From The Boston Globe

A former CIA officer says he made repeated efforts to alert top agency officials to problems with an Iraqi defector’s claims about the country’s mobile biological weapons labs but he was ignored, the Washington Post reported on Sunday.

CIA officer Tyler Drumheller said he personally crossed out a reference to the labs from a classified draft of a U.N. speech by Secretary of State Colin Powell because he recognized the source as a defector, code-named Curveball, who was suspected to be mentally unstable and a liar.

Drumheller told the Post he was surprised when a few days later, on February 5, 2003, Powell told the U.N. Security Council that “we have first-hand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and rails.”

“We thought we had taken care of the problem, but I turn on the television and there it was again,” said Drumheller, the CIA’s European operations chief before retiring last year. He described repeated attempts to alert top CIA officials to concerns about the defector before Powell’s speech.

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