The man who sold the war

You mentioned that the Germans kept changing Curveball's name, and I noticed in the very front of your book that you're not using his real name. Do you know his real name? Did the CIA know his real name?

Well, I know names that I've been given. But in the absence of finding him -- which I was unable to do, I made three trips to Germany -- I can't say for sure that I do. The name I used in the book is the name I was told he used when he first came into Germany. But I never saw any paperwork on that. That was just the name I was given. And I say flat-out [in the book] that was not his name, so I'm trying to be very careful about that. The CIA -- there's an interesting story here. The Germans refused to identify their source to the Americans; in part this was "pride of service," as they called it, like "We have this great source, and you don't, na na na," and in part this was sort of the nature of the business. You as a reporter wouldn't give me your best confidential source, and the CIA certainly doesn't turn over its best sources to the German intelligence, and the Germans feel the same way. And part of it was a deliberate deception on the part of the Germans that I think backfired, in which they claimed that Curveball did not speak English and that he hated Americans. In fact, he spoke much better English than he spoke German, and according to his mother, at least, what Curveball essentially said was that he loved America and he wanted to move here. So the Germans refused to give up his name.

But [the Americans] did eventually track [Curveball] down. And they finally got access to Curveball in Germany. In March of 2004, they were finally allowed to do an interview with him. And that was the first time they ever met him, a year after the war. And it was on the basis of that that they declared him a fabricator.

What did you think of the review of your book that appeared in the Wall Street Journal, written by another important figure in the story of prewar intelligence, [former New York Times reporter] Judy Miller?

Certainly the first half of her review is all positive. I think she gets it, she understands the story. The bottom half of her review ... she does two things there that surprised me.

She's arguing that the problem in the book is that I'm accusing George Tenet and these other guys of lying, but that I don't really identify them and the evidence for that is weak and I should have stayed with the thrust of my story, which is that this is about incompetence at lots of levels at U.S. intelligence agencies. I guess my response to that is, well, [incompetence] is what the book is about; it's not about accusing individuals of lying, it's about a system that was so ham-fisted that people who raised questions were shoved to the side, contradictory evidence was ignored, skeptics were sort of sidelined and the story just snowballed at lots of levels.

I've never quite understood -- this is not just about the review -- the fixation that people have to try and prove that George Bush or George Tenet or somebody else deliberately lied. I mean, they took us into a war based on shockingly insufficient evidence; isn't that bad enough?

And then the second part of Judy's review that surprised me is, in a sense I think she got suckered again. She really fell for George Tenet's argument in his book that this was entirely the fault of [former CIA chief of covert operations in Europe] Tyler Drumheller, that Tyler Drumheller didn't ring the alarm loudly enough or enough times. She says George Tenet says he met with Tyler 22 times between February of 2003 and July of 2004. That may be, but guess what -- that's all after the war. So what's the point? And whether Tyler said something before those 22 meetings is indisputable; there's documentary evidence, there are witnesses, that he repeatedly raised red flags at different stages. He was the only one, he and his aides, the only one in the CIA to get it right. And Tenet -- and, I think, those around him, and apparently Judy -- can't seem to forgive him for that.

I'm very grateful to her for writing this review, I'm very grateful to the Wall Street Journal ... I really don't want to get into a pissing match here with Judy Miller, who was hired to write a review, does a review and is entitled to her opinion ... I think Judy was very unfairly vilified for the reporting she did ... I think her reporting, she honestly did what she thought was right and, like with this thing with Tenet, she was a victim of the sources she had.

When you've got a story this convoluted, how do you as a reporter untangle it?

You know, I look at this case, and I say so in the introduction or the author's note, that this is a "Rashomon" kind of case. "Rashomon" was, you know, a Kurosawa film about a murder, in which the version you get as the viewer is from the four people involved in it, and you get violently different versions of events. And what I was trying to do with this story, as I understood it as I tracked it, was I became increasingly aware that it depended on where you sat as to how you viewed this case as it was developing.

The infighting within the CIA turned, really, in some cases, on an understanding of a word. It was so odd. The Directorate of Operations, the D.O., which is the clandestine service, for them when you say [a source] is "credible," that means that person has been vetted, his information is reliable, he's a known source, he's a proven person who is trustworthy. But for the analysts who are coming out of the CIA's Directorate of Intelligence, the D.I., the word "credible" meant that the story itself, that is, the information, was plausible. And that's two very different things. So they were sometimes talking and speaking the same language in the same meetings, and yet taking away very different understandings about what was going on. And the D.O. side was furious, just absolutely jumping up and down, trying to stop this case or at least raise warnings that Curveball had not been vetted, he was not credible in their eyes. And the D.I. side, which ultimately won the battle, was saying, "Hey, he's credible, his story makes sense, everything we can look at here makes sense to us, so we're going to go with it."

So I'm looking at this and trying to meld these various points of view and tell the story as it was happening in real time. So that we have some understanding of how something this awful, something so truly tragic, could happen. And frankly, I don't see anything out there in the various reforms that would stop this from happening again -- that's the real sad part of this. This was about leaders who were trying to please the president, and there was no attempt to stop it.

Every time there were whistle-blowers in the organizations, the CIA or wherever, who tried to raise red flags, they were either shut down by their supervisors, who basically said it's not your problem, don't worry about it, somebody else must know about this. Or else, in a couple of cases after the war, when people tried to bring truth to power to make people understand, they were literally treated like heretics. It was like a cult over there. They were banished. One guy was told -- it was like the Soviet Union -- he was told he needed psychiatric counseling. He went into work one day, and he was told he had a new office. He was put in the visitors' room, with no secure computer and no phone. Another guy, he was banished to what he called Siberia, an office at the end of a long corridor where there was construction going on. That's their way of dealing with people.

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