good read, but incomplete.
From Amazon
Bob Drogin paints a damning portrait of western intelligence gathering, but not a surprising one. We all know by now that alleged professionals in the CIA and DIA were too eager to tell the White House what they thought it wanted to hear and that the Bush administration did nothing to discourage them from presenting unvetted intel.
The usual suspects are all here: groupthink, turf wars, careerism. What makes this book refreshing is that, aside from being engagingly written, it explains at the most basic levels how American spies and policymakers got it wrong. The answer is much more complex than "Bush lied." Unfortunately, it's much less comforting: George W. Bush will soon be gone, but many of the anonymous bureaucrats who had a hand in the Curveball fiasco will keep their jobs. And George Tenet (a Clinton appointee, if you remember) can spend the rest of his days in a cushy private-sector job and polishing his Presidential Medal of Freedom (awarded to him by Bush after presiding over three unforgivably huge failures -- India's and Pakistan's 1998 nuclear tests, 9/11 and the one you're reading about here).
Still, Drogin doesn't quite answer an important question: Just how much pressure did the administration put on intelligence officers? Perhaps that's because "Curveball" focuses on Saddam Hussein's biological weapons program, not on his chemical and nuclear programs or his connection to Al Qaeda. Alleged, anyway.
The book mentions, but doesn't explain, Dick Cheney's well-known visits to Langley. And then, leading up to Colin Powell's infamous U.N. speech, there's a rather comical episode in which Scooter Libby asks Powell to read a speech the V.P.'s office prepared that involved wild, completely unsubstantiated claims that Saddam Hussein was an almost Bondian super-villain employing "nuclear mujahadeen." Powell wisely tossed this speech in favor of one based on a National Intelligence Estimate written - and, he could only assume, vetted - by apolitical pros. The rest is history.
The narrative slows down for a few chapters two-thirds through as Drogin needlessly recounts in detail the numerous false positives post-invasion weapons hunters investigated before David Kay's Iraq Survey Group began to realize the ugly truth. And the bibliography is maddeningly thin.
But altogether, "Curveball" is a highly readable case study in how bureaucratic bungling can have disastrous consequences. Which is a shame because -- and call me a cynic if you must -- I have a feeling this one won't be on the next administration's required reading list.
Analysis of intelligence should precede decision making
From Amazon
Bob Drogin has performed a magnificent service by pulling all of the information and background into one full story about how US intelligence services and their clients... the Leadership of the US Governmen... were once again guilty of looking for intelligence to justify decisions they wanted to make. He does it with a rapid paced, but fully documented narrative. I strongly recommend this book. It is a 'must'.
It reads like fiction; unfortunately, it's not
From Amazon
It's familiar spy-thriller fodder -- little guy outwits bumbling government bureaucrats, leading to international disaster. And the writing moves along in the page-turning way of the best of the genre.
This isn't made-up stuff, though. It's the real story of how an Iraqi nobody with a good sales pitch and a glib tongue fooled enough intelligence people enough of the time to give the U.S. administration its pretext to go after Saddam Hussein's supposed weapons of mass destruction.
Author Bob Drogin is a veteran newspaper reporter who wrote episodes of this story for the Los Angeles Times over the past several years. His book is thoroughly (but unobtrusively) documented. Read it and you'll hope, as I do, that future Washington decision-makers have read it, too.
Curveball: Spies, Lies, and the Con Man Who Caused a War
From Amazon
A well documented and fascinating account of what led to the Iraq War. Was "Curveball" really the face that launched a thousand ships? Unfortunately, the answer is "yes."
A fascinating look at how things can go completely wrong
From Amazon
This is an excellent book that tells the story of one part of the mess that was the CIA's assessment of Iraq's WMD. It is a quick, interesting read that lays out the biases, red tape, infighting, secretiveness, incompetence and confusion that resulted in the CIA missing what they thought was a slam dunk. With the caveat that not everyone has or will tell their side of the story, this is a well researched, balanced work.