Curveball (informant)

Curveball (informant)

Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi (Arabic: رافد أحمد علوان‎, Rāfid Aḥmad Alwān; born 1968), known by the Central Intelligence Agency cryptonym "Curveball", is an Iraqi 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 Government 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 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. 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."

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."

Rafid Ahmed Alwan should not be confused with Hussein Kamel, Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, who was the chief developer of Iraq's special weapons program and defected in August 1995. Kamel also claimed the existence of extensive biological and nuclear weapons programs in Iraq; he returned to Iraq in 1996 and was killed, along with his extended family, shortly after that point.