Curveball (informant)

Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi (Arabic: رافد أحمد علوان الجنابي, Rāfid Aḥmad Alwān; born 1968), known by the Defense Intelligence Agency cryptonym "Curveball",^[1] is a German citizen who defected from Iraq in 1999, claiming that he had worked as a chemical engineer at a plant that manufactured mobile biological weapon laboratories as part of an Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program.^[2] Alwan's allegations were subsequently shown to be false by the Iraq Survey Group's final report published in 2004.^[3][4]

Despite warnings from the German Federal Intelligence Service and the British Secret Intelligence Service questioning the authenticity of the claims, the US and British governments utilized them to build a rationale for military action in the lead up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, including in the 2003 State of the Union address, where the US President George W. Bush said, "We know that Iraq, in the late 1990s, had several mobile biological weapons labs", and US Secretary of State Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations Security Council, which contained a computer generated image of a mobile biological weapons laboratory.^[2][5] They were suggested to be mobile production trucks for artillery balloons.^[6] On 24 September 2002, the British government published its dossier on the former Iraqi leader's WMD with a personal foreword by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who assured readers Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had continued to produce WMD "beyond doubt".^[7]

On November 4, 2007, the US television news program 60 Minutes revealed Curveball's real identity.^[8] Former CIA official Tyler Drumheller summed up Curveball as "a guy trying to get his green card essentially, in Germany, and playing the system for what it was worth."^[2] Alwan lives in Germany, where he has been granted asylum.^[9]

In a February 2011 interview with British newspaper The Guardian, Alwan "admitted for the first time that he lied about his story, then watched in shock as it was used to justify the war."^[9]