anaesthetica's Journal: The Story of Curveball's Intelligence

The Washington Post recounts the story of CIA officer Tyler Drumheller, chief of European operations until last year, who questioned the veracity of the claims that Saddam had mobile biological weapons laboratories. Drumheller recognized the source of the claims when he saw them in a draft text for Sec. Powell's speech to the UN: an Iraqi defector codenamed "Curveball." From the article:

Curveball described himself as a chemical engineer who had worked inside an unusual kind of laboratory, one that was built on a trailer bed and produced weapons for germ warfare. He furnished detailed, technically complex descriptions of mobile labs and even described an industrial accident that he said killed a dozen people.

Following a CIA investigation, the Agency "acknowledged that Curveball was a con artist who drove a taxi in Iraq and spun his engineering knowledge into a fantastic but plausible tale about secret bioweapons factories on wheels."