Hack Work
Torture and the American way.
December 2005
“This is a miserably incompetent world,” wrote George Bernard Shaw in 1896, on his way to chopping up a production of Henry IV. “The average doctor is a walking compound of natural ignorance and acquired witchcraft, who kills your favorite child, wrecks your wife’s health, and orders you into habits of nervous dram-drinking … The average lawyer is a nincompoop, who contradicts your perfectly sound impressions on notorious points of law, involves you in litigation when your case is hopeless, compromises when your success is certain … And so on, down to the bootmaker whose boots you have to make your tortured feet fit, and the tailor who clothes you as if you were a cast-iron hot-water apparatus. You imagine that these people have professions; and you find that what they have is only, in the correct old word, their ‘mystery’ — a humbug, like all mysteries.”
Shaw died in 1950, too early for him to puncture the mysteries of the CIA, but if he’d lived a few more decades the story of “Curveball” might have killed him with laughter. Curveball is the pseudonym of the Iraqi who coughed up “details” about those fictional mobile chemical labs mentioned by Colin Powell in his war-justifying U.N. speech almost three years ago. Curveball wanted a German visa. So he played a game with German intelligence — and by extension with the CIA — that should remind Graham Greene fans of Our Man in Havana, a Cold War satire about a vacuum cleaner salesman, Mr. Wormold, who signs up with British intelligence and sends doctored schematics of a Hoover back to London, exciting the spooks with rumors of a new Cuban rocket launcher.
Curveball wanted to emigrate to Germany in 1999. To win a visa he posed, not just as a fugitive from Saddam, but as a high-level engineer who could give German intelligence the goods on Baghdad’s chemical weapons. The Germans debriefed him, skeptically, and passed on their information — with a warning that it might be garbage — to the Pentagon’s intelligence service, the DIA. The CIA pursued these reports after September 11, and even had sketch artists make detailed drawings of weapons-manufaturing sites from Curveball’s information. His interviews had to be translated twice — from Arabic to German to English — but by the time it reached Powell’s office the information must have resembled “intelligence.” Still, Powell was skeptical. Still, he said, “The CIA stood by it adamantly.” So he took the report to the U.N., where it became the most colorful dramatic detail of his pivotal speech, the flourish everyone remembers — drawings of mobile anthrax labs! Battle-ready vans! Which could brew enough chemical nastiness “in a single month,” Powell said, “to kill thousands upon thousands of people.”
German intelligence officers who watched the speech on TV assumed the CIA had verified Curveball’s scuttlebutt. “My gut feeling was the Americans must have so much from reconnaissance planes and satellites, from infiltrated spotter teams from Special Forces, and other systems,” said Curveball’s German supervisor. “We thought they must have tons of stuff.” But what Powell presented to the U.N. was just a regurgitation — sometimes an exaggeration — of Curveball’s song and dance. “We were shocked,” the German official said. “Mein Gott! We had always told them it was not proven … It was not hard intelligence.”
It was worse than that. It was a tall tale worthy of Mr. Wormold. Washington, Berlin, and even Baghdad went bonkers over these mobile weapons labs the way Greene’s London went bonkers over vacuum cleaners. Baghdad, too? Yes: After Powell’s slick presentation of Curveball’s jabberwocky, surprised Iraqi officials combed their own country for weapons-producing trucks. “They were in real panic mode,” a CIA source said to the L.A. Times. “They were terrified that this was real, and they couldn’t explain it.”
And now Condoleezza Rice wants to convince Europe that hundreds of secret CIA flights across its territory to probable “black sites” in Romania, Poland, Egypt, or God knows where else — an American gulag archipelago of, okay, not quite torture, but at least outsourced human-rights abuses — have resulted in firm intelligence and saved European lives. She invokes the unknowable mysteries of spycraft. She says, essentially, “trust us,” when the Bush administration has proved itself not just untrustworthy but laughable.
She should know better. No doubt “legal” but shameful methods of near-torture bring out a few quick pieces of real intelligence; but most of the time they’re hack work, like the Curveball debriefing — a matter of desperate men telling government agents exactly what they want to hear — and they can’t be worth the degradation to the name of the United States that torture stories and pictures have already caused. Rice isn’t fooling anyone. The flights, and the nonsense, should stop. “What real CIA field officers know firsthand,” a former CIA man and counterterrorist official in Washington named Larry Johnson wrote last month in the L.A. Times, “is that it is better to build a relationship of trust — even with a terrorist, even if it’s time-consuming — than to extract quick confessions through tactics such as those used by the Nazis and the Soviets, who believed that national security always trumped human rights.”
Michael Scott Moore
