US-UK Built “Replica” Iraqi Dirty-Bomb and Germ Labs Before Invasion

Curious case of the dead scientist and the bomb experiment
Ian Cobain
The Guardian,
Monday March 24 2008

A mysterious bomb-making experiment that ended with the accidental death of a government scientist has remained an official secret for more than five years, leaving his family in the dark about what went wrong. Terry Jupp, a scientist with the Ministry of Defence, was engulfed in flames during a joint Anglo-American counter-terrorism project intended to discover more about al-Qaida's bomb-making capacities.

There has been no inquest into his death, as the coroner has been waiting for the MoD to disclose information about the incident. An attempt to prosecute the scientist's manager for manslaughter ended when prosecutors said they were withdrawing the charge, but said the case was too "sensitive" to explain that decision in open court.

The Guardian has established that Jupp was a member of a small team of British and US scientists making bombs from ingredients of the sort that terrorists could obtain. There is also evidence pointing to experiments to discover more about radiological dispersal devices - so-called dirty bombs - which use conventional explosives to scatter radioactive material.

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Crown Prosecution Service sources said the case was hampered because one of the American scientists refused to testify, while other officials said there was concern in both countries that a trial could expose the nature of the experiment.

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Asked whether it has carried out such experiments at Shoeburyness, the MoD would say only: "The Dstl is involved in classified work that is of national importance, protecting UK armed forces and the public from very real threats." What is clear is that Shoeburyness has hosted some highly unusual activities involving radioactive material.

AFTER THE WAR: BIOLOGICAL WARFARE; Subject of Anthrax Inquiry Tied to Anti-Germ Training
THIS ARTICLE WAS REPORTED AND WRITTEN BY WILLIAM J. BROAD, DAVID JOHNSTON AND JUDITH MILLER.
Published: July 2, 2003

Three years ago, the United States began a secret project to train Special Operations units to detect and disarm mobile germ factories of the sort that Iraq and some other countries were suspected of building, according to administration officials and experts in germ weaponry.

The heart of the effort, these officials said, was a covert plan to construct a mobile germ plant, real in all its parts but never actually ''plugged in'' to make weapons. In the months before the war against Iraq, American commandos trained on this factory.

The tale of the mobile unit provides a glimpse into one of the most secretive of military and intelligence worlds, that of germ warfare defense. But here, two stories intersect. The first involves this previously unknown aspect of the Iraq war. The second involves the investigation into who sent letters containing anthrax that killed five people in the United States in late 2001.

Officials familiar with the secret project say that to design an American version of a mobile germ unit, the government turned to Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, then a rising star in the world of biological defense but more recently publicly identified by the Justice Department as ''a person of interest'' in the anthrax investigation.

It was unclear why investigators focused on Dr. Hatfill. Officials now say a major reason he came under suspicion was his work on the mobile unit.

Dr. Hatfill has been subjected to greater scrutiny than anyone else in the anthrax investigation, but the government has brought no charges. He has repeatedly denied any role in the attacks and has said he knows nothing about anthrax production.

Washington, DC, November 5, 2007 - CBS News’ 60 Minutes exposure last night of the Iraqi agent known as CURVEBALL has put a major aspect of the Bush administration’s case for war against Iraq back under the spotlight.

Rafid Ahmed Alwan’s charges that Iraq possessed stockpiles of biological weapons and the mobile plants to produce them formed a critical part of the U.S. justification for the invasion in Spring 2003. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell’s celebrated and globally televised briefing to the United Nations Security Council on February 5, 2003, relied on CURVEBALL as the main source of intelligence on the biological issue.

Today the National Security Archive posts the available public record on CURVEBALL’s information derived from declassified sources and former officials’ accounts.

While most of the documentary record on the issue remains classified, the materials published here today underscore the precarious nature of the intelligence gathering and analytical process, and point to the existence of doubts about CURVEBALL’s authenticity before his charges were featured in the Bush administration’s public claims about Iraq.

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The intelligence backstory needs a brief sketch here because it bears on the question of CURVEBALL’s veracity. Alwan arrived in Munich from North Africa in November 1999, requesting political asylum. That automatically led to interviews with authorities and vetting by the German foreign intelligence service Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND). It was the BND to whom he told his tale of Iraqi weapons plants. That service in turn shared its reporting with the DIA in the Spring of 2000. The DIA subsequently shared the information with CIA.

The CIA’s Directorate of Operations is responsible for all intelligence collection of this type, and the presence of this source in Germany placed responsibility with the European Division chief, Tyler Drumheller. In his memoir, Drumheller recounts that he first heard of CURVEBALL in the fall of 2002 and made inquiries with the German liaison representative in Washington, who privately warned him of doubts about the source. Both John McLaughlin and George Tenet, in statements made after publication of the Drumheller memoir, deny that anyone made them aware of BND doubts on CURVEBALL in late September or October, when the division chief asserts that this exchange took place. Tenet in his own memoir adds that the BND representative, asked several years later about his 2002 meeting with Drumheller, denied having called CURVEBALL a fabricator, simply warning that he was a single source whose information could not be verified. (Note 7)

According to various sources, by late December the CIA was making official inquiries of the BND as to whether the U.S.—and the White House—could use the material. Drumheller’s aide, Margaret Henoch, expressed her own concerns in an e-mail circulated within CIA headquarters. Deputy Director of Central Intelligence John McLaughlin ordered subordinates to meet and reconcile their positions on CURVEBALL and his information. Analysts at CIA’s prime analytical unit in this area, the Weapons, Intelligence, Nonproliferation, and Arms Control Center (WINPAC) criticized the Directorate of Operations for questioning this information. WINPAC had already used it for its contributions to the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraqi weapons programs and by now had a stake in CURVEBALL’s veracity. (Note 8) The meeting resulted in an impasse between CIA officers from the different units.

On December 20 a cable from the CIA station chief in Berlin arrived at headquarters. It contained a letter to Director Tenet from BND President August Henning saying that CURVEBALL refused to go public himself, and reiterating that BND would not permit direct American access to the source. According to Tenet, the cable went to Drumheller and was never forwarded to the CIA director. The station chief’s requests for a reply went unanswered. Tenet writes, “I had never seen the German letter but had simply been told that the German BND had cleared our use of the Curve Ball material.” (Note 9)

Division chief Drumheller raised the CURVEBALL credibility issue again in January after seeing a draft of the Bush State of the Union address with its claim of Iraqi mobile weapons plants. According to his account, he spoke to colleagues at the CIA’s Counterproliferation Division, wondering what data other than the exile’s reporting WINPAC might have to back such a claim, only to be assured there was none. Drumheller had Henoch prepare an e-mail for McLaughlin’s executive assistant summarizing the problems with the CURVEBALL information, and notes that McLaughlin later queried WINPAC’s senior analyst on this subject about the questions raised. Drumheller indicates that the CIA deputy director received “robust assurances.” (Note 10) Drumheller also told the Silberman-Robb Commission that he had attempted to delete the passage about the mobile weapons plants from the State of the Union speech.

According to Drumheller, he asked to see McLaughlin directly. “To my astonishment,” Drumheller recounts, “he appeared to have no idea that there were any problems with Curveball. ‘Oh my! I hope that’s not true,’ he said, after I outlined the issues and said the source was probably a fabricator.” (Note 11) McLaughlin, in his statement in response (see below), repeatedly declares that “no one stepped forward” to object, and that “I am equally at a loss to understand why they passed up so many opportunities in the weeks prior to and after the Powell speech” to warn about CURVEBALL. McLaughlin did not say anything in his statement about a specific meeting with Drumheller, and he told the Silberman-Robb Commission that he was not aware of the CIA meeting that discussed CURVEBALL’S bona fides even though it was called by his own executive assistant, chaired by that officer, and though the executive assistant afterwards wrote a memorandum summarizing the meeting that was circulated to participants. McLaughlin says he never saw a meeting record. He also did not recall seeing Drumheller, and apparently no meeting with Drumheller was noted on McLaughlin’s daily calendar. Other CIA officials, however, recall hearing the result of the meeting at the time, and apparently exchanges of emails involved more than one of McLaughlin’s assistants. And McLaughlin told the Silberman-Robb Commission that he did meet the WINPAC analyst to hear her assurances. (Note 12)

The sessions at CIA headquarters where the Powell speech itself was vetted involved both John McLaughlin and George Tenet, as well as McLaughlin’s executive assistant, who is recorded at one point asking for more assurances from CIA’s Berlin station chief on the CURVEBALL material. Throughout the period, Berlin’s responses were instead cautionary.

Finally it all came down to the night before Powell’s speech. Powell and Tenet were already in New York engaging in final rehearsals. That night there was a phone call between Tenet and Drumheller. Both individuals at least agree that a conversation took place, though Tenet remembers an evening call where he merely asked for a phone number, while Drumheller says he specifically warned Tenet against using the CURVEBALL material and the director replied something like, “yeah, yeah.” (Note 13) The next day Powell went ahead with the allegations. Tenet had not taken any of CURVEBALL’s claims out of the speech.

At the CIA’s Counterproliferation Division, where officers sat rapt before the television watching Powell speak, with Tenet seated behind him, there was dismay on several counts. One of them was CURVEBALL. Valerie Plame Wilson recounts, “Although an official ‘burn notice’ . . . did not go out until June 2004, it was widely known that CURVEBALL was not a credible source and that there were serious problems with his reporting.” (Note 14)

/... http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB234/index.htm

Overview

Coalition forces have uncovered the strongest evidence to date that Iraq was hiding a biological warfare program.

* Kurdish forces in late April 2003 took into custody a specialized tractor-trailer near Mosul and subsequently turned it over to US military control.
* The US military discovered a second mobile facility equipped to produce BW agent in early May at the al-Kindi Research, Testing, Development, and Engineering facility in Mosul. Although this second trailer appears to have been looted, the remaining equipment, including the fermentor, is in a configuration similar to the first plant.
* US forces in late April also discovered a mobile laboratory truck in Baghdad. The truck is a toxicology laboratory from the 1980s that could be used to support BW or legitimate research.

The design, equipment, and layout of the trailer found in late April is strikingly similar to descriptions provided by a source who was a chemical engineer that managed one of the mobile plants. Secretary of State Powell's description of the mobile plants in his speech in February 2003 to the United Nations (see inset below) was based primarily on reporting from this source.

Secretary Powell's Speech to the UN

Secretary Powell's speech to the UN in February 2003 detailed Iraq's mobile BW program, and was primarily based on information from a source who was a chemical engineer that managed one of the mobile plants.

* Iraq's mobile BW program began in the mid-1990s—this is reportedly when the units were being designed.
* Iraq manufactured mobile trailers and railcars to produce biological agents, which were designed to evade UN weapons inspectors. Agent production reportedly occurred Thursday night through Friday when the UN did not conduct inspections in observance of the Muslim holy day.
* An accident occurred in 1998 during a production run, which killed 12 technicians—an indication that Iraq was producing a BW agent at that time.

Analysis of the trailers reveals that they probably are second- or possibly third-generation designs of the plants described by the source. The newer version includes system improvements, such as cooling units, apparently engineered to solve production problems described by the source that were encountered with the older design.

* The manufacturer's plates on the fermentors list production dates of 2002 and 2003—suggesting Iraq continued to produce these units as late as this year.

Prewar Assessment

The source reported to us that Iraq in 1995 planned to construct seven sets of mobile production plants—six on semitrailers and one on railroad cars—to conceal BW agent production while appearing to cooperate with UN inspectors. Some of this information was corroborated by another source.

* One of the semitrailer plants reportedly produced BW agents as early as July 1997.
* The design for a more concealable and efficient two-trailer system was reportedly completed in May 1998 to compensate for difficulties in operating the original, three-trailer plant.
* Iraq employed extensive denial and deception in this program, including disguising from its own workers the production process, equipment, and BW agents produced in the trailers.

Plants Consistent With Intelligence Reporting

Examination of the trailers reveals that all of the equipment is permanently installed and interconnected, creating an ingeniously simple, self-contained bioprocessing system. Although the equipment on the trailer found in April 2003 was partially damaged by looters, it includes a fermentor capable of producing biological agents and support equipment such as water supply tanks, an air compressor, a water chiller, and a system for collecting exhaust gases.

The trailers probably are part of a two- or possibly three-trailer unit. Both trailers we have found probably are designed to produce BW agent in unconcentrated liquid slurry. The missing trailer or trailers from one complete unit would be equipped for growth media preparation and postharvest processing and, we would expect, have equipment such as mixing tanks, centrifuges, and spray dryers.

* These other units that we have not yet found would be needed to prepare and sterilize the media and to concentrate and possibly dry the agent, before the agent is ready for introduction into a delivery system, such as bulk-filled munitions. Before the Gulf war, Iraq bulk filled missile and rocket warheads, aerial bombs, artillery shells, and spray tanks.

Prewar Iraqi Mobile Program Sources

The majority of our information on Iraq's mobile program was obtained from a chemical engineer that managed one of the plants. Three other sources, however, corroborated information related to the mobile BW project.

* The second source was a civil engineer who reported on the existence of at least one truck-transportable facility in December 2000 at the Karbala ammunition depot.
* The third source reported in 2002 that Iraq had manufactured mobile systems for the production of single-cell protein on trailers and railcars but admitted that they could be used for BW agent production.
* The fourth source, a defector from the Iraq Intelligence Service, reported that Baghdad manufactured mobile facilities that we assess could be used for the research of BW agents, vice production.

/... https://www.cia.gov/library/reports/general-reports-1/iraqi_mobile_plants/index.html#01

The case began when Curveball, a chemical engineer from Baghdad, first showed up in a German refugee camp in 1998. By early 2000, he was working with Germany's Federal Intelligence Service, known as the BND, in exchange for an immigration card.

The Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency, which handled Iraqi refugees in Germany, furnished the engineer with the Curveball code-name. He soon began providing technical drawings and detailed information indicating that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein secretly had built lethal germ factories on trains and trucks.

But the DIA never sought to check his background or information. Instead, the commission found, the DIA saw itself as a conduit for German intelligence, and funneled nearly 100 Curveball reports to the CIA between January 2000 and September 2001.

Except for a brief meeting between Curveball and a DIA medical technician in May 2000, German authorities refused to let U.S. intelligence officials interview their source until March 2004, a year after the war began.

But warnings mounted from the start.

After the meeting in May 2000, the DIA medical technician questioned the validity of Curveball's information. Another warning came in April 2002, when a foreign spy service told the CIA it had "doubts about Curveball's reliability," the commission reported.

With skepticism rising about Curveball, Drumheller said he arranged a lunch meeting with a German counterpart at Pavitt's behest in late September or early October 2002 to ask for an American meeting with Curveball.

By then, Drumheller said, German intelligence officials were increasingly wary of Curveball. But he said they didn't want to acknowledge their doubts in public and risk embarrassment.

Drumheller said the German intelligence officer used the lunch to convey a stark warning: "Don't even ask to see him because he's a fabricator and he's crazy."

Drumheller said he passed that warning up to Pavitt's office. He said he also informed another senior official in the European division and sent a notice to WINPAC, where the chief bioweapons analyst was considered the Curveball expert.

One of the most painful errors, however, concerned Iraq's biological weapons programs. Virtually all of the Intelligence Community's information on Iraq's alleged mobile biological weapons facilities was supplied by a source, codenamed "Curveball," who was a fabricator. We discuss at length how Curveball came to play so prominent a role in the Intelligence Community's biological weapons assessments. It is, at bottom, a story of Defense Department collectors who abdicated their responsibility to vet a critical source; of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analysts who placed undue emphasis on the source's reporting because the tales he told were consistent with what they already believed; and, ultimately, of Intelligence Community leaders who failed to tell policymakers about Curveball's flaws in the weeks before war.

Curveball was not the only bad source the Intelligence Community used. Even more indefensibly, information from a source who was already known to be a fabricator found its way into finished pre-war intelligence products, including the October 2002 NIE. This intelligence was also allowed into Secretary of State Colin Powell's speech to the United Nations Security Council, despite the source having been officially discredited almost a year earlier. This communications breakdown could have been avoided if the Intelligence Community had a uniform requirement to reissue or recall reporting from a source whose information turns out to be fabricated, so that analysts do not continue to rely on an unreliable report. In the absence of such a system, however, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), which disseminated the report in the first place, had a responsibility to make sure that its bad source did not continue to pollute policy judgments; DIA did not fulfill this obligation.

Another source, associated with the Iraqi National Congress (INC) (hereinafter "the INC source"), was brought to the attention of DIA by Washington-based representatives of the INC. Like Curveball, his reporting was handled by Defense HUMINT. He provided one report that Iraq had decided in 1996 to establish mobile laboratories for BW agents to evade inspectors. Shortly after Defense HUMINT's initial debriefing of the INC source in February 2002, however, a foreign liaison service and the CIA's Directorate of Operations (DO) judged him to be a fabricator and recommended that Defense HUMINT issue a notice to that effect, which Defense HUMINT did in May 2002. Senior policymakers were informed that the INC source and his reporting were unreliable.

In November 2007, Stephen Cambone, the controversial undersecretary of defense for intelligence in the Donald Rumsfeld-led Pentagon, became vice president for strategy of QinetiQ North America, a subsidiary of the United Kingdom-based defense contractor QinetiQ (Washington Technology, November 12, 2007). Cambone served under Rumsfeld until December 2006, when he resigned shortly after his boss stepped down. Before joining the George W. Bush administration in 2001, Cambone had collaborated with a number of hardline and neoconservative groups including the National Institute for Public Policy (NIPP) and the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), shaping policies that would later be championed by the administration after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Contracts for QinetiQ

QinetiQ was created in 2001, having evolved out of a research arm of the British Ministry of Defense (MOD) called the Defense Evaluation Research Agency. After the MOD partially privatized the agency in 2001, the U.S.-based Carlyle Group purchased a large stake in the new company (see BBC, November 23, 2007).

In early 2008, two months after Cambone took the position at QinetiQ North America, it was awarded a lucrative contract by the Pentagon’s Counter-Intelligence Field Activity office (CIFA)—an office that Cambone had created while in the Bush administration. In a widely cited article for CorpWatch, investigative journalist Tim Shorrock reported that as part of the five-year, $30 million contract, QinetiQ’s Mission Solutions Group is to provide unspecified “security services.” Wrote Shorrock: “The new CIFA contract comes on the heels of a series of QinetiQ deals inked with the Pentagon in the booming new business of ‘network centric warfare’

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Controversies in the Bush Administration

In 2003, Rumsfeld appointed Cambone the first-ever undersecretary of defense for intelligence—the so-called defense intelligence czar. The move sparked criticism among some analysts, who felt that the Pentagon was inappropriately expanding its range of activities. At the time, John Prados of the National Security Archive argued that the new position would "allow the Defense Department to consolidate its intelligence programs in a way that could undermine CIA head George Tenet's role" (TomPaine.com, April 14, 2003).

Summarizing Cambone’s first three years as undersecretary, the New York Times reported: “Overseeing Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld’s drive to broaden the military's clandestine reconnaissance and man-hunting missions is Stephen A. Cambone, the Pentagon's intelligence czar and one of Mr. Rumsfeld's most trusted aides, whose low public profile masks his influence as one of the nation's most powerful intelligence officials. Since his office was created three years ago, Mr. Cambone and his deputy, Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin, a former commander of the Army's elite Delta Force, have carried out a wide-ranging restructuring of the Pentagon's sprawling intelligence bureaucracy.… In one of the boldest new missions, the Pentagon has sharply increased the number of clandestine teams of Defense Intelligence Agency personnel and Special Operations forces conducting secret counterterrorism missions in Iraq, Afghanistan and other foreign countries.

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Even before his involvement in the prison abuse scandal, Cambone had become a target of criticism, in part because of his close relationship with Rumsfeld. Tom Donnelly, a writer based at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote in the Weekly Standard that, "fairly or not, Cambone has long been viewed as Rumsfeld's henchman, almost universally loathed—but more important, feared—by the services" (Weekly Standard, September 2002). The Washington Monthly reported in late 2001: "It would be hard to exaggerate how much Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his top aide Stephen Cambone were hated within the Pentagon prior to September 11. Among other mistakes, Rumsfeld and Cambone foolishly excluded top civilian and military leaders when planning an overhaul of the military to meet new threats, thereby ensuring even greater bureaucratic resistance. According to the Washington Post, an Army general joked to a Hill staffer that 'if he had one round left in his revolver, he would take out Steve Cambone.'

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Policy Work and Advocacy
A longtime proponent of missile defense programs, Cambone began his career as a policy expert at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the early 1980s. In 1986, he became the deputy director of strategic analysis for SRS Technologies, a defense contractor that regularly receives lucrative contracts for a number of defense programs, including missile defense (for more on SRS contracts, see its Technologies' Defense Systems Directorate web page).

After the presidential election of George H.W. Bush, Cambone was appointed director of strategic defense policy, working under then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney.

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During the Clinton presidency, Cambone worked as staff director on two commissions chaired by Rumsfeld, on missile defense and space weapons, which both sparked criticism because of their controversial conclusions on U.S. strategic vulnerability to ballistic missiles and on space-based defense capabilities. (Also serving on the Rumsfeld commissions were Paul Wolfowitz, Malcolm Wallop, William Schneider Jr., and James Woolsey.) In the tradition of Team B, the unstated agenda of these commissions appeared to be turning up pressure on the Clinton administration to support new weapons programs and substantially increase military spending (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, November/December 1998).

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While working for the commissions, Cambone participated in two study groups sponsored by PNAC and NIPP. NIPP's 2001 report, Rationale and Requirements for Nuclear Forces and Arms Control, and PNAC's Rebuilding America's Defenses, seem to have guided the defense policies of the George W. Bush administration with respect to nuclear policy, national security strategy, and military transformation (see Michelle Ciarrocca and William D. Hartung, Axis Of Influence: Behind the Bush Administration's Missile Defense Revival, World Policy Institute, July 2002).

Affiliations

National Defense University, Institute for National Strategic Studies: Former Director of Research
Center for Strategic and International Studies: Senior Fellow for Political-Military Studies, 1993-1998
National Institute for Public Policy (NIPP): Former Study Participant
Project for the New American Century: Former Project Participant
Government Service

Department of Defense: Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, 2003-2006; Director for Program Analysis & Evaluation, 2002-2003; Principal Deputy Secretary for Policy, 2001-2002; Special Assistant to the Secretary and Deputy Secretary, 2001; Director of the Strategic Defense Policy Office, Bush Sr. Administration
Commission to Assess U.S. National Security Space Management and Organization: Staff Director, 2000
Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States: Staff Director, 1998
Los Alamos National Laboratory: Former Staffer (1982-1986)

Private Sector

QinetiQ North America: Vice President for Strategy, 2007-
SRS Technologies: Deputy Director of Strategic Analysis, 1986-1990
Education

Catholic University: B.A.
Claremont University Graduate School: M.A., Ph.D.



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By 1955-1956 research at both Porton Down Establishments had become solely defensive and Britain abandoned moves to establish any offensive capabilities. Work continued on biological defence and an increasing amount of civil microbiological work. By the 1970s it was decided that a reduced programme of biological defence work should be started by a small team transformed from the Establishment to the Chemical Defence Establishment and that the Microbiological Research Establishment should be placed under the aegis of a civil authority. The Establishment closed as a Ministry of Defence facility on 31 March 1979 and re-opened the next day as the Centre for Applied Microbiology and Research (CAMR) within the Public Health Laboratory Service (PHLS). In April 1994, CAMR moved from PHLS centre to the Microbiological Research Authority (MRA), reporting to the Department of Health and still continuing the programme in civil microbiological research started in 1979. Thus, by 1991 the Chemical Defence Establishment became the Chemical and Biological Defence Establishment and was one of the six new Defence Support Agencies. In 1995, the Establishment became part of the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA), an executive agency of MOD evolved in 1994 from proposals of the “Front Line First” Defence Cost Studies. In 2001, DERA split into two organisations: QinetiQ, a private company, and DSTL (Defence Science and Technology Laboratory), which remains an agency of MOD. Porton Down is now known as DSTL, Porton Down.

NB The above text is taken from the article “Porton Down: a brief history” by G B Carter, Porton Down’s official historian. A more in-depth account can be found in Mr Carter’s book Chemical and Biological at Porton Down 1916-2000 (The Stationery Office, 2000).

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At the beginning of this sordid affair is Steve Cambone, Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence. Cambone was Rumsfeld's closest lieutenant, and in command of the unit within the Pentagon, the Office of Special Plans (OSP) that was later shown to have a central role in the "stovepiping" of cherry-picked intelligence to Cheney's White House Iraq Group (WHIG) in the deception campaign that created the casus belli for the Iraq invasion. http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title...

Powell, Cheney and Bush went on to repeat Cambone and Petraeus' claims despite the DIA's finding that trailers had no role as biolabs.

In late May, 2003, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) concluded that the trailers were not biolabs. The resulting report was circulated at high levels in Washington, and then classified. It's findings were not released until October 2004, when they were made part of the final report of the Iraq Survey Group. For more than a year, Dick Cheney, George Tenet, Steven Cambone, and others continued to assert that the trailers were proof that Iraq was developing biological weapons. That disinformation had originally been provided by "Curveball", an Iraqi defector tied closely to Ahmad Chalabi's INC organization. It now appears that the DIA technical experts report was suppressed, and the Administration instead relied on a rival group of analysts and the findings of Petraeus' own "chemical experts" to make their case about the trailers.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...
Lacking Biolabs, Trailers Carried Case for War
Administration Pushed Notion of Banned Iraqi Weapons Despite Evidence to Contrary

By Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 12, 2006; A01


On May 29, 2003, 50 days after the fall of Baghdad, President Bush proclaimed a fresh victory for his administration in Iraq: Two small trailers captured by U.S. and Kurdish troops had turned out to be long-sought mobile "biological laboratories." He declared, "We have found the weapons of mass destruction."

The claim, repeated by top administration officials for months afterward, was hailed at the time as a vindication of the decision to go to war. But even as Bush spoke, U.S. intelligence officials possessed powerful evidence that it was not true.

A secret fact-finding mission to Iraq -- not made public until now -- had already concluded that the trailers had nothing to do with biological weapons. Leaders of the Pentagon-sponsored mission transmitted their unanimous findings to Washington in a field report on May 27, 2003, two days before the president's statement.

The three-page field report and a 122-page final report three weeks later were stamped "secret" and shelved. Meanwhile, for nearly a year, administration and intelligence officials continued to publicly assert that the trailers were weapons factories.

The authors of the reports were nine U.S. and British civilian experts -- scientists and engineers with extensive experience in all the technical fields involved in making bioweapons -- who were dispatched to Baghdad by the Defense Intelligence Agency for an analysis of the trailers. Their actions and findings were described to a Washington Post reporter in interviews with six government officials and weapons experts who participated in the mission or had direct knowledge of it.

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The contents of the final report, "Final Technical Engineering Exploitation Report on Iraqi Suspected Biological Weapons-Associated Trailers," remain classified. But interviews reveal that the technical team was unequivocal in its conclusion that the trailers were not intended to manufacture biological weapons. Those interviewed took care not to discuss the classified portions of their work.

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Primary Piece of Evidence

The story of the technical team and its reports adds a new dimension to the debate over the U.S. government's handling of intelligence related to banned Iraqi weapons programs. The trailers -- along with aluminum tubes acquired by Iraq for what was claimed to be a nuclear weapons program -- were primary pieces of evidence offered by the Bush administration before the war to support its contention that Iraq was making weapons of mass destruction.

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Spokesmen for the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency declined to comment on the specific findings of the technical report because it remains classified. A spokesman for the DIA asserted that the team's findings were neither ignored nor suppressed, but were incorporated in the work of the Iraqi Survey Group, which led the official search for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The survey group's final report in September 2004 -- 15 months after the technical report was written -- said the trailers were "impractical" for biological weapons production and were "almost certainly intended" for manufacturing hydrogen for weather balloons.



What appears to have happened is that the DIA report came to a conclusion that contradicted the very public statements that had been made by Petraeus, Cambone and others, so it was stamped secret, and shelved until someone gave it to David Kay, who made it part of the final version of Iraq Survey Group report released, 15 months later. Whoever ordered that report classified and buried, also withheld it for several months from Kay, head of the US Government's investigation into alleged Iraqi WMD programs.

Is it conceivable that Gen. Petraeus was unaware of the DIA report and the controversy over the purpose of the trailers? Not particularly likely, as he was in charge of intelligence for the Army group in Iraq, a role that Cambone had overall within DoD as Assistant Secretary for Intelligence. Petraeus was in the midst of a heated controversy about the trailers, and he took sides. That Post report also tells us:


Intelligence analysts involved in high-level discussions about the trailers noted that the technical team was among several groups that analyzed the suspected mobile labs throughout the spring and summer of 2003. Two teams of military experts who viewed the trailers soon after their discovery concluded that the facilities were weapons labs, a finding that strongly influenced views of intelligence officials in Washington, the analysts said. "It was hotly debated, and there were experts making arguments on both sides," said one former senior official who spoke on the condition that he not be identified.


Note Patraeus's statement that his own technicians looked at the trailer and four days later, the General said he spoke with "experts". Petraeus then endorsed that side's position, announcing that there was a "reasonable degree of certainty that this is in fact a mobile biological agent production trailer."

In effect, Petreaus repeated what he was told on May 13. Who were these unnamed "experts"? One can safely conclude that they are the very same "teams of military experts" whose false findings about Iraq WMDs were embraced by the Administration. At the same time, Petraeus lent his weight in favor of that position, establishing his credentials as a reliable member of Cambone's team. This would later be rewarded. According to The Post, the CIA also jumped on the bandwagon, endorsing the Cambone-Petraeus findings:


The technical team's findings had no apparent impact on the intelligence agencies' public statements on the trailers. A day after the team's report was transmitted to Washington -- May 28, 2003 -- the CIA publicly released its first formal assessment of the trailers, reflecting the views of its Washington analysts. That white paper, which also bore the DIA seal, contended that U.S. officials were "confident" that the trailers were used for "mobile biological weapons production."

Throughout the summer and fall of 2003, the trailers became simply "mobile biological laboratories" in speeches and press statements by administration officials. In late June, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell declared that the "confidence level is increasing" that the trailers were intended for biowarfare. In September, Vice President Cheney pronounced the trailers to be "mobile biological facilities," and said they could have been used to produce anthrax or smallpox.

By autumn, leaders of the Iraqi Survey Group were publicly expressing doubts about the trailers in news reports. David Kay, the group's first leader, told Congress on Oct. 2 that he had found no banned weapons in Iraq and was unable to verify the claim that the disputed trailers were weapons labs. Still, as late as February 2004, then-CIA Director George J. Tenet continued to assert that the mobile-labs theory remained plausible. Although there was "no consensus" among intelligence officials, the trailers "could be made to work" as weapons labs, he said in a speech Feb. 5.



Tenet, now a faculty member at Georgetown's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, declined to comment for this story.

Kay, in an interview, said senior CIA officials had advised him upon accepting the survey group's leadership in June 2003 that some experts in the DIA were "backsliding" on whether the trailers were weapons labs. But Kay said he was not apprised of the technical team's findings until late 2003, near the end of his time as the group's leader.

"If I had known that we had such a team in Iraq," Kay said, "I would certainly have given their findings more weight."



How could everyone from Petraeus on the ground to the President of the United States allow themselves to be so misled about the trailers? It goes back to the original source of the deception, an Iraqi defector the CIA codenamed, "Curveball."


Even before the trailers were seized in spring 2003, the mobile labs had achieved mythic stature. As early as the mid-1990s, weapons inspectors from the United Nations chased phantom mobile labs that were said to be mounted on trucks or rail cars, churning out tons of anthrax by night and moving to new locations each day. No such labs were found, but many officials believed the stories, thanks in large part to elaborate tales told by Iraqi defectors.

The CIA's star informant, an Iraqi with the code name Curveball, was a self-proclaimed chemical engineer who defected to Germany in 1999 and requested asylum. For four years, the Baghdad native passed secrets about alleged Iraqi banned weapons to the CIA indirectly, through Germany's intelligence service. Curveball provided descriptions of mobile labs and said he had supervised work in one of them. He even described a catastrophic 1998 accident in one lab that left 12 Iraqis dead.

Curveball's detailed descriptions -- which were officially discredited in 2004 -- helped CIA artists create color diagrams of the labs, which Powell later used to argue the case for military intervention in Iraq before the U.N. Security Council.

"We have firsthand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails," Powell said in the Feb. 5, 2003, speech. Thanks to those descriptions, he said, "We know what the fermenters look like. We know what the tanks, pumps, compressors and other parts look like."



Who was Curveball, and why was he given credibility? http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=5...


He was, to begin with, the brother of one of Chalabi's top lieutenants. He was also an alcoholic. Worse, we did not have direct access to him: the one American who had ever met him had already warned that he was, at best, unreliable. The response to these concerns came from the deputy director of the CIA's Iraqi weapons of mass destruction task force in the form of an e-mail message dated Feb. 4, 2003:

"As I said last night, let's keep in mind the fact that this war's going to happen regardless of what Curveball said or didn't say, and the powers that be probably aren't terribly interested in whether Curveball knows what he's talking about."

How did Curveball manage to pitch us such a load of malarkey and get it past the intelligence community's defenses, undetected and unchallenged? Well, it seems its veracity was challenged, according to the WMD report:

"With respect to Curveball – the primary source of our intelligence on Iraq's BW program – the Defense HUMINT Service disclaimed any responsibility for validating the asset, arguing that credibility determinations were for analysts and that the collectors were merely 'conduits' for the reporting.

"This abdication of operational responsibility represented a serious failure in tradecraft.

"Although lack of direct physical access to the source made vetting and validating Curveball more difficult, it did not make it impossible. While Defense HUMINT neglected its validation responsibilities, elements of the CIA's D O understood the necessity of validating Curveball's information and made efforts to do so; indeed, they found indications that caused them to have doubts about Curveball's reliability. The system nonetheless 'broke down' because of analysts' strong conviction about the truth of Curveball's information and because the DO's concerns were not heard outside the DO."

The system did not just break down all by itself: somebody sabotaged it, and that is pretty clearly the "analysts" who fed on the lies concocted by Chalabi & Co. The INC was being actively promoted by the neoconservatives within and around this administration. Chalabi's enablers and protectors were concentrated primarily in the office of the vice president and the various neocon thinktanks that provided the Pentagon with scores of contractors and "consultants."


And, further, who were the CIA DO officers who were warning about Curveball's information?

One of them was a program manager named Valerie Plame.



***

Finally, why was the DIA and CIA unable to verify Curveball's claims about mobile labs?

The Robb-Silberman Commission found: http://www.wmd.gov/report/report.html#chap...


Biological Warfare Finding 1

The DIA's Defense HUMINT Service's failure even to attempt to validate Curveball's reporting was a major failure in operational tradecraft.

The problems with the Intelligence Community's performance on Curveball began almost immediately after the source first became known to the U.S. government in early 2000. As noted above, Curveball was not a source who worked directly with the United States; rather, the Intelligence Community obtained information about Curveball through a foreign service. The foreign service would not provide the United States with direct access to Curveball, claiming that Curveball would refuse to speak to Americans. 274 Instead, the foreign intelligence service debriefed Curveball and passed the debriefing information to DIA's Defense HUMINT Service, the human intelligence collection agency of the Department of Defense.



And, which foreign intelligence service might they be alluding to here? According to the Washington Post of May 21, 2005: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...


Similarly, the president's intelligence commission, chaired by former appellate judge Laurence H. Silberman and former senator Charles S. Robb (D-Va.), disclosed that senior intelligence officials had serious questions about "Curveball," the code name for an Iraqi informant who provided the key information on Hussein's alleged mobile biological facilities.

The CIA clandestine service's European division chief had met in 2002 with a German intelligence officer whose service was handling Curveball. The German said his service "was not sure whether Curveball was actually telling the truth," according to the commission report. When it appeared that Curveball's material would be in Bush's State of the Union speech, the CIA Berlin station chief was asked to get the Germans to allow him to question Curveball directly.

On the day before the president's speech, the Berlin station chief warned about using Curveball's information on the mobile biological units in Bush's speech. The station chief warned that the German intelligence service considered Curveball "problematical" and said its officers had been unable to confirm his assertions. The station chief recommended that CIA headquarters give "serious consideration" before using that unverified information, according to the commission report.

The next day, Bush told the world: "We know that Iraq, in the late 1990s, had several mobile weapons labs . . . designed to produce germ warfare agents and can be moved from place to a place to evade inspectors." He attributed that information to "three Iraqi defectors."

A week later, Powell said in an address to the United Nations that the information on mobile labs came from four defectors, and he described one as "an eyewitness . . . who supervised one of these facilities" and was at the site when an accident killed 12 technicians.

Within a year, doubts emerged about the truthfulness of all four, and the "eyewitness" turned out to be Curveball, the informant the CIA station chief had red-flagged as unreliable. Curveball was subsequently determined to be a fabricator who had been fired from the Iraqi facility years before the alleged accident, according to the commission and Senate reports.



But, the Commission's conclusions seem to glance over some obvious issues that need to be addressed. If Curveball were "unwilling" to talk to Americans, normal CIA spycraft would have told any trained intelligence officer that there are relatively easy ways to get around that. One, obviously, would be to work more closely with the Germans in questioning that source, and to "look over their shoulders" by verifying the information the source provided. Another would be to find out who Curveball was willing to talk to, and then to make the man believe he was talking to someone other than the CIA. In any case, this does not seem to have been an insurmountable hurdle, if indeed the CIA European Division head and the Chief of Berlin Station had really wanted to verify that information.

In any case, the job of interviewing Curveball should have been tasked to specialists within the Directorate of Operations most familiar with Iraq's WMD program, which would have been Valerie Plame and her colleagues. The reason that wasn't done -- and that task was instead given to certain individuals in the Pentagon is one of the great over-arching questions that still haven't been answered in the fraud that led up to the Iraq invasion.

The terrible irony is that nobody seems to have raised questions about the fraud that connects General Petreaus to the Iraq WMD deception and the Plame case. Why has official Washington failed to look behind the mask that continues to portray him as a man of unquestionable integrity? That's the true intelligence failure in this story.

_________________

Available in orange: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/9/11/64...

Blair Blasted As Carlyle Sees QinetiQ Windfall
Parmy Olson, 02.10.06, 3:10 PM ET

London - It was reportedly the inspiration behind Q in the James Bond movies, and seems to have become a venerated British institution ever since word hit the street that a large chunk of its flotation capital would go to a U.S. private equity firm. Critics of the 2003 sale of the U.K. defense company QinetiQ to The Carlyle Group knew today's listing was inevitable--but as numbers are now put on the amount of cash set to be raked in by the U.S. firm, bitter reactions are rising again to the surface.

Opponents of U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair have long felt that at $74 million, his government had sold its 30.5% stake in QinetiQ to the Carlyle Group too cheaply. They say that the $395 million that Carlyle has made today should have gone to the U.K. taxpayer. The knives have duly re-emerged in force. "It is very much akin to Boris Yeltsin handing out the assets of the old Soviet Union to his chums at knockdown prices," one of Blair's former ministers Lord Gilbert postulated to the BBC. Blair's current defense minister tried to parry the cut and thrust by insisting the government had been right to sell off a "wasting asset."

Meanwhile there's been outcry that the sale was directed at institutional investors at the expense of would-be private shareholders. QinetiQ, however, has since allocating 6% shares to smaller stockbrokers--a combined stake worth nearly $140 million. With the float, U.K. government has cut its stake to 23.7% while Carlyle whittled down its holding to 12.%.

/... http://www.forbes.com/2006/02/10/qinetiq-blair-carlyle-cx_po_0210autofacescan10.html

SpeedBallBlues10-23-2007, 01:31 PM
She is saying that the people in the CIA involved in some of what Colin Powell was saying at the UN were "dumbfounded" watching the live broadcast. At one point when he was refering to the mobile labs she turned to the agent who actually dealt with the only source of this claim, "curveball", and asked her what Powell was talking about and she (the agent) said "I have no idea"!

It's still on... 3.30 EST.

Monday, August 21, 2006

steven hatfill makes me dizzy.


I recently wrote a series of posts discussing Mobile Weapons Labs, anthrax, Judy Miller, Curveball, Steven Hatfill and David Kelly (among other things) with the help of Simon and emptywheel and mamayaga and others.

Hatfill designed two secret weapons labs - and we pondered whether the intention might have been to plant one or both in Iraq to 'prove' that Saddam was making biological weapons. There are a whole bunch of weird questions about the official story.

The Mobile Weapons Labs (MWL's) are back in the news because bioweapons expert Milton Leitenberg of the University of Maryland recently wrote a paper (pdf) asking some questions. Milton has just released a follow-up piece in which he describes some answers.


"The illustration of the set of three vehicles that purportedly portrayed Iraq's mobile BW production vehicles and which first appeared in US Secretary of State Powell's address to the United Nations in February 20031 and then in the CIA/DIA-released report on May 28, 2003,2 were produced by graphic artists working at Battelle under a CIA contract.

Contrary to the prevalent assumptions, the illustrations apparently were not made following any detailed descriptions provided by the Iraqi informant codenamed "Curveball," but rather on the basis of specifications made by CIA staff and its contractor as to the equipment that such a vehicle or set of vehicles would require. It does not appear that the original purpose of the CIA contracted drawings was for use in Sec. Powell's UN presentation, but that they later were used for that purpose as well. Once prepared, they were given to President Bush in one of the "President's Daily Briefs" (PDBs). The same information was later included in the CIA/DIA report on May 28, 2003. Apparently the drawings were all that was ever prepared. No mock-up containing the pieces of equipment shown in the drawings appears to have been produced, and no biological agent or simulant was produced. The drawings therefore appear to be what DDCI McLaughlin referred to as "the processes he described had been assessed by an independent laboratory as workable engineering designs.""
His summary:

In summary, these self-conceived and self-imagined illustrations were all the "evidence" that the United States government had to give to Secretary of State Powell to place before the United Nations and the world to support the claim that Iraq had mobile biological weapon production platforms which had been hidden from UNSCOM and UNMOVIC, in violation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 687. This was one of the prime justifications for the US and the UK to invade Iraq.

Whether the responsibility for this deception belongs to Vice President Cheney's office or to the CIA alone still remains to be determined. One day after the US Defense Intelligence Agency had in its hands a draft report from a mission that it had dispatched to Iraq which definitively reported that the Iraqi vehicles were for hydrogen production, the CIA and DIA released their May 28, 2003 report which stated the contrary and repeated Secretary Powell's UN testimony regarding the alleged vehicles.3 One should also remember that nine months after the two vehicles recovered in Iraq in 2003 were independently determined by US and by British teams as absolutely not being for BW production, George Tenet still portrayed the issue as an open question in a speech at Georgetown University in February 2004.

The earlier analysis also discussed a BW production mock-up truck platform being constructed under a CIA contract to SAIC Corporation and being carried out in Frederick, Maryland, beginning in September 2001 by Dr. Steven Hatfill. This vehicle almost certainly had another purpose, to be used for training US Special Forces personnel who might encounter and capture such vehicles, presumably in Iraq if not elsewhere. Nevertheless, it cannot be excluded that CIA officials also used knowledge of this construction to reassure themselves about the relevance of the drawings made at Battelle to their false preconception of the existence of mobile BW production vehicles in Iraq.
got that?

Apart from that, I'm the bearer of bad news. I've got nothing else. I've been going around in circles for two days on this story and all i've got is dizzy.

emptywheel is promising a new post on the matter, so hopefully she has some more insight than me. (update, here it is)

here's all I can offer.
1. It appears that the purpose of Judy's July 2 article was to pre-empt the WaPo article of the following day. Specifically, at a minimum, to a) give the impression that the SAIC/Hatfill trailer was in response to either 911 or the anthrax attacks. - and b) focus on the SAIC/Hatfill trailer, and not the other spooky mysterious one which also gets buried in the final two paras at Wapo:

"Col. Bill Darley, a spokesman for the U.S. Special Operations Command in Tampa, said that Hatfill also designed a fixed or "static" nonfunctional bioweapons lab for use in training Special Forces in an unspecified location in the western United States.

Darley said he could not discuss details of how these labs have been used in training. The programs, he said, are at the heart of the "dark tactics, techniques and procedures" used to prepare troops for missions abroad."
We have no idea when this lab was built. And if anyone can explain to me why someone would refer to a non-mobile training lab as 'static,' I'd really appreciate it. And if anyone can offer any insight into that second paragraph, that'd be great too. c) to paint the tensions between the Justice Department and the Defense Department over Hatfill's role as being related to the access to the 'trainer' - rather than the fact that "the Pentagon's insistence on using Hatfill as an instructor even as the FBI intensified its investigation of him angered and puzzled some agents"

2. Special Forces in the field need to a) identify a possible bio-weapons lab (mobile or otherwise) b) take control of the lab c) contain any possible fallout/damage (e.g. dont turn off the power) until the pointyheads come in for verification and clean-up. It's not obvious to me why they need a full working demonstration model for any of these tasks, not least a mobile one - particularly because there are probably hundreds of variations of how any such lab might be put together. The Special Forces need to be able to recognize all configurations and act appropriately. They don't need to know the finest details of one possible configuration.

3. Given the task at hand, and given that Hatfill was a 'person of interest' in multiple homicides and terrorism, why did the pentagon step in and 'unrevoke' his security clearance, and unfire him, causing much anger and puzzlement at the FBI, so that they could continue to use him? (Judy trivialized it thusly: " tensions arose between the Justice Department and the Defense Department over their access to the mobile unit")

All that aside, for a bit of background and context, here's Laura Rozen:

"Hatfill's longer biography is riddled with gaps where classified projects presumably belong... From 1975 to 1978, he served with the U.S. Army Institute for Military Assistance, based at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, while simultaneously, his resume says, serving in the Special Air Squadron (SAS) of the white supremacist regime in Rhodesia. He attended medical school in Rhodesia from 1978 to 1984, and then moved to South Africa, where he completed various military-medical assignments while obtaining three master's degrees, studying for a doctoral degree, and practicing in a South African clinic.

[]
His military background includes the United States Army's Institute for Military Assistance, the Rhodesian SAS, and Selous Scouts ."

There is something curious about Hatfill's claim, on his resume, to have worked concurrently with the U.S. Army Institute for Military Assistance in Fort Bragg and with the Rhodesian Special Air Squadron. Indeed, several of his associates have told the Prospect that Hatfill bragged of having been a double agent in South Africa -- which raises some intriguing questions. Was the U.S. military biowarfare program willing to hire and give sensitive security clearances to someone who had served in the apartheid-era South African military medical corps, and with white-led Rhodesian paramilitary units in Zimbabwe's civil war two decades earlier? Or did Hatfill serve in the Rhodesian SAS, and later in the South African military medical corps, at the behest of the U.S. government?"
and if you want more, there's this Vanity Fair piece which is long, but very interesting, and quite damning re his involvement in a whole bunch of stuff, not least the 2001 anthrax attacks. Here's one curious element:

No less interesting to me, as a professor of English literature, was Hatfill's unpublished novel, Emergence, which I examined in Washington at the U.S. Copyright Office. In the book, an Iraqi virologist launches a bioterror attack on behalf of an unnamed sponsor, using an identity acquired from the Irish Republican Army and a homemade sprayer like the one Steven J. Hatfill demonstrated for The Washington Times. A fictional scientist named Steven J. Roberts comes to the rescue, tracing the outbreak to Iraq. The Strangelovean novel ends with America nuking Baghdad. As the warheads fall, the pilot remarks, "Beautiful . . . just beautiful. Welcome to Fuck City, Ragheads! Let"s get the hell out of Dodge."
[]
Hatfill's novel, however, has a surprise ending. In a three-page epilogue, the narrator, a Russian mobster, reveals that his own organization, not Iraq, is responsible for the bioterror attack:

"The reaction was as great as we had hoped for the entire focus of the American F.B.I. has now shifted towards combating chemical/ biological terrorism and this is allowing us to formulate the unprecedented expansion of our organization."
[]
The ink was hardly dry on Emergence when the government hired Hatfill, now working for S.A.I.C., to commission a paper from Bill Patrick focusing on how to respond to a biological terror event.

Posted by lukery at 8/21/2006 06:07:00 PM