The entire case for Iraq's WMDs was built on a single fabricator codenamed 'Curveball' whom intelligence agencies knew was lying

On February 5, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell stood before the United Nations Security Council with satellite photographs, audio recordings, and what he presented as ironclad intelligence: Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and an active biological weapons program. The presentation was methodical, authoritative, and persuasive. It became the public justification for an invasion that would reshape the Middle East.

What Powell didn't tell the world was that nearly all of this intelligence came from a single source: an Iraqi defector nobody in the intelligence community actually trusted.

Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, codenamed "Curveball" by German intelligence, was a former Iraqi military officer who had fled the country. He claimed to have firsthand knowledge of mobile bioweapons laboratories and stockpiles of chemical and biological agents. His accounts were specific, detailed, and alarming. They were also fabricated.

The CIA, German BND, and British MI6 each independently flagged Curveball as unreliable. German intelligence was particularly emphatic in their warnings—they assessed him as motivated by a desire to topple Saddam Hussein's regime and therefore willing to invent information to make that happen. These warnings were not buried in obscure intelligence reports; they were documented and communicated through official channels. Yet they were systematically suppressed or ignored by the Bush administration officials building the case for war.

For years after the invasion, officials maintained that the intelligence community had acted in good faith with the best information available. That narrative began to crumble in 2011 when Curveball himself came forward. In an interview with The Guardian, he admitted precisely what the intelligence agencies had warned: he had fabricated his claims. As he put it, "I had the chance to fabricate something to topple the regime." He had told the intelligence services what they seemed desperate to hear.