments, with further official inquiries on-going. One aspect that became crystal clear, though, was that Curveball had lied. His family said that he had no problem with Americans; he had come near the bottom of his engineering class, not top as he had claimed. He was a trainee engineer, not the project manager that the CIA had made him out to be. Worst of all, he had been fired in 1995 — three years before the supposed accident, and just at the time when he claimed he started work on the WMD transports. A year after the invasion, the CIA was finally allowed access to Curveball directly, and took his story apart piece by piece.
Despite this, al-Janabi tried to stick to his guns, until he finally admitted the truth to the Guardian in February 2011, although he maintained that he only had sketchy dealings with the BND. In response, George Tenet posted a statement to his website noting that ‘the latest reporting of the subject repeats and amplifies a great deal of misinformation about the case’. Amidst his further attempts at self-justification, he did make one key point: ‘The handling of this matter is certainly a textbook case of how not to deal with defector provided material.’ Few would disagree.
The perceived intelligence failures both prior to 9/11 and in the build-up to the war in Iraq led to one of the biggest shake-ups of the American intelligence community in half a century — or, at least, it should have done. The aim of the various reforms was to create an intelligence community fit for purpose in the twenty-first century. According to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s (ODNI) website:
The United States Intelligence Community must constantly strive for and exhibit three characteristics essential to our effectiveness. The IC must be integrated: a team making the whole greater than the sum of its parts. We must also be agile: an enterprise with an adaptive, diverse, continually learning, and mission-driven intelligence workforce that embraces innovation and takes initiative. Moreover, the IC must exemplify America’s values: operating under the rule of law, consistent with Americans’ expectations for protection of privacy and civil liberties, respectful of human rights, and in a manner that retains the trust of the American people.
DCI George Tenet resigned unexpectedly, stepping down from the CIA in July 2004, shortly before the release of the report by the 9/11 Commission. This recommended the establishment of a National Intelligence Director who would not only take responsibility for the safety of the United States, but also have effective powers to control the seventeen different intelligence agencies. This didn’t go down well with the government, or the various agencies that would be affected, and what many regarded as a typical Washington fudge and compromise ensued. Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, in particular, didn’t want the Pentagon’s various intelligence agencies answerable to the Director of National Intelligence (DNI); the FBI wanted to keep their autonomy. At the time, historian and journalist Fred Kaplan described the final bill as ‘not reform in any meaningful sense. There will be a director of national intelligence. But the post will likely be a figurehead, at best someone like the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, at worst a thin new layer of bureaucracy, and in any case nothing like the locus of decision-making and responsibility that the 9/11 commission had in mind.’
Tenet’s successor at the CIA was Porter Goss, who would be the last CIA chief to act as head of the intelligence community; one of the many clauses of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act prevented a DNI from serving as head of the CIA or any other agency at the same time. The first DNI, appointed in 2005, was former US Ambassador to the UN and Iraq, John D. Negroponte; his successor in 2007 Admiral Michael McConnell also served for two years. Neither really was in a position to force through the changes that were needed within the intelligence community. By the end of November 2008, even the DNI’s own Inspector General noted that the office was not providing effective leadership, which was ‘undermining ODNI’s credibility and fuelling assertions that the ODNI is just another layer of bureaucracy’.