On Feb. 5, 2003, Colin Powell told the United Nations Security Council that the United States had “firsthand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails.” His source, he said, was an eyewitness, an Iraqi chemical engineer. The man was an asylum seeker in Germany whom the CIA had never been allowed to meet. American officials knew him by a code name, Curveball. In February 2011 he told the Guardian he had made the story up.
The German service that controlled him was the Federal Intelligence Service, the BND. From 1998 to 2005 it was run by August Hanning, the former BND president arrested Tuesday on suspicion of espionage and attempted treason. His arrest has put the old case back in the German press, which recalls the letter Hanning sent CIA Director George Tenet in December 2002.
Two versions of what the Germans told Washington have circulated ever since. In one, they warned the CIA that Curveball was unreliable and were ignored. In the other, Tenet’s, the BND “had cleared our use of the Curve Ball material.” We read the declassified record, chiefly the 2005 report of President Bush’s commission on weapons of mass destruction intelligence. Both versions are in it. They describe two different channels.
The private channel: “a waste of time”
The commission report never names the country. It calls the BND “the foreign liaison service” handling Curveball, and redacts the rest. The National Security Archive, which compiled the public record in 2007, identifies the service as the BND.
The service shared its debriefings but never gave Washington direct access to Curveball. His reporting reached the U.S. through the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Defense HUMINT Service, which disseminated almost 100 reports from him between January 2000 and September 2001. By early 2001, the commission says, the handling service was describing him in operational messages as “out of control,” and could not locate him.
The sharpest warning came in late September or early October 2002, at a lunch between the head of the CIA’s European division (Tyler Drumheller, named in other accounts) and a representative of the foreign service. Asked about American access, the representative said, by the division chief’s account, “You don’t want to see him because he’s crazy,” and that talking to him would be “a waste of time.” He said his service was not sure Curveball was telling the truth and that he worried Curveball was “a fabricator.”
Then came the caveat that explains everything after it. The representative warned that his service “would publicly and officially deny these views if pressed,” because it did not wish to be embarrassed.
The official channel: cleared for use
The official answers were different. In December 2002, with a presidential speech on Iraq expected, CIA headquarters asked again for access to Curveball and said the U.S. government wanted to use his reporting publicly. On Dec. 20, the commission reports, the foreign service refused access “but concurred with the request to use Curveball’s information publicly,” with “the expectation of source protection.”
That is the reply Tenet says he heard about. In his 2007 memoir, as quoted by the National Security Archive, Tenet writes that a Dec. 20 cable from Berlin carried a letter to him from Hanning, saying Curveball would not go public and that the BND would still not allow direct American access. Tenet says the cable went to the European division and never reached him. “I had never seen the German letter but had simply been told that the German BND had cleared our use of the Curve Ball material,” he wrote.
Accounts of the letter’s wording differ, and the letter itself is not among the documents the National Security Archive published. Germany’s Tagesspiegel, recounting the case this week, describes it as saying the information was judged plausible and convincing in substance but could not be confirmed.
What the CIA’s own traffic said in the last weeks
Inside the CIA, the private doubts kept surfacing. A group chief in the European division wrote before a Dec. 19 meeting that Curveball had been more forthcoming while he needed resettlement help, “possibly because when he was being helpful, he was embellishing, a bit.” She added: “We have been unable to vet him operationally and know very little about him.” Analysts at the CIA’s weapons center argued, with equal force, that his reporting was reliable.
The meeting ended without resolving it.
On Jan. 27, 2003, the station in the handling country cabled that the service “has not been able to verify his reporting,” and that using an unverifiable source “on such an important, key topic should take the most serious consideration.” A division email to the deputy director’s office days later spelled out the official position in full. The foreign service had “agreed to our using the information publicly” but did not want it sourced back to it. It “cannot vouch for the validity of the information,” and worried he “may not have had direct access.”
On Feb. 3, two days before Powell spoke, the deputy director’s office asked the station once more about the émigré’s whereabouts, to guard against “unwelcome surprises,” including press access to him.
The night before the speech, Tenet phoned the division chief at home from New York about another matter. The division chief told the commission he said something to the effect of “you know that the [foreign service] reporting has problems,” and that Tenet answered “yeah, yeah.” Tenet told the commission the call was about a phone number and that Curveball never came up.
How the record closed
The CIA got its first direct access to Curveball in March 2004. He could not explain discrepancies in his reporting, including a site layout that did not match satellite imagery, the commission says. In May 2004, more than a year after the invasion, the CIA formally deemed his reporting fabricated and recalled it.
The commission’s finding on biological weapons was blunt. The intelligence community “seriously misjudged” Iraq’s program, and the “primary reason” was its “heavy reliance” on Curveball.
Primary source: Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, Report to the President, March 31, 2005, Chapter One excerpt (PDF). Full context: National Security Archive, “The Record on CURVEBALL,” Electronic Briefing Book No. 234. For Hanning’s arrest this week, see our report, Germany Arrests Ex-Spy Chief Hanning Over 2,000 Leaked BND Files.
Curveball: What the BND Told the CIA Privately, and Officially
Sources
- WMD Commission (Silberman-Robb), Report to the President, Chapter One: Iraq, biological warfare section (March 31, 2005). Used for: the access arrangement, the almost 100 reports, the 2001 “out of control” messages, the lunch, the Dec. 20 reply, the group chief’s email, the Jan. 27 cable, the division email, the Feb. 3 memo, the night-before call, the March 2004 access and May 2004 recall, the summary finding.
- Secretary of State Colin Powell, remarks to the U.N. Security Council (Feb. 5, 2003). Used for: Powell’s description of the source.
- National Security Archive, “The Record on CURVEBALL,” ed. John Prados (Nov. 5, 2007). Used for: identification of the BND, Tenet’s memoir account of the Hanning letter, Drumheller’s role.
- Tagesspiegel, “Ex-BND-Chef Hanning festgenommen: Das ist der Mann…” (Oct. 6, 2026). Used for: the German account of Hanning’s Dec. 20, 2002, letter.
- Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi (Wikipedia), citing Martin Chulov and Helen Pidd, “Defector admits to WMD lies that triggered Iraq war,” The Guardian (Feb. 15, 2011). Used for: the 2011 admission.