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- [00:01]
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- [01:20]
Michael Isikoff
I'm Michael Isikoff and welcome to another edition of the Spy Talk Podcast. Jeff Stein can't be with us today, and Karen Greenberg will be joining us in a moment, but we're going to dispense with the usual weekend review discussion we have because we've got a really special guest, actually, guests coming on to discuss what may have been the biggest, most colossal intelligence failure in the CIA's history. And I'm speaking, of course, about the saga of Curveball, the Iraqi exile whose claims about mobile biological labs inside Iraq were used as justification as a principal justification for the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. You go back to Colin Powell's speech to the UN and the curveball claims. He doesn't use the name, of course, but the assertions are front and center in Powell's speech. They're mentioned by bush in his 2003 State of the Union and in my own reporting at the time, these reports coming in from the Germans about the claims of this guy Curveball were absolutely essential to the Bush administration's case for war. And of course we now know it was all baloney. Curveball was a fabricator from the outset. So we're going to talk to a CIA operative and analyst who had a catbird seat into the Curveball fiasco. Jerry Watson, a 31 year veteran of the CIA who's written a huge book about the Curveball story that he's trying to get cleared by the CIA, and the CIA is balking at it. So he's now suing his former employer. And we're also going to hear from Bob Drogan, the former Los Angeles Times reporter who wrote a key book about Curveball many years ago. So it's quite a discussion. It's a long one, but a one well worth listening to. So without further ado, let's go right to our interview with Gerry Watson.
- [04:00]
Jeff Stein
Okay.
- [04:00]
Michael Isikoff
We are now joined by Jerry Watson, former veteran CIA covert operative and analyst, who is now suing his former employer, the CIA. And we're going to dig into that. It's over a book he has written, a massive book, I think over a thousand pages documenting what many feel is like the most colossal intelligence failure perhaps in the CIA's history. Jerry, welcome to Spy Talk.
- [04:35]
Jerry Watson
All right, thank you. I appreciate you having me here.
- [04:38]
Michael Isikoff
This is a subject of great interest to me and I'm sure a lot of Spy Talk listeners. But let's just walk us through, first of all, your background at the CIA, what you did very briefly, and how you got onto the case of Curveball.
- [04:56]
Jerry Watson
Okay. Basically, I started with the CIA in 1986. April of 1986. And I had applied to a lot of different government agencies while I was in graduate school. The process is very slow for finally getting in. Anyway, I did finally get in in 1986. I came in to the Director of Operations as a case officer, went through all the training and everything, was posted overseas, did my first tour, and then then returned back to the United States. I had married an analyst at the CIA, which actually makes it very convenient.
- [05:35]
Michael Isikoff
Yeah.
- [05:36]
Jerry Watson
Because we both have the security clearances and have gone through all that process, so.
- [05:41]
Michael Isikoff
So you don't have to worry about disclosing anything in pillow talk.
- [05:45]
Jerry Watson
No, but I mean, we did. Our issues would overlap sometimes and. And so we'd pass in the kitchen a lot in the middle of the night because she was going off to brief. And I'm just coming home from writing finished Intelligence. And we'd sort of pass in the kitchen sometimes because she had to go in early and I came home late. But anyway, so can I just say I was fascinated.
- [06:10]
Michael Isikoff
One of the nuggets in Bob Drogan's piece that he wrote for Spy Talk about you, a two parter, is that your marriage with a fellow CIA person is not unique. In fact, there's a whole section on the CIA's website, Love at Langley.
- [06:30]
Jerry Watson
Yeah, I think that was part of a push to sort of be family friendly because when. When we got married in 1980 or 1988, just before we went overseas. They were not happy that I was getting married. I remember my personnel officer, when she heard it, was very disappointed and said, we had such plans for you. And the reason is because when you're a case officer and you get married now, the agency has to deal not only with your needs, but now a spouse. And at that time it was a very male dominated organization and they really didn't want to have to deal with somebody else just because you wanted to get married. So now they, they realize that as time goes on, people do get married and they've got to deal with this issue. So they're trying to be more family friendly. And I think that's. Yeah. And more and more people started to get married from inside the agency, but also marrying people from outside because then they have to go through a process to make sure they're approved by the agency because if they don't approve that person, you'll have to resign.
- [07:40]
Michael Isikoff
But they don't have to approve your marriage, I assume.
- [07:43]
Jerry Watson
No, but they'll decide whether or not that person is approved for you to be married to them while you work there. If they don't trust that person, then you're told to resign.
- [07:55]
Karen Greenberg
So whether it's a liability or not.
- [07:57]
Jerry Watson
Right.
- [07:58]
Karen Greenberg
That's kind of interesting.
- [07:59]
Jerry Watson
Yeah. So anyway, so I went in, I did that for. I was a case officer for about 10 years and then I decided case officers are generalists. So I wanted to be. I was jealous of the analysts. I wanted to be an expert on an issue. So I moved over to the Director of Intelligence with the analytics, the analysts are, and became an analyst. And for the first, oh, must have been seven years, six years I worked with providing intelligence support and material support for the inspections in Iraq for the UN weapons inspectors. We would help through working through an office at the US Department of State. We would help provide personnel to go on these inspections. The material they need, any sort of support because this was of course, in the interest of the United States government to have these inspections. I did that for a while and then I moved over to be a line analyst. And my account was on Iraq. I was one of three analysts on what was called the Iraq BW Team for Biological Warfare. We had three analysts. One did focus on research and development, another focused on BW agent production, and mine was on weaponization. And that's how I got involved in the whole Iraq issue and on Curveball.
- [09:27]
Michael Isikoff
And one, one point that Bob made in his piece that I think in retrospect, is pretty significant in trying to understand how the CIA got things so wrong about Iraqi wmd. And it dates back to, I guess, what was it, December 98. Clinton bombs Iraq because he says they're not fulfilling their inspection requirements, blocking the
- [09:58]
Jerry Watson
inspections and constructing them and not being. Not being fully transparent. And. And that was Desert Fox when they bombed in December of 1998. So I was there in 1998, in the summer. And were you in Iraq? Yeah, I was a weapons inspector. Right. We were running out of personnel to send over there because they all had technical expertise. And when we were starting to. When that pool gets smaller, after you send people over for three or four times, they start to say, well, I can't, you know, I can't go again. I got a job. I got family. And so we're running out of people to send that were qualified. So some of us would volunteer and say, well, we'll go. And so that's what I did. So I was there during the summer of 1998. And yes, the Iraqis obstructed us. We had. We had a kind of a battle with them at the Air Force headquarters over a document we found in a safe that gave the actual accounting numbers for the actual amount of CW chemical weapons that were used during the Iran Iraq war. That was very important to material balance. If they use this much, how much do they have left? And so that contradicted what the Iraqis had officially given us. So that turned into a real battle where it got pretty tense. But we made it up.
- [11:16]
Michael Isikoff
The point. The point I was going to make about that, though, is as obstructive as they were prior to the bombing. After the bombing, Saddam kicks the inspectors out. And so now you've got no, if I understand it correctly, no window into what Iraq is up to at all.
- [11:35]
Jerry Watson
Yeah, actually, the inspectors left Iraq because things were getting too dangerous. And what Saddam did is after the bombing, he just didn't allow them back in. So the US Government, of course, is now concerned. President Clinton at the time, you know, because now we have no eyes. We don't know what's going on in the country. We really didn't have a lot of sources there of our own. The U.N. we weren't spying on the U.N. we were trying to help them in their. In their inspections. But we need.
- [12:04]
Karen Greenberg
That was my question. How did the U.N. i'm just curious about that relationship between you and the UN and how that conversation went and, you know, who got, who reported to whom. You know what I'm saying, was there a formal process for reporting in or what was that?
- [12:20]
Jerry Watson
Well, again, we were interested in what UNSCOM is finding out on the ground in Iraq, of course, and through our support, we can learn some of that. Now, we weren't spying on them. This was voluntary on their part, and they didn't have to tell us anything if they didn't want to. But we needed a dialogue so that we could help them with, hey, here's some intelligence. You might check out this site. Or, you know, if you need some support over here, we can provide that because, again, it's in the US Interest. We weren't the only ones doing this. All the, the, the other countries involved were doing the same thing, and they were. So they didn't necessarily report to us or even share us information, but we would talk to some of the inspectors who would come back and debrief them. That was my job for six years, is the analyst contacted me and said, hey, can you go contact these, these American inspectors who were on these teams and see if they're willing to be debriefed voluntarily? So I did that and that we got a lot of good information off that. You know, and again, I want to stress the UN is not, you know, they're not allowing a bunch of spies in there. They need the support. And this is one way we could leverage that support is can you let us know what's happening, too?
- [13:43]
Michael Isikoff
And I should point out we've just been joined by Bob Drogan, storied former Los Angeles Times reporter and author of until now, the definitive book on Curveball, the subject of our talk today. So, Bob, welcome. Welcome to Spy Talk here.
- [14:03]
Bob Drogan
Thank you. Yeah, thank you. Thank you for inviting me.
- [14:07]
Michael Isikoff
So we're gonna, I'm gonna, like, continue with Jerry, and then we'll, we'll bring you into the discussion to give us your thoughts on what he's had to say. But just picking up on, on where we left off, Jerry. So in 2000, Clinton leaves. 2001, Clinton leaves office. Were you convinced that Iraq had WMD? And how solid if so, was your conviction that chemical and biological weapons.
- [14:37]
Jerry Watson
Yeah, and I address this in my, in my book. Yeah, we were, we were not fully convinced. We believed that WMD may be there because Sanaa made WMD before. So he obviously knows how to make it so he can make it again. He's still got the same people. He's got the material. So, so we were, we analysts, intelligence analysts, not just in the US but also the Brits and the, and the, And The Germans, we were following this, trying to figure out where anything is. But yes, we did believe it was there. But because we didn't have concrete, solid intelligence saying they really did have it, we had to use qualifiers and caveats on our reporting. So we had to say, Saddam may have a weapons program. He may have wmd. He could be doing this. And that's important because unless you are 100% convinced and you can prove that, you really can't say Saddam has wmd. You have to say he may have it.
- [15:40]
Michael Isikoff
Well, that's what brings us to, you know, what changed. And one of the big things that changed was the reports that start coming in from the Germans about a guy codenamed Curveball.
- [15:55]
Jerry Watson
Right.
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Jeff Stein
So.
- [15:56]
Michael Isikoff
So let's get right to that. And when you first heard and saw these reports and what your reaction was, okay.
- [16:03]
Jerry Watson
So again, before I went into the Iraq BW team, I was still doing the support for UNSCOM. So Curveball showed up in Germany in late November 1999, and he had traveled from Iraq on his own and got there.
- [16:25]
Michael Isikoff
He.
- [16:26]
Jerry Watson
The Germans picked him up, as Bob has said, out of the Zorndorf refugee community. And they started to debrief him because he had some very interesting information with emigres. You want to go through the immigration of your country and talk to them and find out, do any of them have any good information that intelligence would like to have? And so every country does this. So of course, the Germans were doing that at Zerndorf, trying to find out, do any of these emigres know anything? So they got to Rafaed to Kerbal, and he told him this story about these mobile BW plants. They started disseminating. They. They started sharing that information with what was called Defense Human Service at the time. That's the operational collection arm of the Defense Intelligence Agency. So they had a close relationship, closer than CIA did with the Germans because of the history. I mean, it goes back decades. So they. So the Germans started sharing the information, Kerbal's reporting with Defense Human. Defense Human would disseminate that to the U.S. intelligence community. And we analysts would see these reports. So that's really when it started in January and February of 2000. The first time I ever heard of this guy was not until summer of 2000, where I'm still doing the UNSCOM support work. And at that time, I was working with UNSCOM on. We had concerns that the Iraqis had restarted a UAV program that would produce UAVs that could carry spray tanks to deliver BW. This was a real, actual program declared by the Iraqis back in 1991. So in 1995, all of a sudden, we see them restarting what appeared to be this same program. So the senior analyst on the Iraq BW team, before I moved to that office, she came to see me and said, hey, can liquid, a liquid slurry of BW agent, which is what Kerr Ball is saying, is produced in these mobile BW plants, can that be used in aerial spray tanks? And I said, absolutely. I mean, that's perfect for it. So that increased her confidence, and of course, it increased my confidence and in our assessments. And so she just said, well, the German VND has this source. He's an Iraqi. Iraqi engineer. And that's all I knew, and that's all she would share with me, because his reporting ever since the beginning was in restricted channels. And I was not read into it. She was. And so was a junior analyst that she worked with. And so that's all they. They told me. Later on, In September of 2001, just before 9 11, I moved over and became a member of that Iraq BW team. And mine's on weaponization. So Curveball didn't have any information on weaponization. So I'm not ready into the program still in 2001. But they were. So I only knew what they were telling me. And they would tell me a lot of the good things, but they never really told me any of the bad things that they were finding out about him. So that caused a problem.
- [19:42]
Michael Isikoff
I want to get to that in a moment. And by the way, the full name of Curveball is Rafid Ahmed Al Janabi. And when he starts. When these reports start circulating by the Defense Intelligence Agency and there's what, something like 90 such reports that get filed over that time, that really does change the calculus on what the CIA thought it knew about wmd. And maybe I'll bring Bob in at this point. How significant were these reports from DIA about Curveball's claims in the intelligence community's assessment of wmd and of course, in the Bush administration's case as well?
- [20:34]
Bob Drogan
So my understanding is, and it's been a while since I've been involved in this, but my understanding is when he first came out at the end of 99 and started speaking to the BND all through 2000 and 2001 and they're filing these reports, it wasn't getting a whole lot of notice. What happened was 9 11, and after 9 11, when suddenly the Bush administration, the White House, is suddenly Looking for is suddenly accusing Saddam Hussein of somehow being involved with 9 11, which was the CIA pushed back on. The CIA did not push back on at all on this question of wmd, which the. Dick Cheney and others in the administration were really harping on by the middle of 2002 or so, when Jerry said a minute ago that there were caveats and they may have this and they may have that by the fall of 2002, when the CIA and the whole national intelligence community issues something called the National Intelligence Estimate, right, which is supposed to be the gold standard of finished intelligence products, and sends it over to Congress. And normally those kinds of things take, I'm told, six months, eight months, a long, long time, through a very extensive review process. They bang that puppy out in something like 19 days. And it did not have those caveats and did not have any of those things. It just says we assess he has with high confidence and so on. And in the case of. To answer your question specifically, Mike, when. Partly because the. It in the 1990s, right, when UNSCOM was in Iraq and is conducting all of these inspections, and they find this enormous chemical weapons program that. Bigger than they expected, right? They find a biological weapons program that they did not anticipate and it's more sophisticated than they knew, and they find a. A nascent nuclear program that they had not anticipated, right? So they are seeing this stuff. So we move up to 2002, and suddenly because of curveball and the reporting that builds up around it, they suddenly have this high confidence that he has a biological weapons program. And the guys over on the chemical weapons side and it's a lot easier to make chemical weapons agents. They're basically pesticides with juicing them up a little bit. It's a very. They've been used since World War I when they read that and they learn that the. The BW side of the shop, right over at where Jerry is working in. In the weapons side in Windpack, that they have this. This guy and they're absolutely blue. They jack up their assessments and suddenly they go from the. Well, low confidence he may have. Yeah, he's definitely got it. Because if he's got the bw, then these other things must be true. So it becomes sort of the tent pole in the. For. For the. For the CIA's assessments. So by the time Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, goes to the United nations in February of, of 2003, and I'm sitting there in the Security Council, I'm watching it, and he says, first thing, biological weapons and he pulls out this little vial of, you know, pretend anthrax or something, and he says, we have an eyewitness, right. George Tenet, the dci, the Director of Central Intelligence, is sitting right behind him and has never told him that they have never interviewed the eyewitness. The eyewitness being Curveball, who has claimed that he has been supervising.
- [24:10]
Michael Isikoff
Supervising mobile. A mobile lab for production of biological.
- [24:17]
Karen Greenberg
Can I just ask one. Can I just ask one question here?
- [24:20]
Jerry Watson
Yeah.
- [24:21]
Karen Greenberg
What? How much of this information was shared with UNSCOMP before this? Before the Powell testimony?
- [24:28]
Jerry Watson
Before it? Yeah, a great deal of it.
- [24:32]
Karen Greenberg
And they agreed with the assessment?
- [24:34]
Jerry Watson
No, no. Can I back up one second? You have to understand the difference between the Clinton administration and the Bush administration.
- [24:43]
Karen Greenberg
Okay?
- [24:44]
Jerry Watson
So during 2000 into 2001, President Clinton was mostly focused on domestic issues. He really turned over the foreign aspect to Al Gore, to Vice President Al Gore. And so everybody at that point believed that Saddam was contained. He's in the box because unscom, the UN Is all over him. He can't really do anything. They're all over the country. And that was very true. And then Kirbal was reporting through 2000 and into 2001, and his story starts to fall apart because people are investigating what his claims are, and there's contradictions up the wazoo. I mean, walk us through a little more, Jerry.
- [25:30]
Michael Isikoff
Who he was and what were the contradictions that started to emerge
- [25:38]
Karen Greenberg
and who pointed them out?
- [25:42]
Jerry Watson
The information was being shared, and I was allowed by the agency to say this, but the information was not just shared with CIA and DIA from. From the German VND, but the Germans were also sharing with the British SIS, Secret Intelligence Service, MI6. So, of course, when any of us get this kind of information, we're going to try and go check it out. And that really, that's what the Germans wanted us to do. They were a smaller service. They were fairly limited in what they can really vet as far as the information and check out. But we have more resources, and so do the Brits. And so they share it with us, asking us, please give us your evaluation of his information. And so that's what we attempted to do, is go check this out. Well, the Brits were much more successful than we were. They. One of the people that. That. One of the Iraqi engineers that Curveball implicated in his story was a guy named Dr. Basil Asati. He was the head of the engineering center where Curveball worked. And he had emigrated from Iraq. His son was living in the uk going. He was going to be. He was pre med, and he was at Sheffield University, which is where his dad went to school. So the Brits, of course, immediately go to the son, and because they're trying to get contact with a dad, they're reading all this stuff about your dad was involved in this mobile VW plant project and all. So they go to the kid and they ask him, and he's this young guy, and Kerbal had implicated the son in this project. And the Brits see this young guy and they're thinking, wait a minute, this kid, this young guy is supposedly involved in some secret project by Saddam. So anyway, the kid, they really say, where's your dad? We want to talk to your dad. Oh, well, they're thinking the dad is still in Iraq. And he says, no, no, my dad's in Dubai. Here, you want us. You want his phone number and his email? Here you go. You know, so. So the Brits are thinking, wait a minute, why? Why is this. If this guy is so important to this top secret project in Iraq, what's he doing being allowed to emigrate to Dubai? So they went and found him in Dubai and they talked to him. And Basel came out years ago on 60 Minutes and told everything about this, how he then debriefed on all this. So that's where things started to go wrong, because Dr. Basil Asati, who was codenamed Red river, and that's been on 60 Minutes, that was just a British nickname that they gave him. So we could all talk, all these different intelligence services talk to each other and we'd use these sort of nicknames, but the Brits were the ones who gave these names out to everybody. Anyway, so with Basil.
- [28:32]
Michael Isikoff
But the Brits had never talked to Curveball either.
- [28:35]
Jerry Watson
No, no. The Germans wouldn't let any of us talk to him directly.
- [28:38]
Michael Isikoff
And dia, which is circulating these reports, didn't talk to Curveball either.
- [28:45]
Jerry Watson
No.
- [28:45]
Michael Isikoff
Right.
- [28:46]
Bob Drogan
If I can. There was during this period of time. If I can. So you asked if, if UNSCOMP believe this, one of the missions that UNSCUM did, or multiple missions, was to track, try and track down Curveball. Originally had claimed he'd worked at a place called Jer on the daf, which is near Baghdad, a big building. And CIA had imagery and so on. And his story was that the trucks came in and they had to make a dog leg here and a turn there or something, and there was a movable wall to get it out. And they went to this site and they took ground readings and they took, you know, DNA tests and they radar Images and, you know, and the wall was very solid. There's no question. There's no movable wall. There's no secret button you could press or pull a book out and a wall opens up or anything. And CIA responds, as I understand it, says, well, they built the wall before you came. You know, where the wall moves at night and they take it down in the morning, or, you know, it's on a hit. I mean, they came up with every kind of possible excuse to justify their own conclusion rather than acknowledge.
- [29:52]
Jerry Watson
Right. And then to answer Karen's question, they went there because we asked them to. We provided that information to them because UNMOVIK, which is the successor to UNSCOM, took over in November of 2000, what was it, 2002, and got back into Iraq before our 2003 March war. And we gave them this information so that they could go and inspect this site. And we could already see on imagery the wall that divided the site in half. Now, Kerbal never reported a wall. So to answer Karen's questions, we started to see in 2000, we're looking at imagery of Jerfal Nadoff, this agricultural site. It's now got a wall across it that was built in 1997. Well, Kerr Ball said he didn't leave until 1999, so why didn't he report a wall dividing the site in half? And as Bob pointed out the route he said that the mobile plants took, and these are semi trucks with a flatbed trailer with equipment mounted on it with a covering. They had to go through this wall at least twice. So how do you go through a wall? Well, they came up, the imagery analysts came up with an answer. They wrote on the satellite imagery. They annotated it with gate G, A, T, E with an arrow pointing at it, at the wall, at the places where the truck would class. And I talked to the imagery analysts later on, years later, and I said, why did you do that? And they said. I said, kerbal never reported a gate because he never reported the wall. And they said to me, well, how else would a truck get through the wall? And I thought, you know, you just misled all the policymakers.
- [31:39]
Michael Isikoff
We do need to take a break. We will be right back.
- [31:45]
Grainger Commercial
Granger knows when you're a procurement manager for an office park, you're not managing one building, you're managing all of them. And to stay ahead, you need to see through walls and around corners. Lights about to fail, filters ready to clog, H Vac on its last leg if you want. Until something breaks, you're already behind. Count on Grainger for quality products, easy reordering and 24. 7 support. Call 1-800-GRAINGER click grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done. Grainger knows when you're a procurement manager for an office park, you're not managing one building, you're managing all of them. And to stay ahead, you need to see through walls and around corners. Lights about to fail, filters ready to clog H Vac on its last leg. If you wait until something breaks, you're already behind. Count on Grainger for quality products, easy reordering and 24. 7 support. Call 1-800-GRAINGER click grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.
- [32:46]
Michael Isikoff
And we are back. I have to say, one of the delicious items in Bob's piece about about you, Jerry, is at the time Curveball, the most crucial intelligence asset being used to make the case for war against Iraq, was working at a Burger King. And also, by the way, did you ever go to the Burger King, Jerry?
- [33:15]
Jerry Watson
No, but I know where it is. Yeah, I mean, I tracked it down because I wanted to know. But he also did interviews with the press later on and talked to and the, the press from the Guardian, a couple of reporters, Helen Pitt, and I'm trying to remember the other gentleman's name. They went there and actually talked to the co workers who said, yeah, Curveball would brag about, boast about how important he was back in Iraq. And we all thought he was full of garbage. So let me explain how that happened. So you've got 2,000, he's reporting. His, his reporting sounded so sensational and incredible at the beginning. And this is typical with fabricators. As you start to investigate their story, it starts to crumble. And then you start to question their credibility. And it finally gets to a point where you're like, we're done. You're just lying. We're done with you. And you. And you get rid of them. I mean, you terminate your relationship with them. I gotta be careful how I say things. This is too much into Hollywood movies. So what happened here is as we got into 2001 and his story is being checked out by the Brits and other people, it's crumbling. And so Rafat is panicking, his story is falling apart. And he's thinking, my con is going to lose, you know, I'm going to lose my, my. The BND is giving me an apartment, supporting me, give me a cell phone, I'm getting paid. And this is all going to come to an end, and I still don't have citizenship, which is why he did this in the first place. He was just trying to get citizenship. Curbal is a pathological and practiced liar. And he doesn't feel any guilt for lying, which is why he can implicate everybody, including his friends, family, co workers, anybody in his stories, and he'll stick to it to the end. And he doesn't care. He doesn't have empathy. It reminds me of someone else these days, but, and this is the problem when you start to listen to pathological liars, if you do not figure them out that they are lying to you by looking at their information and starting to challenge them, they're going to keep on feeding you information. So as 2001 progressed, he got to a point where in September, right before 9 11, if that's just a coincidence, happened there. But the, the analysts in the community, the analysts in bnd, CIA, DIA and sis, the, the analysts are all in love with this guy. They have just enamored with the source,
- [35:52]
Michael Isikoff
who they've never met.
- [35:53]
Jerry Watson
They've never met, never talked to. Reading his very polished reporting. And, and they're believe it. I read it too. It sounded really, really plausible. But the operations officers in all these different intelligence organizations, they have to deal with sources directly. When you deal with someone directly, you're not really impressed. You know, if they don't come off right away as impressing you, you're going to start to question their credibility. And so analysts don't deal with sources directly normally. And so the analysts had never met this guy, but the ops officers have. And the German officer ops officers I'm talking about in the bnd. So they're dealing directly with Kerbal. And he is a pain to deal with. He's demanding, he wants everything, he wants them to help him on, to move his furniture for him when they move him from apartments. And he thought they were just his servants. The ops officers, the German ops officers are getting tired of dealing with this. The analysts, the German analysts are still in love with this guy. So the ops officers finally get fed up and In September, early September 2001, they decide we're done with this guy and they terminate their clandestine relationship with him. That cuts off.
- [37:08]
Michael Isikoff
This is the B.S. bND.
- [37:10]
Jerry Watson
So this, this is the BND.
- [37:11]
Michael Isikoff
September of when?
- [37:13]
Jerry Watson
2001.
- [37:14]
Bob Drogan
Three days before 9 11?
- [37:16]
Jerry Watson
Yeah, three days before. Yeah, as Bob mentioned, they cut their ties with him. So he has no financial support. You know, he's got an apartment, he's got to pay for, he's got to pay for his livelihood. So he has to go find a job. Now when you're an emigre in a country in Europe, you can only take the menial labor jobs. You're not going to go replace someone, you know, a German citizen in a, in a more important job. And his engineering background wasn't very good anyway, so he got a job at Burger King. Now this is, you know, right before 911 they terminate him. 911 happens. Look at the change in, in the, in the environment, in, in the US and all these other countries when 911 happened. Fear. I mean it's just a fearful environment. A lot of fear mongering, you know, oh my God, the terrorists are coming to get us. So all of a sudden the Bush administration saw that as an opportunity to not just take out Bin Laden and Al Qaeda, but to also go after Saddam. They had been wanting to do it for a long time. So they did use this as painting Saddam as an imminent threat for regime change. That was their policy. This gave them the opportunity. So as Bob pointed out, everything changed after 911 where curveball's reporting had been questioned and suspicious that it may be fabrication and terminated him. Now all of a sudden, after 9 11, it's like the most important thing since sliced bread. Because the Bush administration might.
- [38:50]
Karen Greenberg
You said earlier on the CIA got it so wrong. Right. But in a way that's not really what your story's about, because what made them.
- [39:01]
Michael Isikoff
They did get it wrong.
- [39:02]
Karen Greenberg
They got it wrong.
- [39:03]
Jerry Watson
But they, they rely.
- [39:05]
Michael Isikoff
They got everything wrong. And they relied on Curveball.
- [39:08]
Jerry Watson
Right.
- [39:08]
Karen Greenberg
But they knew better that. I guess what I'm asking is.
- [39:11]
Bob Drogan
Well, a few people. A few people.
- [39:13]
Jerry Watson
Yeah.
- [39:13]
Bob Drogan
Or suspect.
- [39:15]
Jerry Watson
Yeah.
- [39:15]
Bob Drogan
Because you see, institution.
- [39:19]
Jerry Watson
Yeah, because CIA, dia, sisbnd, these are all big organizations made up of people. Some people believe something, some people inside don't. So when you talk about the CIA getting something right or wrong, you have to figure out who inside there were the ones who got it wrong and who got it right. So in this case with Curveball, his, his reports are all suspicious to, to the operations officers. But the analysts never let go. They thought, nope, he's credible. So when, when 911 happens, the Bush administration wants the CIA to provide them with all the threat information on Saddam that we have. And of course, here's Kerr Balls reporting, and they're not. Wait, wait, wait. Let me, let me finish one thing here. Because when. So all of a sudden this information is reborn and it's considered credible by the analysts, not by the operations officers, the analysts. The analysts are the ones who are communicating with the policymakers. In those new finished intelligence reports, there is absolutely no mention that curveball has been terminated by the handling agency. None. The policymakers don't know this.
- [40:37]
Michael Isikoff
And none of the contradictions are in the reporting.
- [40:40]
Jerry Watson
None of it is included in there.
- [40:42]
Michael Isikoff
Right.
- [40:42]
Bob Drogan
So one of the things that I find fascinating as an outsider and as a reporter is. Was trying to understand this process at the time. And what struck me about CIA at that point was how much it reminded me of high school. Right? The fights between the analysts and the DO and the personalities. And I just heard something yesterday, Jerry. You probably know this, but I did not know this before. So there's this famous note that the station chief in Berlin writes back and says, the Germans are getting nervous. There's real problems with this guy. And in his book, Tennant says, I never got that note. And what I heard yesterday was because a certain individual at Langley was fighting with the station chief in Berlin and said, I'm not passing this thing on. Screw this guy. Because they've been mortal enemies for years, like in high school. And they just said, screw it. So it was like, all about personality clashes.
- [41:40]
Michael Isikoff
Well, I want to ask about that, Bob, because there was some high drama in the days and hours before Powell's speech at the UN where some people were trying to warn higher ups. You can't rely on this. Powell can't use this. Tyler Drumheller, who I think was in charge of European affairs, said that he was warned by the BND that he was not reliable and he alerted John McLaughlin, the deputy to George Tenet. McLaughlin says he didn't remember that happening. So there were people trying to blow the whistle before. Powell uses the Curveball example as almost Exhibit A in his speech to the
- [42:27]
Jerry Watson
UN they were all on the operations side in even the Brits. The British operations officers were trying to warn, watch out this guy's information. Remember in the W D Commission report, there's a British senior operations officer who said, hey, agency, especially WinPac, this guy curveball is exhibiting characteristics typical of a fabricator. And he. He fought with WINPAC over this and tried to get them to. To understand, look, we think. We, the operations officers think this guy is a fabricator, and you guys are running with this and not telling the policymakers any of the problems with this guy. And that's what really my book is all about, is this battle between the two groups in each of these organizations as they tried to push forward information. Some of it would get Blocked and others it would flow, especially if it. If it agreed with what the analysis was, that Saddam is a threat, an imminent threat. He has wmd. That kind of analysis flew through the process, but the ops officers kept getting stopped, saying, wait a minute. There's problems with this source. His credibility is a serious question. So. So do you understand I'm not just talking about CIA. I'm talking about dia, sis, and bnd. We were all the same. Operations officers didn't like the guy. Analysts loved him.
- [43:57]
Michael Isikoff
Did. Did Curveball have any relationship or get any encouragement from Ahmed Chalabi in the Iraqi National Congress?
- [44:05]
Jerry Watson
No, except none. Just one thing, and that's when Kerbal's older brother we. We learned this when I went into Iraq and investigated. Kerbal's older brother, Fatah, worked for the inc. He was the senior.
- [44:23]
Michael Isikoff
Yes, that's a relationship.
- [44:26]
Jerry Watson
In 2001. In summer of 2001, the. The older brother, Fatah called Kerbal in Germany and said, hey, you know, how you doing? Nice to talk to you again, my brother and all that. My younger brother, hey, do you have any information on Iraq wmd? Do you know of any problem? You were an engineer there. Do you know anything that's happening in Iraq? And Kerbal said, no, no, I don't. I don't have anything. I just worked on some agricultural products projects, which was true.
- [44:57]
Bob Drogan
Mike, do you remember where. Mike, do you remember where Chalabi was on. It was January 28, 2002. He was sitting.
- [45:06]
Michael Isikoff
Was that 2002 or 2003? I think it was 2003. Yeah. Well, I am. That's interesting, because I am reliably informed that Chalabi privately took credit for Curveball.
- [45:23]
Jerry Watson
He didn't know anything about it, and we even.
- [45:26]
Michael Isikoff
But if the brother was working for the inc, where in London or where was the brother?
- [45:31]
Jerry Watson
Brother was in Turkey.
- [45:32]
Michael Isikoff
His brother was in Turkey. So you don't think that this was ever communicated up the chain?
- [45:39]
Jerry Watson
No. We searched for any information to either confirm that or refute that the INC was behind this, but no, the brother was told. The older brother was told by Kerbal. No, I don't have anything. And that's what he passed back to Tilabi. Chalabi also came out publicly and said, I don't know who this guy is that supposedly works for me. Because Fatah, the older brother.
- [46:04]
Bob Drogan
Look, I went to as well that his people were.
- [46:09]
Jerry Watson
Yeah. After the fact, when we talked to the brother that period before we. We found all this out, that he had made this phone call and everything, the Germans never knew any of this, but we found it out because we talked to the brother. So when that came out and we investigated because we knew the analysts are going to lock onto this and say, oh, see, we weren't just dumb believing this stuff. We weren't just misled. The INC had this sophisticated project to fool us, and so we wanted to kill that right away. So we investigated that whole thing and wrote back, no, no, no, INC didn't know anything about this. The only thing they did was question the brother one time.
- [46:51]
Michael Isikoff
Isn't it possible that that phone call from the brother who worked for the INC kind of encouraged Curveball to make up his tall tales?
- [47:04]
Jerry Watson
No, because as Bob knows, he already made up that story. Remember the brother?
- [47:09]
Michael Isikoff
You said he told the brother he knew Nothing.
- [47:11]
Jerry Watson
Yes, in 2001. But Bob, when did Kerbal start reporting? January and February of 2000. So he already came up with his story when he was in Germany. Because as Bob knows, Kerbal got to the Zerndorf Refugee center and started talking to the other refugees about, I want to get German citizenship and have them give me and see I have an Iraqi passport. They're going to get me all this stuff. And the other immigrants said, hey, look, this is a very long process. It's going to take you 5, 10 years to ever get there, if you ever do. So Curveball decided I got to come up with a story because the emigres told them also. However, if you're important to the bnd, they'll get you a free ride through this process much faster than the regular emigre system. So that told Curveball, I got to come up with a story that's going to. They're going to. They're going to latch onto so that then I'm valuable to them and they'll put me through the process faster, which is exactly what happened.
- [48:11]
Michael Isikoff
All right, so you've now written this massive book deconstructing all that went down.
- [48:21]
Jerry Watson
Can I add one thing in here? Because, Karen, I talked about this a little earlier. You call it a massive book. It's 850 pages, but I think that qualifies. Yes, but that's, again, that's what I submitted to the Agency. The agency is trying to redact. They're actually trying to redact all of it, but they're going to try and redact as much as they can. If they redact hundreds of pages, what do I have left? So I gave them 850 pages that I don't intend to publish. But I want to get what I can through the process so that I do have enough for a book to be published.
- [48:55]
Michael Isikoff
But one of the things they are saying is classified is the identity of Curveball Rafid Al Janabi. And the Guy's been on 60 Minutes. He has been publicly out there for years.
- [49:09]
Jerry Watson
Yeah, look, I'm not looking for.
- [49:10]
Michael Isikoff
What basis do they have for.
- [49:12]
Jerry Watson
I'm not looking for a fight with CIA. To me, this is absurd.
- [49:16]
Michael Isikoff
You're suing them.
- [49:18]
Jerry Watson
Yes, I realize that, but I mean,
- [49:20]
Karen Greenberg
that's kind of a fight.
- [49:21]
Jerry Watson
Okay, but before that, even before I even filed the lawsuit, I thought this is absurd that we Curveball. If you go look on the Internet, you can find everything you want about this guy and that he was the source. So when I, before I submitted my book, I submitted FOIA's Freedom of Information act for about 120 documents from CIA and DIA. It's everything I investigated. I proved it was all false. Why is it still classified after 25 years? It was classified 25 years ago. That should have been.
- [50:01]
Karen Greenberg
How long ago did you submit the manuscript to them for?
- [50:04]
Jerry Watson
That was at the beginning in January of 2025. I submitted FOIAs before that in 2024, and I was told it's going to take two and a half years before they even get to start to process the FOIAs. So when I submitted my manuscript, the CIA came back and said, well, until your FOIA is clear, we're not going to review your book. That's why that Mark Zod and I filed the lawsuit is because they are obligated to review the book. But they are saying not until your FOIAs are gone or gone through there that will we even touch this. So what they've come back and said is, well, we'll start reviewing your book, but we're probably going to redact everything. The entire book.
- [50:46]
Michael Isikoff
Did they put that in writing?
- [50:47]
Jerry Watson
Yes.
- [50:48]
Michael Isikoff
Really?
- [50:48]
Jerry Watson
Yes. So their lawyer has said. Their lawyer has said that. Sorry, Bob,
- [50:57]
Bob Drogan
I really hope you get you succeed in getting these FOIAs through. I look forward to reading the original reports and find out what exactly.
- [51:05]
Jerry Watson
And that's important for my book.
- [51:07]
Bob Drogan
Right. And whether it was twisted along the way or amped up at what or how it changed over time because with 90 of them, obviously that story must have moved and moved in different ways. And I would really love to.
- [51:21]
Jerry Watson
Yeah, because.
- [51:21]
Michael Isikoff
And that's why I go that, that's
- [51:23]
Jerry Watson
why I wanted the reporting release, is because you can read these reports, because that's what we investigated. Every claim he made in those reports is what we chased down. And that's why the story is such a fascinating story is how we did that. And it's also distressing about how we were obstructed from doing that because we became kind of the skunk of the garden party when we investigated this on the ground in Iraq. We made everybody mad. CIA, dia, sis, and bnd. Yes. But everybody got mad at us.
- [51:57]
Michael Isikoff
Did you ever meet Curveball?
- [52:00]
Jerry Watson
No. No, I have not met him. Others that I work with have met him.
- [52:05]
Michael Isikoff
How about that doctor who was sent to evaluate him and less who said that he was. He had liquor on his breath early in the morning.
- [52:16]
Jerry Watson
Yeah. He's been out drinking. Yeah. So I didn't meet him. But I. I went to his family's house. I went. When I got to Iraq, as I, as Bob and I have discussed this, I went to Iraq. I was there in June. But of 2003, I went back in September because I had to come back to CIA headquarters to get access to all the information that had been withheld from me. I can't investigate him if I can't have access to all this information. I was still never read into the program, but I got a hold of the files from my colleagues who were the lead analysts on that. It had everything in there. And of course in there is all the things that went bad on Curveball, all the derogatory information. So I used that when I went back in September, and I got back in September on. I mean, I got back in Iraq on September 3rd of 2003. We went to see his immediate supervisor at the engineering center on September 5th. And the guy told us, oh, that guy Rafeed. Well, he walked away from his job at the Engineering center at the very final few days of 1994. And we had no choice but to terminate his employment on the first few days, 1995, when he told us that we knew right then. This is all a fabrication, all of it. Because everything Kerbal reported was after 1995.
- [53:35]
Michael Isikoff
So to wrap up here, a question for both of you. What lessons should we take from this rather amazing story of a fabricator whose claims get used as a basis for going to war?
- [53:52]
Jerry Watson
Okay, I'm very glad you're asking that question, because the point of my book is not to embarrass people over mistakes that were made. I made mistakes. Hell, I thought there was WMD in Iraq before the war, and I believed in Curveball. It wasn't until I started to learn about him after the war and investigate him That I realized all of this fell apart. It was all a fabrication. So the point of my book is to help people learn what happened and why it happened. That analysts became biased toward that judgment. They weren't stupid. The analysts just became biased toward the judgment that Saddam has WMD before the war. It wasn't until we got into Iraq that we learned that was wrong. So I'm hoping this helps people, the general public, to understand how we got into this war and with the most significant source and how it all went wrong. But also I wrote this for my colleagues in the intelligence community, not just in the U.S. but the foreign countries, our allied partners as well, so that they can learn, watch out if this happens to you. Watch for these signals, these signatures that are happening to start going, well, wait a minute. Wait a minute. We've got this great source, but maybe we should look at this source a lot closer before we start using it with the policymakers.
- [55:10]
Michael Isikoff
Bob, I want to come to you on the lessons from all this, but I got one last question for Jerry. In the years since, we have learned that Saddam deliberately wanted us and the rest of the world to believe that he had WMD because he thought that would be a deterrence for the Iranians and overall deterrence, perhaps, for others. And I just wonder, because that's not an argument or a thought that I ever recall being expressed in the run up to the Iraq war. And we have this giant intelligence community with all these analysts. Did anybody ever consider the idea that maybe Saddam was bluffing?
- [56:05]
Jerry Watson
First, let me start off by I disagree with that. Saddam was trying to get out from UN Sanctions. I challenge anybody to show me where he actually said and gave this impression he has wmd. It doesn't make sense. Saddam is trying to get out from under sanctions with the UN. The UN is in his country going around looking for any evidence that he still has wmd. Saddam even threatened his scientists with death if UNSCOM found anything. He didn't want anything retained. He wanted it all destroyed and gone.
- [56:43]
Michael Isikoff
Because every time unscom, then why not come clean, let the inspectors in, show that he had nothing, and put the whole thing to rest?
- [56:52]
Jerry Watson
He did. And what did we come away with? Everybody came back. The UNSCOM inspectors came back and said, we can't find anything. We can find no evidence that he has reconstituted his program. But the analysts, the intelligence analysts are all out there, and the politicians and all these different countries, especially the US Are saying, no, Saddam has reconstituted based on what? Nobody had any evidence except some Fabricators who were giving us this stuff.
- [57:21]
Bob Drogan
So, Mike, I'm going to. I'm going to support Jerry on this one. My memory of. In the sense that in the debriefs of Saddam, it became clear that he thought. He thought we were smarter than we were. He thought that we understood that this was all aimed not at the US but at. about bellowing Iran. And that as Jerry said, the inspectors were all over the country. Right. I remember talking to a guy who was on missile inspectors and he was. They were sent to someplace. Oh, my God, you should see these long things. They're holding them. And they were chicken shacks, you know, chicken chicken coops. Coops, places, whatever. They got they T shirts that said, you know, chickens are missing.
- [58:04]
Jerry Watson
That was our doing that they went to. Because they went to one of Kerbal sites that he said there was a secret laboratory buried under this, hidden under a chicken coop. And they went there and there was no hidden site. So they got the T shirts that said, you know, ballistic Chicken Inspector. And
- [58:23]
Bob Drogan
yeah, so I actually, I agree with him. I think that we. That the.
- [58:28]
Jeff Stein
And.
- [58:28]
Bob Drogan
And it wasn't just CIA, as you remember, Mike, most of the media, everything, everything tank in Washington. You know, Congress fell for it hook, line and sinker. And it was pretty much happening elsewhere in London and in Berlin and Paris and so on. Not on the streets, but in the in.
- [58:46]
Jerry Watson
Right. And if you go look.
- [58:47]
Bob Drogan
And why they believed it?
- [58:49]
Jerry Watson
Because they didn't go look at what the inspectors have said. Right before the war on Movic, inspectors are saying, we are finding nothing. No aluminum tubes, no uranium from Africa, no UAVs carrying. That's after the war. That's on the record. They have come out and said it's not there. And so.
- [59:06]
Bob Drogan
So one of the really instructive things is if I remember this. So I was there the night, the day that Powell spoke. And he gives this incredibly, I was convinced, persuasive presentation. And the Iraqi minister at the un the secretary or ambassador at the UN issues a lengthy statement afterwards that I remember looking at. You know, throw it away. It's useless. It means nothing. If you look at it after. After what we know, it was absolutely dead on spot. Correct. It was absolutely more correct than anything said that day.
- [59:41]
Michael Isikoff
Yeah.
- [59:42]
Bob Drogan
Let me get to your lesson, okay? We're running out of time. There are two lessons that I take from this, okay? One of them is that after 9 11, the take was we failed to connect the dots in Iraq. They made up the dots. That's the problem is they took a very disparate kinds of things and they, they pieced it together because there was no access, it was a denied site after the 1998, after the bombing, and they just sort of filled in the holes with these, these elaborate schemes. That was number one, the number, the number two thing is for the intelligence community, as was with everything else, if you want it bad, you get it bad. Right? They really wanted to find something. They put the word out and every dirt bag out there came in with a story. Chalabi was the biggest one, but, but, you know, that's what they got.
- [60:31]
Michael Isikoff
One follow up to the lessons learned question is how does this apply to our current war in the Middle east against Iran?
- [60:42]
Bob Drogan
So I think, I think here's a real key similarity, which is that in, during the Iraq war, before the Iraq war, the inspectors were kicked out because the Clinton bombed Iraq, right? In 1998, the inspectors are kicked out and CIA goes blind. Everybody goes blind. It's a denied space. And so they make up these stories about what's happening inside, and that leads to the disaster. In the case of Iran, Trump rips up. There's an effective. There's a working agreement, the JPCOA, that the Obama administration signed in 2015, to limit Iran's nuclear program to ship out all the enriched uranium, or 98% of it, and have IAE inspectors and cameras and so on. Trump, for whatever his reasons, decides to rip it up in 2018. The inspectors are still allowed to go for a while. Trump then bombs them. So now, and during that, over this last period of time between 2018, now Iran decides the hell with it. As long as we don't have, the Americans don't have, we don't have this agreement. So they go, they have now 1,000 pounds of in uranium. It used to be a 10% enrichment, now it's a 60%. As far as we know, despite Trump's claims that it was obliterated, it's all still there. So it was in both cases, you know, eras on our side that led to the disasters, disastrous political decisions that led to war.
- [62:07]
Michael Isikoff
Jerry.
- [62:07]
Jerry Watson
Right, right. I mean, look at, look at the similarities between Iraq and Iran. You know, your same buzzwords are being used by the administration. Imminent threat, WMD, regime change. I mean, this is Iraq 2.0. We're doing this again. And we don't know really. I'm not current on what the agency knows in Iran, but IAEA of course, has confirmed they do have some enriched uranium. But, you know, when you have a, you still have a second half of your weapons program. You've got to create a device to be able to use this. We don't know. Does anybody know what they've done on that side?
- [62:51]
Michael Isikoff
Ballistic missiles, maybe? Yes.
- [62:53]
Jerry Watson
But you have to have a warhead, and you have to have a device in that warhead that is a nuclear device. And you have to get from the enriched uranium and a gas into a metal form to form, you know, either a gun assembly device or an implosion device. We don't know anything about that.
- [63:11]
Bob Drogan
So they know something about it. But the estimates are, you know, eight months to a year away. It's always been eight months to a year away. It's been eight months to a year away since 2003.
- [63:22]
Jerry Watson
So, yeah, I'm concerned we've gone down the same road again and the American public has been misled with the same buzzwords we used on Iraq.
- [63:32]
Michael Isikoff
Excellent point. Well, just to wrap up here, Jerry, I want to thank you and Bob for joining us, and I look forward to your book finally clearing all these bureaucratic hurdles so when it comes out, I can put it next to Bob's book on the curveball shelf of my. My library.
- [63:51]
Jerry Watson
All right, sounds good.
- [63:52]
Michael Isikoff
Thanks a lot.
- [63:53]
Jerry Watson
Okay, bye, guys. Thanks, Karen.
- [63:54]
Bob Drogan
Good to see you.
- [63:55]
Jerry Watson
Thank you.
- [63:57]
Jeff Stein
And that's it for this week's Spy Talk. Be sure to check out our complete podcast archive on Apple or wherever you get your podcast. And if you haven't already, do Check out the SpyTalk Co news site on Substack where we offer steady diet of scoops and original analyses from the intersection of intelligence, foreign policy, and military operations. Just Google Spy Talk, you'll quickly find your way there. This edition of the Spy Talk podcast was smoothly produced as always by Kanai and expertly edited by Molly Hawkey for MSW Media. That's it. See you around. I'm Jeff Stein.
- [64:36]
Michael Isikoff
I'm Michael Isagoff.
- [64:37]
Karen Greenberg
I'm Karen Greenberg.
- [64:39]
Jeff Stein
Thanks for listening.
- [64:41]
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- [65:13]
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