The New Spymasters Read online

  To criticize Bob Drogin for his mistakes was to miss the point. Without his original scoop, published in the Los Angeles Times, which had alerted the world to the con, we might never have heard of Curveball at all. What mattered was not so much the literary techniques he used to tell his story, but more – as Drogin himself suggested in an interview – that the full truth about events in intelligence rarely emerges at the first telling. I asked Drogin if, in an account of intelligence failures, there was ‘an irony in the literary approach where you fill in the blanks’. He said he did not see it that way. ‘I never, ever expected that my book would be the last word: unthinkable.’ He pointed to the example of Agent Zigzag, the British wartime double agent whose story took seventy-five years to emerge. There were errors too, he said, in the best-seller Black Hawk Down by Mark Bowden, which missed bin Laden’s role in training the men who shot down the helicopter, he said.

  When he was researching the book, the civil war in Iraq was at its worst and no spy had yet confessed to their role in the US invasion that started the conflict. ‘I was trying to unravel a story that involved a congenital liar. It involved intelligence agencies that lie as a part of their mission, politicians that had no reason to be honest about what happened, and documents that, even if I got access to them, would be wrong.’

  Drogin agreed that his account’s biggest gap was the ‘criminal’ way Curveball was handled by German intelligence. Because where his imaginative sections had misled was in conjuring the idea of a con man that had defeated the efforts of sharp interrogators led by a handler ‘fluent in the pitiless vernacular of spying’. And it is at that ground level, not in some Washington intrigue, where the lie was born.

  * * *

  It has long been a widely held view that the Iraq intelligence failure was the result of a plot in Washington and London to embellish the case for a war that President Bush and Prime Minister Blair were determined to fight regardless. In this view, the overall case that Saddam Hussein had been hiding weapons of mass destruction was a fabrication, woven together by systematically exaggerating the accounts of agents like Curveball. ‘It wasn’t intelligence, it was propaganda,’ said Karen Kwiatkowski, a retired lieutenant-colonel who, at the time of the Iraq War, was a Pentagon analyst. ‘They’d take a little bit of intelligence, cherry-pick it, make it sound much more exciting, usually by taking it out of context, often by juxtaposition of two pieces of information that don’t belong together.’4 In the US, this plot to cow the intelligence establishment was said to have been directed by Vice-President Dick Cheney, whom The Economist had already labelled – before he took office – ‘the power behind the throne’.5 Britain’s famously cautious spymasters were, in turn, said to have been bullied into submission by Blair’s own Cardinal Richelieu, his press secretary, Alastair Campbell. BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan quoted inside sources who claimed that the intelligence dossier about weapons of mass destruction made public by Britain had been ‘sexed-up’. A headline in a newspaper article by Gilligan read: ‘I asked my intelligence source why Blair misled us all over Saddam’s WMD. His response? One word … CAMPBELL.’6 (In their defence, both Cheney and Campbell denied distorting any facts, but defended their right and duty, as senior officials, to pose challenging questions to intelligence agencies and hold them to account, when appropriate.)

  The extent of intelligence manipulation became plain, said critics, in the infamous ‘Downing Street memo’, marked ‘UK Eyes Only’, which was written on 23 July 2002 by Tony Blair’s private secretary, Matthew Rycroft. It was a record of a meeting chaired by Blair and in it Rycroft wrote, ‘This record is extremely sensitive. No further copies should be made. It should be shown only to those with a genuine need to know its contents.’ He then went on to quote ‘C’, as Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of SIS, was known: ‘C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.’

  Dearlove later corrected Rycroft’s minutes at the time of the memo’s circulation. He asked Rycroft to remove the phrase about fixing intelligence. But to many Dearlove had – wittingly or not – confirmed the broader picture. By rallying convenient facts and half-truths, the senior leadership of the American intelligence apparatus had become stooges for Cheney and his boss, Bush, sacrificing their integrity to persuade a gullible public to accept the war they were determined to launch, regardless.

  The official WMD Commission reached a softer, though also damning, conclusion. It alleged that the secret services were reckless with the truth. For instance, on biological weapons, the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), which had given Curveball his code name and handled his intelligence, had ‘abdicated responsibility’ to vet a crucial source, they said. The CIA’s analysts, meanwhile, had emphasized what Curveball reported over and above other intelligence because the tales he told ‘were consistent with what they already believed’. Intelligence chiefs were also faulted for failing ‘to tell policymakers about Curveball’s flaws in the weeks before war’.7

  As first recounted by Drogin, the CIA’s senior leadership were so complicit in the false narrative that they ignored specific warnings that Curveball was a fake, including the concerns raised by Tyler Drumheller, the CIA operations chief for Europe, whose job it was to liaise with German intelligence. Drumheller recalled that on the night before Colin Powell gave his UN speech, he warned CIA director George Tenet by telephone that the Germans had misgivings about their own source. (Tenet denied receiving such a warning.) Drumheller mentioned a lunch in Washington with the BND chief, who told him that Curveball was probably mad, a warning he said that he circulated to CIA directors. He had also passed on to Tenet a warning letter about Curveball from August Hanning, then chief of the BND. In a contradictory account, Tenet said he never saw the letter and only found out two years after the war – ‘too late to do a damn thing about it’ – that Germany had had doubts about his source.8

  Those critics who cite the Downing Street memo or Drumheller’s evidence are implying that intelligence chiefs on both sides of the Atlantic played politics and deliberately pushed intelligence they knew was based on shaky foundations – if not downright false. It had all been a conspiracy against the public. But were things that simple? It is true that intelligence was presented to the world without essential qualification. As the official British report on Iraq intelligence said, the ‘caveats on the intelligence were dropped’.9 Both the politicians and the spy chiefs resorted to exaggeration and redaction, ignoring doubts. This misinformation helped cause a war. Yet to judge this as a deliberate plot to mislead is to commit the same error that Blair and Bush made, which was to ignore the full picture and erase the caveats. Critics of the secret service leadership were trying to see a very grey world in black and white. (And there were sensible people inside the CIA who disagreed with Drumheller’s version of events; some had honestly believed in Curveball and other parts of the intelligence case.)

  The really disturbing thing was not the spinning of evidence or the imagined conspiracy, but rather that the intelligence itself was wrong. And moreover, while in Britain and America there were some dissidents inside the intelligence services, most insiders believed that wrong intelligence (just as there are leading critics of the Iraq War inside the CIA who reject Drumheller’s account and defend Tenet’s honesty, if not his judgement). Lies had found their way into the system and been swallowed whole. And that made the very machinery of spying smell rotten. In SIS, staff felt it as keenly as the discovery of Philby’s betrayal, recalled Gordon Corera, BBC security correspondent. ‘One by one [SIS’s] prized sources were melting away like mirages in the desert heat,’ he wrote, and panic consumed Vauxhall Cross.10

  To find out what lay behind this debacle, it is worth going back to that key source, the human agent in Germany, and witne
ssing the birth of the lie. Let’s try to tell his story again.

  * * *

  Rafid Ahmed Alwan, an Iraqi of the Janabi tribe, was born in 1967 in the capital city, Baghdad. In 1999, he left his country for unknown reasons; some have suggested that he had been accused of petty fraud. He travelled to Jordan, Egypt, Morocco and then France. Just after Christmas, he drove across the German border and headed towards Nuremberg in Bavaria. His destination was in the city suburbs, the Zirndorf processing camp for those who wished to claim political asylum in Germany. He considered the barracks an unpleasant sort of place, a form of house arrest, but Zirndorf was a compulsory first stop.

  The word among the inmates at the camp was that, to speed up asylum applications, it was worth visiting a German intelligence office behind the refugee centre. Here, it was said, they sifted the applications for people who might know useful things. This was the Zirndorf branch of the Central Office for Questioning, a subdivision of the BND.11 In early 2000, Alwan walked in to tell his story. He outlined his background: he had studied chemical engineering at Baghdad Technical University; during military service he was posted to Saddam Hussein’s weapons research programme, the Military Industrialization Commission; then he had worked at the Chemical Engineering and Design Centre (CEDC) in Baghdad on equipment to process seeds and biological agents.

  When this information was passed on, the BND found Alwan’s background tantalizing. It was of particular interest to a team of weapons experts at the spy agency’s pre-unification headquarters in Pullach, five miles south of central Munich. Given his potential value, Alwan was whisked out of Zirndorf and into his own flat, and was then subjected to months of interrogation by a specialist analyst, Dr Peter. The officer completed over a hundred debriefing reports, more than ninety-five of which made their way to the United States.12 None were written after 2001.

  Alwan would later tell the Guardian that he already had a plan in mind by then. He wanted to use these meetings to undermine the Iraqi regime; he decided to fool the world. ‘I had a problem with the Saddam regime,’ he said. ‘I wanted to get rid of him and now I had this chance.’13 And what a tale he spun. He told interrogators that he had worked at the CEDC until 1998 and that, while there, he had seen a plan to make mobile laboratories that could make germ weapons like anthrax and smallpox. He said he had witnessed an accident there in which many died, with the victims having to be buried in lead coffins.

  In truth, Alwan could not have witnessed any of it as he had been sacked from the CEDC four years earlier. Nevertheless, this same false story was repeated three years later, on 5 February 2003, in a speech by the hapless US secretary of state, Colin Powell, to the UN. By then it had been months since Curveball’s last interrogation. When Powell spoke, Alwan – aka Curveball – was taking casual jobs, washing dishes in a Chinese restaurant and frying hamburgers at Burger King.

  With German foreign minister Fischer in the chair, Powell offered the Security Council what he called a glimpse inside the US intelligence file on Iraq. ‘We have first-hand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails,’ he claimed, going on:

  The trucks and train cars are easily moved and are designed to evade detection by inspectors. In a matter of months, they can produce a quantity of biological poison equal to the entire amount that Iraq claimed to have produced in the years prior to the Gulf War …

  The source was an eye witness, an Iraqi chemical engineer who supervised one of these facilities. He actually was present during biological agent production runs. He was also at the site when an accident occurred in 1998. Twelve technicians died from exposure to biological agents.

  He reported that when UNSCOM [the UN inspection mission for Iraq from 1991 to 1999] was in the country and inspecting, the biological weapons agent production always began on Thursdays at midnight because Iraq thought UNSCOM would not inspect on the Muslim Holy Day, Thursday night through Friday. He added that this was important because the units could not be broken down in the middle of a production run, which had to be completed by Friday evening before the inspectors might arrive again.

  This defector is currently hiding in another country with the certain knowledge that Saddam Hussein will kill him if he finds him.14

  This was all from Germany, from just one source: Curveball. As the defector would confess eight years later, it was a total lie; he made it up. ‘I had the chance to fabricate something to topple the regime,’ he said in 2011. ‘I and my sons are proud of that, and we are proud that we were the reason to give Iraq the margin of democracy.’15 (It was not clear what he meant exactly by ‘the margin’.)

  He said the same to the BBC. When a reporter put it to him, ‘The fact is we went to war in Iraq on a lie and that lie was your lie,’ Curveball replied, ‘Yes,’ with a smirk.16

  But the account still feels too naive, like another fabrication. If we check the details again, Alwan arrived in December 1999, when Saddam Hussein was at the height of his powers. There were no drumbeats for war just yet. Alwan might have wanted to exaggerate his story to get a German passport, or even just a residence permit. But was he really clever enough to have come up with such a grandiose plan to overthrow the regime and confident enough to invent an account that could withstand scrutiny? He had a record as a petty criminal, but he had never been a political opponent of the regime.

  And can we be sure that all of what he said was entirely wrong? Had he really made it all up? It is too easy to swing from one extreme to another. Reducing the story to spy-as-fabricator is just as lazy as blaming politician-as-fabricator.

  * * *

  I wanted to explore these contradictions with the man himself, Rafid Alwan. In the decade after the Iraq War, he had been exposed, tracked down and, after first denying that he had told any lies, had finally ‘confessed’ to his fabrications.

  As I asked around for his contact details, fellow journalists told me that he had been paid handsomely for his various interviews. He had a reputation for being difficult. And indeed, when I finally got to see him, in the autumn of 2013, he once again had something to sell, this time memoirs of his life as a spy. He was looking for a ghostwriter or co-author.

  We met, amid the warning bells of the street trams, in the southern German city of Karlsruhe, where he had been resettled by the BND. A stocky figure in blue jeans, he had a round face, a twinkling smile and a warm handshake. We walked to a nearby coffee shop.

  I had been waiting around for the meeting for a few hours. He had not returned my calls. But while I explored the area, he had already been to my hotel to look for me and managed to have a row with an unhelpful hotel receptionist. ‘She was racist,’ he said.

  Alwan knew about my previous book on the CIA. I gave him a signed copy of the German edition. Now he wanted to know whether I would be interested in helping him tell his story. He already had a draft in Arabic that he wanted me to read and plenty of supporting documents I could see at his lawyer’s office. They revealed a lot about the way the BND operated, including the false companies they had set up and how they had cheated him, he said.

  I asked Alwan what it was he wanted from his book. Speaking in good English, he said he wanted to correct the record, to challenge the lies written about him. It seemed a little ironic. Alwan said he never lied in order to support an asylum claim. ‘I had received asylum before I started talking. I can prove it.’ He said that, contrary to reports, he and his family had a long history of working against Saddam Hussein (he mentioned one of the opposition parties). He had a motive to help bring about Saddam’s toppling. When I asked him more about this, he said it would have to wait. He did not want to give me anything for my book: he was afraid of losing his best lines.

  I had come a long way for this meeting, but it was a huge anticlimax and did not last long. The reason he was late, he said, was that his daughter had suddenly been taken ill and was in hospital. He had to rush off to see her in intensive care. We agreed to meet the next day.

  * * *
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  We all know that spies make up stories. But not all fabricated evidence is completely false. Just because we know Curveball told some lies, it does not follow that he made up everything. Moreover, not all lies or even exaggerations are deliberate; it is possible that he believed everything he said. Falsehoods like that are particularly hard to spot.

  There were plenty of con men along the road to war. In Italy, a forger concocted ‘proof’ that Saddam had tried to buy uranium from Niger; the evidence was a series of letters originating in the Nigerian Embassy in Rome. Although they were identified as forgeries by the French intelligence services and others, they still made their way into George Bush’s State of the Union address in 2002. But the Curveball story was more complex than a straight forgery. If it was true that people could behave honestly but still, through their actions, manage to create a fabrication, the implications were very disturbing for the spy game.

  * * *

  A few weeks before my meeting with Alwan, I was in a café in Germany chatting with John Goetz, the reporter in Germany who has done more than anyone to uncover the truth of this case. After Curveball’s real name was published by CBS News, it was Goetz who was the first to track him down. Their handshake on the doorstep was the moment that Alwan knew his cover was blown. Now Goetz and I were on our way to talk to some of those involved from German intelligence.

  Over the years, Goetz had tracked down most of the key figures in the case. His working theory was that the fabrication was not so much created by Curveball but encouraged by the way he was handled. As a German saying puts it, ‘A hammer is always looking for nails.’ In his view, both Curveball and his handler, the BND officer and biologist Dr Peter, who was always looking for biological weapons, were to blame. We had been told, ‘Dr Peter was for a long time the only person that Curveball had in his life.’ Alwan himself would later underline that point. ‘The central thing in my story is —’ he said, using the BND scientist’s real name.