page_title: Curveball (informant)
hierarchical_section_title: Curveball (informant)
caption_attribution_description: English: Colin Powell's UN presentation slide showing alleged mobile production facility for biological weapons. (Subequently shown to be an incorrect allegation.) Speech title: Remarks to the United Nations Security Council, Secretary Colin L. Powell, February 5, 2003 Slide title: detail of where material is carried in mobile production facilities for bio weapons work
context_page_description: Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, known by the Defense Intelligence Agency cryptonym "Curveball", 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 program. Alwan's allegations were subsequently shown to be false by the Iraq Survey Group's final report published in 2004.
  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 utilised 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 President Bush said "we know that Iraq, in the late 1990s, had several mobile biological weapons labs", and Colin Powell's presentation to the UN Security Council, which contained a computer generated image of a mobile biological weapons laboratory. They were suggested to be mobile production trucks for artillery balloons.
context_section_description: Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi (Arabic: رافد أحمد علوان الجنابي‎, Rāfid Aḥmad Alwān; born 1968), known by the Defense Intelligence Agency cryptonym "Curveball", 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 program. Alwan's allegations were subsequently shown to be false by the Iraq Survey Group's final report published in 2004.
  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 utilised 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 President Bush said "we know that Iraq, in the late 1990s, had several mobile biological weapons labs", and Colin Powell's presentation to the UN Security Council, which contained a computer generated image of a mobile biological weapons laboratory. They were suggested to be mobile production trucks for artillery balloons. On 24 September 2002, the British government published its dossier on the former Iraqi leader's WMD with a personal foreword by Blair, who assured readers Saddam Hussein had continued to produce WMD "beyond doubt".
  On November 4, 2007, 60 Minutes revealed Curveball's real identity. 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."  He lives in Germany, where he has been granted asylum.
  In a February 2011 interview with The Guardian he "admitted for the first time that he lied about his story, then watched in shock as it was used to justify the war."
caption: Computer-generated image of alleged mobile biological weapons laboratory, presented by Colin Powell at the UN Security Council.
exif: {}