Curveball (informant)

Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi (Arabic: رافد أحمد علوان الجنابي, Rāfid Aḥmad Alwān; born 1968), known by the Defense Intelligence Agency cryptonym "Curveball",[1] is a German citizen who defected from Iraq in 1999, claiming that he had worked as a chemical engineer at a plant that manufactured mobile biological weapon laboratories as part of an Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program.

[3][4] Despite warnings from the German Federal Intelligence Service and the British Secret Intelligence Service questioning the authenticity of the claims, the US and British governments utilized them to build a rationale for military action in the lead up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, including in the 2003 State of the Union address, where the US President George W. Bush said, "We know that Iraq, in the late 1990s, had several mobile biological weapons labs", and US Secretary of State Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations Security Council, which contained a computer generated image of a mobile biological weapons laboratory.

[9] In a February 2011 interview with British newspaper The Guardian, Alwan "admitted for the first time that he lied about his story, then watched in shock as it was used to justify the war.

Alwan's new story included that after he had graduated at the top of his chemical engineering class at Baghdad University in 1994,[11] he worked for "Dr. Germ," British-trained microbiologist Rihab Rashid Taha to lead a team that built mobile labs to produce lethal biological WMD.

Although the Americans did not have "direct access" to Curveball,[13][14] information collected by the BND debriefing team was later passed on in part to the Defense Intelligence Agency in the United States.

Despite CIA technicians and weapon experts finding major flaws and inconsistencies with the designs and systems he asserted the military was developing, this information made it to the American government and although there were wide doubts and questions about the claimed informant's reliability and background, assertions attributed to Curveball claiming that Iraq was creating biological agents in mobile weapons laboratories to elude inspectors appeared in more than 112 United States government reports between January 2000 and September 2001.

According to a Danish state TV documentary, DR1 Dokumentaren "Manden som løj verden i krig"[18] broadcast on April 21, 2010, Curveball was still living in Germany under protection from the German police.

Furthermore, on June 26, 2006, The Washington Post reported that "the CIA acknowledged that Curveball was a con artist who drove a taxi in Iraq and spun his engineering knowledge into a fantastic but plausible tale about secret bioweapons factories on wheels.

"[26] In February 2011, Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi admitted for the first time that he lied about his story regarding Iraq's secret biological weapons program.