Curveball was the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND) cryptonym for the Iraqi defector who, per John Kiriakou, was the single most important fabricator of Iraqi weapons-of-mass-destruction intelligence in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq War. Per Kiriakou, “Curveball — one of the greatest intelligence failures in modern CIA history.”[1][2]
The German refusal to share access
The BND approached the CIA with the source: “Hey, we’ve got a source, a really sensitive source called Curveball, and this guy can give us the kitchen sink on Iraqi WMD.” They began sending top-secret reports — “they’ve got biological weapons, they have chemical weapons, they have nuclear weapons, they’ve got a long-range delivery system.” CIA: “We want to meet him.” BND: “Nope, can’t meet him — he’s so sensitive only we Germans can meet him.” CIA: “Okay, then we want to meet him with you and we want to polygraph him.” BND: “Nope, we’ve already ensured that he’s telling the truth.”[1][3][4]
Per Kiriakou, the analytic disputes inside the CIA over Curveball reporting nearly came to fistfights: “I was afraid it would come to fisticuffs.”[4]
The actual identity
Per Kiriakou: “In the end Curveball was a dishwasher in a Shish Kebab restaurant who just went to the Germans and said, ‘I am an Iraqi scientist and I have weapons of mass destruction information I’d like to give to the CIA.’ He would go through the newspapers and read all the stuff and then he would write notes and he would tell the Germans, ‘Listen, this is what I found out. Saddam Hussein, he’s got all this stuff — 100%, I just confirmed it through my special source at the weapons-of-mass-destruction department at the Iraqi government.’ The whole thing was made up.”[5][2]
His motivation, per Kiriakou: “He said he did it because he wanted to immigrate to the United States, and this was what we wanted to hear anyway. So he thought if he gave us enough information, even if it was just from the newspapers, we would make him an American citizen.”[2]
Consequence
“American lives were lost because of this.” Per Kiriakou, Curveball’s fabricated reporting was the foreign-source pillar of the WMD case for the Iraq War, alongside Ahmed Chalabi’s parallel fabrications and the Yellowcake Niger forgery.[2]
Kiriakou’s own role, and his doubt at the time
In a 2026 account Kiriakou placed himself directly in the exchange: “I was the deputy director’s executive assistant at the time. So I was intimately involved in these conversations with the Germans.”[6]
The refusal, as he recounts it, was absolute. Asked to meet the source, the Germans said “Absolutely not. He’s so sensitive. You can’t talk to him. You can ask questions — send us the questions, we’ll ask him, and then we’ll send you the answers in a cable.” The agency disliked the arrangement and accepted it anyway.[6]
What the answers produced in him was suspicion rather than confidence, precisely because of their quality: “his information was so good that it was not believable.” He recalls the deputy director asking him directly whether he believed the source. “And I said, ‘No, I don’t actually. It’s too perfect. It’s too good.’”[7]
He stresses that the CIA was not the only recipient — the same cables went to the White House, and “they were going directly to Dick Cheney and to his office.”[8]
In this telling he describes Curveball as a Kurdish refugee working as a dishwasher in a German restaurant, who read the papers daily, “take notes to himself about what the Americans wanted to hear,” and volunteered them to German intelligence hoping the CIA would be pleased enough to grant him American citizenship.[9]
His allocation of blame is joint, and the failure he identifies is elementary tradecraft: “Curveball played us like fools, thanks both to Dick Cheney and the German intelligence service — because the Germans never bothered to vet him. They never polygraphed the guy. They never tested him operationally. They just took every word he said and treated it as if it was coming from the mouth of God.”[10]
His closing verdict: “People lost their lives because of Curveball.”[10]