Curveball (informant)

Common card · No. 252640

Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi (Arabic: رافد أحمد علوان الجنابي, Rāfid Aḥmad Alwān; born 1968), known by the Defense Intelligence Agency cryptonym "Curveball", is a German-French 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 (WMD) 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 United States's Central Intelligence Agency, German Federal Intelligence Service and the British Secret Intelligence Service questioning the authenticity of the claims, the US and British governments 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 the US president George W. Bush said, "We know that Iraq, in the late 1990s, had several mobile biological...

Read on Wikipedia · Image The original uploader was Rwendland at English Wikipedia., Public domain