The New Spymasters Read online

  Goetz says that even after the Iraq War many in German intelligence continued to believe Curveball’s story: ‘I spoke to everyone involved. They believed in him … Even two years after the war, even after they had scoured Iraq and found nothing, even then they still believed Curveball.’ Goetz was told this in 2005 by the men who had worked the case.

  He remembers sitting down with one expert at the BND and showing him all the Senate and Iraq Survey Group reports that indicated that what Curveball had said couldn’t be true. But his source was dubious. At the BND, ‘they always believed in him … in a kind of stare-you-in-the-eye way’.

  Goetz had talked for years about how it was that people ended up believing incredible things, despite all the contradictory facts before them. It was one of the things that made us despair about our profession of fact-finding. You could amass fact after fact, but people would not draw the obvious conclusions.

  We talked about an interview with a former CIA station chief called Jim. He was discussing recruitment pitches taught at Camp Peary, the CIA training school in Virginia known as the Farm. Trainee spymasters were told to analyse the ‘target’ and then guess what motive could be exploited to persuade him to become an agent and betray his country or employer. ‘That’s all bullshit,’ Jim had said. ‘It never actually works like that. The key thing is to get the guy to betray something, to cross the line. He will work out his own justification.’ A carefully nurtured recruitment was often based on an unspoken understanding. Human beings had incredible ways of inventing rational excuses for what they did or were going to do, he said.

  Perhaps we were heading too far into Sigmund Freud and psychological territory. Jim’s point was that fathoming motives, and discussing those motives with the target, could sometimes be not only counterproductive but also irrelevant to what people ended up doing. Persuasion came through habit as much as logic, and human beings were indeed incredibly suggestible.

  Applying Jim’s explanations of recruitment to the art of interrogation and analysis, it was obvious that the logic could be reversed and help to explain how an agent might, in effect, recruit his interrogator (or indirectly those analysts who read his statements). Just as a recruiter might slowly lead his potential agent towards a betrayal, so an agent might, little by little, establish confidence before planting the lie. Then, just as an agent might invent reasons to justify the act of betrayal, so a recruiter might invent logic to validate what the agent was saying, whether the agent’s information really made sense or not. The recruiter could become an instrument for the lie, helping to paper over every inconsistency. All this could take place subconsciously. The more an interrogator developed empathy for his subject, the more chance there was he himself would, quite honestly, invent rationales to explain away what seemed awry about his subject’s account.

  Our working theory about Curveball and Dr Peter rested on the notion of suggestion, that Curveball had provided what Germany’s intelligence service had made clear they needed. It was not deliberate coaching; just the psychology of the agency’s relationship with him. One reason for thinking this was the amount of accurate information Curveball had provided. A problem with accepting the consensus view that Curveball’s story was pure fabrication lay with how much Curveball had got right, about both Iraqi facilities and the production of bio-weapons. How could he have known all this detail? Drogin resolved that paradox by suggesting that Curveball gathered facts by hooking himself up to the Internet.

  ‘That was a mistake,’ said Goetz. His research showed that Alwan had no Internet connection back then.

  Nevertheless, Curveball was getting his information from somewhere. One idea was that he was simply phoning ex-colleagues and friends in Iraq, in effect running what are called ‘sub-sources’. Alwan himself would later say that he was able to make up his story using textbooks and documents supplied by Dr Peter. ‘I did not have the Internet but I had a computer. I still have all the documents I used for writing my material,’ he added.

  But there was another potential source. What if the interrogator was sufficiently gullible and naive and insufficiently self-aware not to realize how many ideas and pieces of technical information he was passing to Curveball?

  The surprising thing was that Alwan had seen Dr Peter before he left Iraq, when the German scientist had worked as a UN weapons inspector and visited Alwan’s workplace. When Alwan was being interrogated, he recalled, ‘it took me some time but I recognized him after a while. I realized he had come and seen us. It was in 1992 when I was working in the Military Industrialization Commission. When I saw him in Germany, he introduced himself as an asylum officer. He admitted later he had been a weapons inspector. I had said to him, “I know who you are.”’ He said Dr Peter showed him nothing but kindness, but ‘he was not professional’. When I asked if he manipulated Dr Peter, Alwan just smiled.

  * * *

  Our car tyres scrunched into the gravel driveway of a suburban house. Goetz and I were coming to see a source in German intelligence who was deeply involved in the Curveball saga. What he, and several others directly involved, revealed was just how much it had really been a personal story between the agent and his handler. The details – largely unearthed by Goetz – have never been told before.

  It was Dr Peter who spotted Curveball’s interesting CV, with its mention of ‘mobile bio-chemical labs’, among the pile of asylum applications from Zirndorf. And it was he who conducted all the interviews. (Dr Peter himself declined to be interviewed, citing his professional obligation of secrecy.)

  Dr Peter was not a trained agent handler, or even a case officer. He was a biologist. In theory, Curveball had a professional case officer – one of the agent runners from the BND’s Abteilung I (Department I). They organized Curveball’s accommodation, they ferried him to and from meetings, but none of them became close to Curveball. It was Dr Peter who handled the debriefing sessions and wrote up reports of them. The professionals had abdicated from their job.

  Dr Peter’s passionate interest was biological weapons, the source said. Apart from serving as an international inspector in Iraq, he had monitored Iraq’s interest in germ warfare since the 1980s. According to the source, before Dr Peter had discovered Curveball, ‘he already suspected that Saddam was still working on biological weapons – particularly smallpox’. Then along came Curveball and appeared to confirm these suspicions.

  ‘Curveball was always about smallpox,’ Dr Peter used to tell people. ‘This guy has real information and he is not clever enough to make it up himself.’ Dr Peter would always complain that when Curveball’s intelligence was summarized for the public, the smallpox part was excised. Colin Powell’s speech referred – without mentioning the source – only to Saddam having the ‘wherewithal to develop smallpox’. But if Saddam was actually developing smallpox (the Variola virus) it was disturbing – a far more dangerous threat to humanity than his anthrax programme, for instance. Smallpox had been globally eradicated in 1980; what remained of the virus was being held in just two labs in the world: the United States Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta and the State Research Institute for Viral Preparations in Moscow. Dr Peter, however, had come to believe that Saddam Hussein might also have stocks.

  Dr Peter appeared to be impressed, said our source, that while Alwan seemed to have real technical knowledge and a good memory (mentioning, for example, the exact temperature at which germ agents were held and giving precise descriptions of locations), he never seemed to exaggerate his knowledge (for example, by saying exactly what was being made where). ‘Curveball used to talk about Agent A, Agent B and so on and describe how they were handled. But he never said this one was anthrax or smallpox or whatever.’

  In his conversations with colleagues, Dr Peter had recounted how Alwan often got things wrong the first time. But then, when reinterrogated, he would come up with the right detail. Dr Peter rationalized this error by assuming that, as a refugee still in the precarious stage of seeking asylum, Alwan had his own moti
ves for not wanting to be fully truthful first time round. By his logic, the movement to a true version was evidence of a successful interrogation, not of fabrication. Using the same set of facts, Dr Peter was gifted with the ability to draw completely different conclusions from other people, according to colleagues. It was either genius or delusion.

  It was Dr Peter’s determination to investigate Curveball’s intelligence on smallpox that led him to arrange the only encounter that took place between an American officer and Curveball prior to the Iraq War. Dr Peter had noticed that Curveball had the distinctive scarring on his upper arm that usually signalled someone had been inoculated against smallpox. Curveball said he had been vaccinated when he joined the germ warfare programme. Smallpox antibodies last only ten years after vaccination, so by looking for them in Alwan’s blood Dr Peter hoped to determine if this vaccine dated from childhood (which would be usual) or was more recent and evidence of adult involvement in a bio-weapons programme. To conduct the test, Dr Peter wanted American expertise – not only to study the blood but also to take the sample. ‘He wanted no one to be able to challenge the conclusions when they came,’ said a person closely involved.

  In May 2000, a CIA doctor named ‘Les’, who was attached to the DIA, was duly summoned from Washington. The Germans had told the US that Curveball hated Americans, so Les was under strict instructions not to breathe a word. If, by his accent, he revealed his nationality, the BND had warned, then Curveball would refuse to cooperate.17 So he kept quiet. Later, on the eve of Colin Powell’s 2003 speech, Les wrote an email begging them to question Curveball’s evidence. He claimed that when they met, Curveball had acted in a particularly odd way; Les felt Curveball must have been drinking alcohol the previous night and had ‘a terrible hangover’ the morning of the meeting. According to a colleague, Les believed that Curveball ‘might be an alcoholic and that bothered him a lot’.18 (In fact, the ‘hangover’ story was a misapprehension. That day Alwan had a broken rib and was in considerable pain. This might have explained his grumpy mood better. He wasn’t perhaps the best Muslim in the world, but he did not drink or eat pork.)

  Les also concluded that Curveball’s handler, Dr Peter, was far too close to him. As he recounted in his email later, ‘this is an opinion of mine and I really have nothing else to base it on, but it was obvious to me that his case officer, for lack of better words, had fallen in love with his asset and the asset could do no wrong. I mean, the story was 100 percent correct as far as [redacted words] was concerned.’19

  The way the Germans treated the subsequent blood test results showed that they believed Curveball. When Alwan’s blood was analysed in Germany, Britain and the US, only the American lab showed faint traces of antibodies. For everyone but the Germans, the results were inconclusive. But Dr Peter made clear he regarded them as confirmation that Curveball had been immunized in adulthood against smallpox – and thus had been part of an illicit germ warfare programme.

  In May 2001, Dr Peter convened a special conference in Germany to consider Curveball’s evidence and the bio-weapons threat. Officers from German, US, British and Israeli intelligence were present. And the conclusion of that conference led to an expensive purchase by Germany of large stocks of smallpox vaccines. ‘In Germany, that was [Dr Peter’s] lasting impact,’ said a German official.

  ‘It demonstrates that Dr Peter and everyone else who counted at the BND had swallowed what Curveball was saying,’ said Goetz. ‘And the interesting thing is they – even later – kept believing.’

  * * *

  As the interrogations continued, some glaring problems arose with what Curveball said. Though he claimed not to know many specifics, Curveball had described in great detail a warehouse in Djerf al-Nadaf, just south of Baghdad, where mobile trucks would come to be replenished. He said the trucks had equipment on board to ferment and dry out the germ spores. The existence of this drying capacity, thought the BND experts, meant its only purpose was military. The place Curveball described was known to Western intelligence and to UN inspectors (most of whom were intelligence officers on secondment). It belonged to the CEDC where Curveball had worked. But they knew it was a small, cramped building surrounded by walls. Curveball needed to explain how the trucks could move in and out. Asked about this, he said the trucks exited by a hinged wall at the corner of the warehouse.

  The trouble was the hinged wall did not exist. And nor could the large trucks even move in the yard. This became clear from photographs taken in 2001 by American satellites that revealed there was an additional wall in the way. Curveball was told of the images. But he appeared unfazed and clung to his account. Again, the rationalizations kicked in. Dr Peter and US analysts just concluded that the structure seen on the satellites must be temporary or part of a ruse.

  When the UN weapons inspectors returned in 2002, one of the first things they did was check out what they had heard in Colin Powell’s speech. They travelled to Djerf al-Nadaf and confirmed that the wall was not temporary at all. And the corner of the warehouse was not hinged or movable in any way.

  The next flaw in Curveball’s account was exposed by British intelligence. One of his stories was that a son of his former boss at the CEDC, Dr Basil Latif, had been sent to the UK in 1995 to procure parts for the weapons programme. Britain naturally wanted to know more, and they were able to exploit the fact that Curveball had said he ultimately wanted to settle in Britain. An SIS officer called ‘G—’ was sent to masquerade as an immigration officer. To maintain cover, G— could ask what Curveball knew about the UK only. So it was not a thorough debrief. Nevertheless, G— left the interview less than convinced. According to German colleagues, G— told them, ‘He is telling a lie, adding to the story. There is something about it that doesn’t add up.’

  * * *

  By the time of 9/11 and the subsequent push for war, Dr Peter had left the BND. He had been passed over for promotion and did not want to move with his unit to the new BND headquarters in Berlin. But as interest in Curveball revived he was pulled out of retirement to join a special mission with British secret intelligence. SIS had discovered that Curveball’s ex-boss Latif was now living in Oman.

  The interrogation of Latif was conducted by the same SIS officer, G—, and by Dr Peter. But it was incomplete. To avoid giving away who their source was, the pair could not ask any specific questions about Alwan. So the two interrogators failed, for example, to get from Latif that Alwan had been fired from the CEDC in 1995. If they had asked him and clarified this point, they could have alerted the UK and Germany before the war that Curveball’s claims to have witnessed up-to-date germ weapons production and the accident in 1998 were fanciful. This is an example of how the secrecy involved in source protection can prove very costly.

  Nevertheless, what Latif did tell G— and Dr Peter made the story about Latif’s son seem doubtful. As Latif said after the war, ‘I don’t know what he [Alwan] said. But in 1995 my son was sixteen years old and in that year he came to the UK to do his GCSEs and he’s still here. How could he be involved in these things? I heard [Curveball] mentioned several things about my family, my son. But he’s clearly not that clever. If people lie they should fabricate it well! My son was sixteen in 1995.’20

  It was after this trip that SIS penned a report in April 2002 that summarized their conclusions about Curveball and rather neatly hedged their bets. The classified cable to the CIA said that SIS was ‘inclined to believe that a significant part of [Curveball’s] reporting is true’ in the light of his detailed technical descriptions. But also they were ‘not convinced that Curveball is a wholly reliable source’ and said that ‘elements of [Curveball’s] behaviour strike us as typical of individuals we would normally assess as fabricators’. Despite all this, the CIA noted that SIS ‘continued officially to back Curveball’s reporting throughout this period’.21

  Whatever the doubts that emerged, Dr Peter kept faith with Curveball, even if, as a professional, he emphasized that he was a single source that needed con
firmation. One way he and colleagues rationalized growing contradictions was by developing a theory that some of Curveball’s intelligence might be hearsay from a ‘sub-source’. They knew he was speaking to people in Baghdad by telephone. Dr Peter asked the BND to tap Curveball’s phone. He was told they lacked both the resources and the legal authority. The way some in the BND came to see it, if Curveball’s information was second-hand but still accurate, did it really matter?

  It was not just the Germans who found a way to rationalize their doubts. As the WMD Commission exposed, while analysts at the hugely resourced US agencies had been hired to be sceptical, they instead viewed intelligence like movies, constantly suspending disbelief. One CIA analyst had remarked, ‘Mobile BW [biological weapon] information comes from [several] sources, one of whom is credible and the other is of undetermined reliability. We have raised our collection posture in a bid to locate these production units, but years of fruitless searches by UNSCOM indicate they are well hidden.’22 The WMD Commission report notes caustically, ‘The analysts appear never to have considered the idea that the searches were fruitless because the weapons were not there.’23

  Eventually, after every corner of Iraq had been searched and nothing found, and after even Curveball admitted he had lied, Dr Peter finally accepted that Alwan’s story was a fabrication, according to friends. But, they added, the retired BND scientist continued to puzzle over where the information had come from. He apparently sensed a darker conspiracy. ‘My feeling is that he was being fed by someone else,’ he told an ex-colleague. Curveball had had so much detail on so many places, but so little on others. ‘Only two countries in the world have the capability of it,’ he would say – and by that he meant Israel and the United States. No one had the heart to suggest to Dr Peter that the man who had really been feeding Curveball all his lies – perhaps unconsciously and without malice – was Dr Peter himself.