Curveball
Spies, Lies and the Man Behind Them: The Real Reason America Went to War in Iraq
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- £9.49
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- £9.49
Publisher Description
'Curveball' was the codename given to the mysterious defector whose first-hand evidence on Saddam's weapons of mass destruction proved vital in giving the Bush administration the excuse it needed to invade Iraq.
The only problem - this 'evidence' was nothing more than a pack of lies.
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Bob Drogin has written the definitive account of the most notorious intelligence fiasco in US history, revealing how squabbling, arrogance and incompetence within the various intelligence agencies allowed one man's lies to spread higher and higher up the chain of authority, eventually reaching the White House itself.
Breathlessly paced and shockingly revelatory, Curveball is an explosive true-life account of how honour and dishonesty amongst spies led to the UK and the US becoming embroiled in a catastrophic war.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In 1999, an Iraqi refugee, soon code-named Curveball, told German intelligence agents of his work on an ongoing Iraqi program that produced biological weapons in mobile laboratories. His claims electrified the CIA, which had little good intelligence about Saddam Hussein's regime and was fixated on the threat of Iraqi WMDs, which later became a centerpiece in the Bush administration's case for invading Iraq. It was only after American occupation forces failed to find any mobile germ-warfare labs or other WMDs that prewar warnings about Curveball's heavy drinking and mental instability, and the nagging gaps and contradictions in his story, were taken seriously. In this engrossing account, Los Angeles Times correspondent Drogin paints an intimate and revealing portrait of the workings and dysfunctions of the intelligence community. Hobbled by internal and external turf battles and hypnotized by pet theories, the CIA including director George Tenet, whose reputation suffers another black eye here ignored skeptics, the author contends, and fell in love with a dubious source who told the agency and the White House what they wanted to hear. Instead of connecting the dots, Drogin argues, "the CIA and its allies made up the dots."
