Germans say informant US used to justify war in Iraq was unreliable

BERLIN -- German intelligence officials responsible for one of the most important informants on Saddam Hussein's suspected weapons of mass destruction said that the Bush administration and the CIA had repeatedly exaggerated the informant's assertions as Washington prepared for the war.

Five senior officials from Germany's Federal Intelligence Service said in interviews with The Los Angeles Times that they warned US intelligence authorities that the source, an Iraqi defector codenamed Curveball, never claimed to produce germ weapons and never saw anyone else do so.

According to the Germans, President Bush mischaracterized Curveball's information when he warned before the war that Iraq had at least seven mobile factories brewing biological poisons.

Colin L. Powell, then secretary of state, also misstated Curveball's claims in his prewar presentation to the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003, the Germans said.

Curveball's German handlers of the past six years said his information was often vague, mostly secondhand, and impossible to confirm.

''This was not substantial evidence," a senior German intelligence official said. ''We made clear we could not verify the things he said."

The German authorities, speaking about the case for the first time, also said that their informant had emotional and mental problems. ''He is not a stable, psychologically stable guy," said a German intelligence official who supervised the case. ''He is not a completely normal person," an intelligence analyst agreed.

Curveball was the chief source of inaccurate US prewar assertions that Baghdad had a biological weapons arsenal, a commission appointed by President Bush that was reported this year. US investigators did not interview Curveball, who insists his story is true, or the German officials who handle his case.

The German account emerges as Washington is engaged in a political battle over prewar intelligence. The White House lashed out last week at Senate Democrats and other critics who alleged the administration had manipulated intelligence to go to war.

Democrats have forced the Senate intelligence committee to resume a long-stalled inquiry. Democrats in the House are calling for a similar inquiry.

An investigation by the Los Angeles Times, based on interviews since May with about 30 current and former intelligence officials in the United States, Germany, England, Iraq, and the United Nations showed that US bungling in the Curveball case was far worse than official reports had estimated.

The White House, for example, ignored evidence that UN weapons inspectors had disproved virtually all of Curveball's accounts before the war.

As war approached, President Bush and his aides issued increasingly dire warnings about Iraqi germ weapons as the invasion neared, even though intelligence from Curveball had not changed.

At the CIA, senior officials embraced Curveball's claims, even though they could not verify them or interview him until a year after the invasion.

They ignored multiple warnings about his reliability, punished in-house critics who had provided proof that he had lied, and refused to admit any error until May 2004, 14 months after invasion.

After the CIA vouched for Curveball's information, President Bush warned in his State of the Union Speech in January 2003 that Iraq had ''mobile biological weapons labs" designed to produce ''germ warfare agents." The next month, Bush said in a radio address and a statement that Iraq ''has at least seven mobile factories" for germ warfare.

Curveball told his German handlers, however, that he had assembled equipment on only one truck and had heard secondhand about other sites. Moreover, he could not identify what the equipment was designed to produce.