‘Curveball’
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The CIA may be inept, but at least it’s not as bad as the BND, Germany’s intelligence agency. This according to Bob Drogin, the author of “Curveball,” a book that tells the tale of the infamous informant who convinced U.S. intelligence sources that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
Drogin paints the German spy agency as even more ineffective than the CIA, and 10 times less friendly. “My book is a 300-page book about screwups, but since it has been published, I now know that I could have written a 350-page book,” he said at the New America Foundation on Tuesday. “Everything was much worse I’ve learned, especially, on the German side.”
Indeed, the Germans who discovered and “ran” Curveball refused to tell the actual name of the Iraqi spy and did not even let the CIA meet him.
Drogin also related countless stories on how ex-CIA Director George Tenet catered to the slightest whim — or perceived whim — of President Bush, even at one point deluging him with covert information on Mozambique’s dictator after Bush 43 uttered one derogatory comment about the man.
Drogin let it be known that a “smoking gun” in the Iraq adventure could in fact still be out there, in the form of a secret paper written by Vice President Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby to the CIA before the invasion.
