John Prados - On February 5, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell made a dramatic presentation before the United Nations Security Council, detailing a U.S. bill of particulars alleging that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction that threatened not only the Middle East, but the rest of the world. Unbeknownst to the public at the time, a key part of the U.S. case—relating to biological weapons—was based on the direct knowledge of a single agent known as CURVEBALL, whose credibility had previously been cast in serious doubt.


U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell holds up a model vial of anthrax during his historic presentation before the United Nations Security Council, February 5, 2003.

CBS News’ 60 Minutes is now reporting the identity of the agent as one Rafid Ahmed Alwan, (Note 1) who appeared in a German refugee center in 1999 and brought himself to the attention of German intelligence. CBS News describes Alwan as “a liar … a thief and a poor student instead of the chemical engineering whiz he claimed to be.” (Note 2) If accurate, the CBS report raises even more troubling questions about the basis for the Bush administration’s decision to go to war in Iraq, as well as more general considerations about the relationship between intelligence and the policy process.

By way of background to this latest revelation, the National Security Archive is reproducing the existing public record on CURVEBALL as derived from declassified records, official inquiries and former officials’ accounts. The documents below are a small fraction of the full record, which remains almost entirely classified. The National Security Archive has filed Freedom of Information Act requests for these still-secret materials and will post them as they become available.

The public record as of this posting, while miniscule, nevertheless has an important story to tell, the centerpoint of which is Powell’s speech, which represented the Bush administration’s most powerful public argument leading to the decision to invade Iraq.

Powell’s address, modeled after Adlai Stevenson’s vivid appearance before the same body in 1962 during the Cuban missile crisis, was punctuated by a glossy slide presentation and show-and-tell devices including a vial of powder which he held up before his audience, declaring that if it were a biological weapon it would be enough to kill thousands of people. Saddam Hussein, Powell forcefully asserted, possessed stockpiles of such weapons and the infrastructure to produce them. (Note 3)

According to both of the major official U.S. investigations into Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs—by the so-called Silberman-Robb Commission and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (Note 4)—Powell based this particular claim on data gathered by the CIA, which in turn relied principally on information it had obtained indirectly from CURVEBALL.

Read all at the National Security Archive