The Los Angeles Times managed to track down and interview Rafid Ahmed Alwan, a.k.a. the infamous 'Curveball', purveyor of a remarkable series of stories on Iraq's supposed biological weapons capabilities. It was he that came up with the "mobile weapons labs" that Colin Powell showed cartoon drawings of at the United Nations, that Iraq was attempting to smuggle WMD's from England, and that a collection of corn sheds at Djerf al Nadaf were part of a secret biological weapons program. He now lives in Germany.
As it turns out, of course, he bullshitted the whole thing. In Iraq he was a con man, thief, embezzler and general crook who was fired from job after job.
He claimed, for example, that the son of his former boss, Basil Latif, secretly headed a vast weapons of mass destruction procurement and smuggling scheme from England. British investigators found, however, that Latif's son was a 16-year-old exchange student, not a criminal mastermind. [...]
"Rafid told five or 10 stories every day," Freah said in an interview. "I'd ask, 'Where have you been?' And he'd say, 'I had a problem with my car.' Or, 'My family was sick.' But I knew he was lying."
He had a gift for it and "was not embarrassed when caught in a lie," Freah said.
At the Djerf al Nadaf warehouse, laborers treated seeds from local farmers with fungicides to prevent mold and rot. But Alwan convinced his BND handlers that the site's corn-filled sheds were part of Iraq's secret germ weapons program. He worked there, he told them, until 1998, when an unreported biological accident occurred.
In fact, Alwan had been dismissed three years earlier, in 1995, after inflating expenses and faking receipts for tools, supplies and lamb for a party.
"I fired him," Freah said. "He was corrupt and he was found stealing."
Even his fellow Burger King employees in Germany knew him as a serial liar...
In early 2002, a year before the war, he told co-workers at the Burger King that he spied for Iraqi intelligence and would report any fellow Iraqi worker who criticized Hussein's regime.
They couldn't decide if he was dangerous or crazy.
"During breaks, he told stories about what a big man he was in Baghdad," said Hamza Hamad Rashid, who remembered an odd scene with the pudgy Alwan in his too-tight Burger King uniform praising Hussein in the home of der Whopper. "But he always lied. We never believed anything he said."
So his family, his friends, his co-workers and his employers, from Iraqi warehouses to German Burger Kings, all knew him to be a con man, crook and general nut. German officials warned the Americans not to use information provided by him, and weapons inspectors who investigated his claims before the war found them false.
But that still wasn't enough to keep his valued "information" out of the hands of the special intelligence gathering operations of Rumsfeld and Cheney, who then passed it to the press, or from Colin Powell's speech at the United Nations, or from George W. Bush's 2003 State of the Union address, or from any of the myriad other administration reports used to justify the war. Truly, the Iraq War was a perfect example of a group of con men getting together and deciding to believe each other's stories.
Coalition deaths in the Iraq War have recently topped 4,100. The number of Iraqi deaths are not known, and not counted.
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