Iraq bioweapons claim came from unreliable source

4.00pm - By ANDREW GUMBEL

LOS ANGELES - The case for war against Iraq was dealt another embarrassing blow today as it emerged that the only first-hand intelligence source on Saddam Hussein's alleged mobile bioweapons labs was a politically motivated Iraqi defector now dismissed as an "out-and-out fabricator".

The mobile labs, since exposed by weapons inspectors to be hydrogen production facilities at best and phantoms at worst, were one of the centrepieces of US Secretary of State Colin Powell's prewar address to the United Nations.

As recently as January, Vice-President Dick Cheney still held out the possibility that discovery of the labs would provide "conclusive" proof that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

According to a detailed investigation in the Los Angeles Times, however, the sole source claiming to have seen mobile bioweapons labs with his own eyes was the brother of one of the top aides to Ahmed Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National Congress who recently boasted how the erroneous information provided by his group achieved his long-cherished goal of toppling Saddam.

The source, given the unintentionally appropriate code name Curveball, was an asset of German intelligence and was never directly interviewed by US officials.

The Pentagon and Central Intelligence Agency do not even know exactly who he is, the LA Times reported.

David Kay, the postwar weapons inspector whose declaration in January that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction initiated a series of hammer-blows to the credibility of both the Bush administration and the British government, described Secretary Powell's use of Curveball's information before the UN as "disingenuous".

He told the LA Times: "If Powell had said to the Security Council: 'It's one source, we never actually talked to him, and we don't know his name', as he's describing this, I think people would have laughed us out of court."

Secretary Powell told the world on February 5 last year the administration had "first-hand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails" capable of producing enough anthrax or botulinum toxin to kill "thousands upon thousands of people".

He showed what he called "highly detailed and extremely accurate" diagrams of how the trucks were configured.

Revealingly, however, he could only produce artist renditions, not actual blueprints or photographs.

Since the Powell speech, Curveball's reliability has been systematically demolished.

The German BND warned the CIA shortly afterwards - it is not clear whether it was before or after the war began -- that it had "various problems with the source".

Curveball has been shown to have lied about his academic credentials and omitted to tell his interlocutors he had been fired from his job as a chemical engineer for the Iraqi army and jailed for embezzlement before fleeing Iraq sometime in the late 1990s.

The possible existence of mobile labs was touted as a theory by UN weapons inspectors frustrated as early as 1992 about their failure to find evidence of chemical and biological weapons programmes.

(Saddam's son-in-law, Hussein Kamal, later defected and explained they had been destroyed in 1991.)

The UN inspectors approached Mr Chalabi for help in establishing the existence of the mobile labs in late 1997, and he quickly obliged.

Scott Ritter, the UN inspector quickest to grow sceptical about Iraqi weapons capabilities, told the Times: "We got hand-drawn maps, handwritten statements and other stuff flowing in. At first blush, it looked good. But nothing panned out. Most of it just regurgitated what we'd given them. And the data that was new never checked out."

It appears to be a classic case of an informant giving intelligence agencies what they want to hear.

Evidence -- much of it tentative - trickled in throughout the 1990s that Saddam may have built mobile labs to conceal his weapons programmes.

In 1994, for example, Israeli military intelligence indicated that poisons were being made in red-and-white ice cream trucks and in green moving vans labelled "Sajida Transport" after Saddam's wife.

UN inspectors later concluded this information was bogus.

Coincidentally, the role of Israeli intelligence in the case for war was the subject of a carefully worded parliamentary report released in Jerusalem yesterday.

An eight-month-long inquiry resisted the notion that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction did not exist, but still lambasted the intelligence agencies for exaggerating Iraqi capabilities, particularly in the immediate run-up to war when reports on Saddam's missile arsenal mushroomed.

"Why didn't we succeed in laying down a broad and deep framework so we could rely on reports and not speculation and assumption? That is the central question," parliamentarian Yuval Steinitz, who led the inquiry, told reporters.

Much the same has been said in the United States by veteran intelligence professionals appalled by their government's manipulation of information in general and Colin Powell's UN speech in particular.

It is Mr Powell who is likely to come under the closest scrutiny in the wake of the Curveball revelations because he was the member of the Bush administration most trusted internationally and because his presentation seemed so convincing.

"It was a masterful performance, but none of it was true," the veteran CIA analyst Ray McGovern concluded last year.

Aside from the mobile labs, Secretary Powell showed slides of what he said were chemical munitions facilities surrounded by trucks he called "decontamination vehicles".

The "chemical munitions" works were later identified by Mr Ritter and others as a site well known to UN inspectors and thus a lousy hiding place for illicit weapons programmes.

The vehicles were later shown to have been fire engines.

Mr Powell also showed surveillance footage of an Iraq plane dropping simulated anthrax in what he said was a military exercise.

It later emerged the plane in question was destroyed in 1991.

- INDEPENDENT

Herald Feature: Iraq