page_title: Curveball (informant)
section_title: Claims and background
hierarchical_section_title: Curveball (informant) / Claims and background
caption_attribution_description: English: At the UN, Colin Powell holds a model vial of anthrax, while arguing that Iraq is likely to possess WMDs.
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 studied chemical engineering in university but received low marks. He also worked at the Babel television production company in Baghdad, which was owned by Saddam Hussein's son Uday; sometime after leaving his job, a warrant was issued for his arrest because of theft from the same company.
  Curveball's story began in November 1999 when Alwan, then in his early 30s, arrived at Munich's Franz Josef Strauss Airport with a tourist visa. Upon entering the country he applied for political asylum because he had embezzled Iraqi government money and faced prison or worse if sent home. The German refugee system sent him to Zirndorf, a refugee center near Nuremberg.
  After he arrived at the refugee center he changed his story. Alwan's new story included that after he had graduated at the top of his chemical engineering class at Baghdad University in 1994, he worked for "Dr. Germ," British-trained microbiologist Rihab Rashid Taha to lead a team that built mobile labs to produce lethal biological WMD.
  The Germans listened to his claims and debriefed him starting in December 1999, continuing to September 2001. Although the Americans did not have "direct access" to Curveball, information collected by the BND debriefing team was later passed on in part to the Defense Intelligence Agency in the United States. As an incentive to keep supplying information to German intelligence, Curveball had been granted asylum, as he had applied earlier in 1999 and failed. He had enough money that he did not have to work. He gave many hours of testimony about Iraq's WMD program and in particular its mobile weapons laboratories. Despite CIA technicians and weapon experts finding major flaws and inconsistencies with the designs and systems he asserted the military was developing, this information made it to the American government and although there were wide doubts and questions about the claimed informant's reliability and background, assertions attributed to Curveball claiming that Iraq was creating biological agents in mobile weapons laboratories to elude inspectors appeared in more than 112 United States government reports between January 2000 and September 2001. His assertions eventually made it into United States Secretary of State Colin Powell's address on February 5, 2003 to the United Nations detailing Iraq's weapons programs.
  According to a Danish state TV documentary, DR1 Dokumentaren "Manden som løj verden i krig" broadcast on April 21, 2010, Curveball was still living in Germany under protection from the German police. Danish TV filmed Rafid and recorded clips of conversation with him, before he called the police and had the TV-crew banned from his neighbourhood.
caption: February 5, 2003 - United States Secretary of State Colin Powell holding a model vial of anthrax while giving the presentation to the United Nations Security Council.
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