David Kay was the guy President Bush put in charge of finding Saddam’s WMD once the dictator was removed from power. Kay headed the Iraq Survey Group but quit before it finished its work. The final report — which clearly states the Saddam’s WMD program ended years before the invasion — was done under the auspices of Kay’s successor, Charles A. Duelfer.

At the time, Kay was always pretty quiet as to why he quit, though it was obvious that he was unhappy with many aspects of his job. I was critical of him for this public reticence. He subsequently noted that “I don’t think they (WMD) existed,” and that “What everyone was talking about is stockpiles produced after the end of the last Gulf War and I don’t think there was a large-scale production program in the nineties.” He told the Senate Armed Services Committee that “It turns out that we were all wrong, probably in my judgment, and that is most disturbing.”

But wait, there’s more. In a recent interview with Spiegel Online, Kay absolutely tips a bucket on German intelligence and their handling of the alleged defector whose codename was “Curveball”. Curveball has been revealed to be a fake, a completely unreliable informant whose phoney information provided a convenient source of information for the Bush Administration in mounting their case for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

In the Spiegel interview, Kay makes a number of points:

SPIEGEL: As head of the Iraq Survey Group, you led the effort to follow up on the claims made by ‘Curveball,’ the asylum seeker from Iraq who told German intelligence that Saddam Hussein was building mobile biological weapons laboratories. Do you remember the first time you began to doubt his story?

Kay: The real shock was that the CIA had never spoken to him directly. To this day, I still don’t understand. How can you hang the most dramatic part of a case for war on an individual no American agent has ever directly debriefed? I realized right away, we needed to follow up in Baghdad on whatever leads we had concerning ‘Curveball.’

He goes to say that the German’s lied to him (and the CIA) about CB not being able to speak English and about his hatred of Americans. To say he is angry understates the case, I think. It is also fair to say that he is less than impressed with how his own country handled the intelligence and the search for WMD:

SPIEGEL: When you were in Iraq, your team found out that ‘Curveball’s’ story had nothing to do with the truth. How did CIA leadership react to your findings?

Kay: With resistance and denial. It was an absolute refusal to face reality. I just kept on hearing, ‘don’t stop now. Keep working. You must be wrong. You will find it. Keep looking.’

SPIEGEL: But nothing was ever found…

Kay: No and my e-mails became less and less friendly. There was a war going on in Baghdad, the members of my team were risking their lives every day, and the Germans kept on refusing us access to the source. When we finally got permission, it was even worse.

He goes onto explain how the German’s undermined his team’s efforts to interview Curveball. Finally, he addresses the issue of whether the fact that Curveball was a fake would’ve made any difference to whether the invasion was launched or not:

SPIEGEL: Would it really have made a difference if ‘Curveball’ had been exposed as a fraud before the war? The Bush administration wanted to go to war no matter what.

Kay: Sure, the administration had that position. But don’t underestimate the importance that the link to al-Qaida, the weapons of mass destruction and, specifically, the biological weapons labs played in Congress. You can be pretty certain it would have changed the congressional vote, the authorization. Let me just say, I do not believe it would have been easy to take this nation to war if you had not had the intelligence.

SPIEGEL: What can we all learn from the ‘Curveball’ disaster?

Kay: I feel disillusioned. I think that ‘Curveball’ was the biggest and most consequential intelligence fiasco of my lifetime. It shows how important effective civilian control of the intelligence services is, because non-transparency is extraordinarily dangerous for democracy. In an intelligence service, people who don’t make waves are rewarded. I am worried that the same mistakes could be repeated all over again.

Again, you can’t help but feel these comments are coming a bit late in the day, but nonetheless, it is good to have them on the record.

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