US: A US presidential commission investigating the intelligence debacle that preceded the Iraq invasion reported yesterday that the damage done to US credibility would "take years to undo".
US intelligence was described by the report as being in chaos, often paralysed by the rivalry of 15 different spy agencies and affected by unchallenged assumptions about Baghdad's supposed weapons of mass destruction.
The incompetence described in the report occasionally descends into farce, particularly over an Iraqi defector codenamed Curveball, whose fabricated tales about mobile biological laboratories and their influence on US decision-makers were reminiscent of Graham Greene's accidental spy in Our Man in Havana.
Despite warnings that he was "crazy" and "a waste of time", and that he had not even been in Iraq at the time of an event he supposedly saw, his claims became the subject of almost 100 Defence Intelligence Agency reports and a focus of the National Intelligence Estimate in October 2002.
Most critically, Curveball's description of mobile laboratories provided one of the highlights of Colin Powell's address to the UN Security Council on February 5th, 2003, in which the US secretary of state laid out the justification for the invasion.
Curveball's story has already been told in part, but yesterday's account is the most comprehensive. He was an Iraqi chemical engineer who was first debriefed in 2000 by a foreign liaison service - not named in yesterday's report but elsewhere reported as being in German intelligence.
Before the war the Germans refused to let US interrogators question Curveball directly, saying that he "would refuse to speak to Americans"; they just passed on his claims, according to the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction.
Warning signs emerged in May 2000 when a military intelligence officer was allowed to visit Curveball. He reported: "I do have a concern with the validity of the information, based on Curveball having a terrible hangover the morning of [ the meeting]."
The warning fell on deaf ears, but by autumn 2002 the CIA was growing increasingly nervous, knowing it had not met an important source. So a meeting was arranged between the local CIA division chief and German intelligence officers.
When the division chief asked whether US agents could question the defector, "the foreign intelligence service responded with words to the effect of 'You don't want to see him because he's crazy'. Furthermore, the [ German] representative said that he worried that Curveball was 'a fabricator'."
The division chief passed on this alarming news to his superiors, but George Tenet, then CIA chief, and his deputy, John McLaughlin, both denied having been told of it.
On the eve of Mr Powell's UN speech, Mr Tenet and senior intelligence officers were cloistered with the secretary of state in New York, going over the administration's claims. At midnight Mr Tenet called the division chief at home, but the two men have different recollections of the conversation.
"Although he did not remember his exact words, the division chief says that he told Mr Tenet something to the effect of 'You know that the [ foreign service] reporting has problems'. According to the division chief, Mr Tenet replied with words to the effect of 'Yeah, yeah' and that he was 'exhausted'," the report says.
It continues: "The division chief said that when he listened to the speech . . . he was surprised the information from Curveball had been included."
Questioned by the commission, however, Mr Tenet denied that the subject of Curveball had ever been raised.
Curveball is reportedly related to a senior member of the Iraqi national congress (INC), then an exile group. However, the commission found that the INC had not brought him forward.
The report is another nail in the coffin of Mr Tenet's reputation and clears the White House and Pentagon of trying to shape intelligence to justify war.
It concludes: "The commission found no evidence of political pressure to influence the intelligence community's prewar assessments of Iraq's weapons programmes."