[NYTr] Spies, Lies and the Con Man Who Caused the Iraq War

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Random House via Alternet - Oct 22, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/65718/

Spies, Lies and the Con Man Who Caused a War

By Bob Drogin
Random House Publishing Group

[The following is an excerpt from CURVEBALL: Spies, Lies and the Con Man
Who Caused a War (c) 2007 by Bob Drogin. Published by arrangement with
Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a
division of Random House, Inc.]

Staring out the window, Ahmed Hassan Mohammed could see little of his
new home.

In the spring or summer, arriving passengers at Munich's Franz Josef
Strauss International Airport normally glimpse the rugged foothills of
the Bavarian Alps jutting above the horizon. The distant mountains
gleam softly in the morning light, and shimmer in the rich pastels of
the setting sun.

But in November 1999, when Ahmed's plane landed, gray mist usually
veiled the view. On most days, heavy clouds swirled across the leaden
sky. Rain pelted down from passing squalls and driving storms. Sharp
gusts skittered across the runway puddles and flattened the nearby
grass. Droplets streamed down the windows like tears.

Ahmed's plane flew from North Africa, and the stale air in the cabin
would smell of sweet anise and cheap cologne. Foreign workers heading
home traveled heavy and happy. They forgot their dismal jobs and
cramped flats. They shrugged off the suspicious eyes and sudden silences
in German shops. Their bags betrayed their new riches. They hauled
television sets and fancy stereos. They dragged cheap suitcases,
cardboard boxes wrapped with rope, and plastic sacks full of duty-free
cigarettes. But the return flights, like this one, from the desert
villages and urban slums of Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco, seemed
sadder. The men brought back stuffed dates and preserved lemons, kif
candy and almond cookies. They suffused the plane with the scent of
regret and wrenching farewells.

The airplane aisle filled quickly as passengers climbed out of their
seats and yanked overstuffed bags down from overhead bins. They pulled
on worn leather coats and thick ski parkas. They pushed their tired
children and each other toward the exit door and shuffled down the metal
stairs. Ahmed followed.

Airport workers in neon yellow slickers scurried near the plane.
Utility vehicles painted cautionary orange chugged and hauled silver
containers bulging with bags. Boxy white Sky Chefs delivery trucks
disgorged supplies or took others on. Airport vans, all the same olive
green, rushed in one direction and then back again. Ahmed couldn't help
but notice. Germany was so orderly. So color-coordinated. So different
from the cacophony of life back home. An elongated blue bus, the two
parts joined by a black rubber accordion neck, pulled up beside the
plane. On the side, black letters read "Flughafen MŸnchen." Munich
Airport.

He boarded the bus to the terminal for international arrivals and was
swept along as the throng pushed inside. White acoustic tiles and the
drone of hidden machinery suddenly muffled the crowd's chatter. He
stepped on a moving sidewalk that glided silently past glittering ads
for gold watches, sleek cars, and high-priced appliances. Gorgeous
women, tall and young, beckoned to him from the posters. The light was
blindingly bright.

The long hall emptied into a smaller area, where other passengers
already were shuffling into lines in front of four booths. A large sign
on top read, Passkontrolle-Alle Pässe. Ahmed didn't speak German, but a
translation was posted underneath in English and he could read and
write enough of that. Passport Control-All Passports. Each booth
featured a large glass window at eye level, but the lower portion was
frosted white so someone waiting in line or even standing a foot away
could only see the face and chest of the federal border police officer
sitting inside. The officer wore a starched, military-style khaki shirt
and a white plastic ID card in a red border hung from the right pocket.
Small stars embroidered his shoulder boards. A patch on the left
shoulder read "Polizei."

The long line moved slowly, but the traveler was patient. He knew how
to wait in submissive silence for hard-eyed men in military uniforms.
Finally his turn came. He steeled himself and stepped up to the window.
The officer inside could extend his right arm and his open palm would
appear in a small, semicircular opening. Ahmed handed his dark brown
passport to the pink fingers that suddenly poked out.

The document was from Iraq, issued in Baghdad. Leafing through the stiff
pages, the officer could see several large, colorful visas, plus the
usual entry and exit stamps. Small countries invariably issue the
biggest, most florid visas, perhaps to compensate for their
insignificance. These showed he had visited Turkey and, more recently,
Jordan, Cyprus, Morocco, and Spain, traveling for about six months. His
passport held no visa for Germany.

Just outside each booth, a rectangular mirror hung on a metal arm from
the ceiling. It was positioned so the border officer could tilt his head
and peer up to his right, and get a clear view of the applicant waiting
in front of him. This one didn't stand out.

He was a good-looking man, solidly built, of olive complexion and
medium height. He looked in his late twenties, perhaps a little older.
He had jet black hair, parted on the left, and a thick shock draped low
on his forehead. His eyes were large and heavy-lidded, pensive and
brooding, set far apart. A broad, hawkish nose sat over full lips and a
strong chin. A full mustache curled around the corners of his mouth
like a sneer. It seemed notable only because most Iraqi men raised
shaggy brush mustaches to mimic Saddam. Perhaps he was cold, or tense,
but the traveler seemed to tremble. Later, German intelligence
authorities would say he often quivered with nervous energy.

The border officer studied the document and then looked up at the Iraqi.
Ahmed would have stared back. He usually held people in a frank gaze,
tilting his head just so. It conjured an impression of serious
endeavor. If he flashed a shy smile, as he often did, the officer would
have noticed teeth stained with tobacco tar. Ahmed didn't just smoke.
He embraced the habit, almost tenderly. He carefully cupped his lighter
with his slender fingers, as if facing a vigorous wind. Then he flicked
the blue flame alive, closed his dark eyes, and leaned back, letting the
smoke wreathe up to caress his face.

No record was kept of their conversation, but it would be brief and to
the point. Where is your visa? The border officer spoke in English. Few
Iraqis knew decent German.

Please, I want political asylum. He replied in slow, thickly accented
English. Few Germans spoke any Arabic.

The officer was not, as one might think, surprised. Germany was the
travel hub of modern Europe and its economy was booming. Every
day-every hour-refugees showed up from one hellhole or another and
appealed for safe haven from war, famine, ethnic persecution, and
political oppression. Nearly half of all refugees who applied for
asylum in the promised lands of Western Europe filed their claims in
Germany. Immigration records showed 7,476 people sought asylum in
Germany the month Ahmed arrived. A total of 95,113 flooded in that year.

Most fled the vicious civil war in the Balkans, then rupturing along
ethnic fault lines. But southern Germany also was refuge of choice for
Iraqis on the run. Thousands flowed in each year, wave upon wave of
businessmen, engineers, scientists, and soldiers, all fleeing Saddam's
tyranny. More than sixty thousand Iraqi refugees and _migr_s lived in
Germany, and at least half of them clustered around the cities of
Munich, Nuremberg, and Augsburg in the southern state of Bavaria.

They had good reason to come. Germany provided greater benefits to
refugees than nearly any other nation in Europe. It was especially
tolerant and benevolent to those seeking sanctuary from the misery of
Iraq. Saddam's secret police picked up and tortured people at whim, or
shot them in front of their homes and hung the bodies from lampposts.
The U.N. had imposed strict military and economic sanctions, and
guilt-stricken postwar Germany wasn't going to forcibly repatriate
anyone to one of the most repressive regimes on the planet.

The border officer pressed a button on his desk, and another man in a
starched khaki shirt appeared and escorted the traveler across the hall
to a small office with a desk. Ahmed sat down on a hard metal chair, and
an Arabic translator soon arrived so the German officer could ask a
series of questions and take down the answers. German officials later
would describe the story that Ahmed blurted out in a smoker's voice,
thick and gravelly.

I am from Baghdad, northeast Baghdad. I live with my mother and father.
I am a chemical engineer. I attended the University of Baghdad. I
worked at the government Chemical Engineering and Design Center. I
worked in a program to help Iraqi farmers. We improved their seeds.

Yes, I am married. No, she is still in Baghdad. Ahmed Hassan Mohammed
is a false name. I used this passport to escape Iraq. I cannot go back.
I am against Saddam. They know this. I had serious problems with the
authorities. If I go back, they will put me in prison and torture or
kill me.

The lengthy interview and paperwork took several hours but the
translator finally wrote out careful instructions and helped Ahmed buy
the necessary bus and train tickets at a kiosk just outside the customs
hall so he wouldn't get lost. Clutching the slips of paper and his bag,
he walked purposefully through the huge airport to reach the bus stand
outside.

He boarded the local bus to the town of Friesing, about twenty minutes
away past dark russet fields lined by thick hedgerows. He got out at the
town center and entered a small Tyrolean train station with carved
wooden benches and a red-gabled roof, like a model for a toy train set.
He descended into a small tunnel under the tracks, and climbed back up
into the biting wind on Platform 4. A red suburban train soon roared
up, and when the door slid open, he entered the second-class
compartment and found a seat. The doors whooshed to a close, and the
train roared away again on the two-hour journey to Nuremberg.

>From the train, Ahmed could see rolling hills, ice-flecked rivers, and
desolate winter fields of rapeseed and flax. The view was surprisingly
rural. Horses grazed in small paddocks, stamping their feet and
snorting steam in the cold air. Every so often, the train entered a
deep forest glen, and the light grew dim and mossy under broad
chestnuts and oaks, or stately stands of fir and spruce. Back in the
open, tall cable pylons counted off in strict cadence for a few miles
beside the tracks before they pivoted away into a side valley. A power
plant cooling tower, shaped like an hourglass, puffed in the distance.
Further along, low-lying fog shrouded an entire field or a farmhouse.
But the mist soon freed other pastures and outbuildings, ghostly and
drained of color.

The villages along the tracks all seemed alike: spotless streets lined
by tidy stucco houses under steep roofs of rust red tiles. Soon small
towns and then cities appeared, with glass-fronted offices and
department stores along busy shopping districts. Burly men in green
loden coats hunched against the chill. Stylish women hurried down the
cobblestone street, faces red and raw in the wind, pulling children
with mittens. Teens conspired and smoked in doorways. Mostly, however,
Ahmed saw turrets and spires poking into the pewter sky. They were
medieval church towers, neo-Baroque clock towers, and ornate bell
towers. He was used to the simple, unadorned minarets of the mosques
back home, where the devout muezzin calls the faithful to prayer five
times a day.

Ahmed was not especially faithful. Not about Islam. Not to his native
country. Certainly not to the long-suffering wife he had abandoned back
in Baghdad. Faith was a luxury in his life. Life under Saddam was too
fragile and too dangerous for such naive virtues. Iraqis made painful
moral compromises every day to survive. But that was the past.

Ahmed intended to start a new life in Germany. He was certain of that.
He would find a huge house and buy a gleaming Mercedes sedan with
buttery soft leather seats. As an engineer, he liked huge cars and
machines, the bigger the better. He would find work as a high-paid
chemical engineer in a color-coordinated factory. Go to beer halls.
Learn German.

The last leg of Ahmed's journey was not far, perhaps twenty minutes or
so by bus from the Nuremberg train station to the western suburb of
Zirndorf. But the scenery shifted dramatically. Zirndorf perched on the
upper lip of a wide valley. Down below he could see factories and
industrial yards stretching into the winter haze. A bitter wind whipped
up over the ridgeline, and scraps of paper and loose trash tumbled
along the dirt verge. Auto garages and repair shops, smoky pilaf and
kebab caf_s, and shabby apartment blocks crowded the street.

Rounding a bend in the road, Ahmed finally approached his destination.
The Zirndorf refugee center stood atop a small hill, stark and severe,
protected by high walls and a metal gate. A police post guarded one
side of the driveway. Across from it, a two-story building stood behind
a chain link fence topped by barbed wire. A tarnished brass sign
identified it as the Hauptstelle fŸr Befragundswegen, or the Main Office
for Questioning. It meant nothing to him.

He walked up the driveway to a small guardhouse beside the gate and
slid his passport and airport documents through a slot under the
window. After a few moments, the sentry returned his papers and
signaled for him to pass. He pressed a button and the gate clicked
open. Ahmed gratefully pushed through a turnstile enclosed in a steel
cage. It was clear no one could come or go from Zirndorf, as the
refugee center was known, without permission.

Inside the courtyard, he could see three imposing barracks aligned in
soldierly rows. They looked as inviting as penal blocks. Off on the
left, a small Catholic church appeared abandoned and forlorn. Few
people used the old church anymore. Most recent refugees were Muslims
but the center had no mosque. Across from the church, a gaudy Bavarian
clock tower overlooked the compound from atop the administration
building. But both hands were missing from the face, as if time no
longer mattered.

Ahmed walked to the administration building and pushed the metal door
open. The walls were moldering yellow plaster and the halls reeked of
curry and sweat, of too many people in too small a place. But the
German staff seemed efficient. After checking his papers, they took his
picture and issued him a color photo ID in a plastic sleeve. They led
him to a supply room and gave him a bar of soap, a toothbrush, and
other toiletries. They furnished him coarse sheets, a small pillow, and
a thin blue blanket. They brought him to another room stuffed with
donated clothes, and let him choose a warmer coat, boots, and anything
else for the winter.

They showed him the small coffee shop, where strict rules against
fighting, alcohol, and other infractions were posted in eight languages
above a black stand-up piano. It was battered, and badly out of tune,
apparently the victim of a rule breach or two. A refugee had painted a
mural on the wall of smiling African women in bright wraparound
dresses, with rich head-ties of stiff brocade, a colorful reminder of
another world, another time. An old TV blared loudly in the corner, and
the multi-language warning tacked to the front was mangled if clear in
English: Don't Tuch It!

The staff assigned Ahmed a bed upstairs with other single men. He
climbed the broad stone staircase and looked in. His room contained six
bunk beds, three on each side wall. A small metal table sat between
them. Graffiti scarred the walls, the only decoration. A yellow bulb
hanging from the ceiling reflected dully on the door, and it took a
moment to realize it was heavy galvanized metal, several inches thick,
secured with reinforced locks.

Zirndorf had five hundred beds for refugees and one cafeteria, back down
on the first floor. Years ago, mobs of hungry men fought to squeeze
through the single narrow door that led to the dining hall. To ease the
crush, authorities installed floor-to-ceiling steel bars and chicken
mesh to funnel diners into single-file lines. The angry crowds thinned
out over time but the barred pens and coops remained. Zirndorf looked
more like a prison than a place of refuge. The Nazis built Zirndorf
early in World War II to house motorized military police, and the
nearly two-foot-thick stone walls somehow survived the British and
American air raids that obliterated most of Nuremberg. After the war,
Zirndorf lay deep in the American occupation zone. U.S. authorities
turned it into an interrogation center and holding camp-the largest in
the country-for Soviet bloc defectors and refugees. As the Cold War
raged on, decade after decade, tens of thousands of East Germans,
Hungarians, Poles, Czechs, and other asylum seekers passed through the
dismal compound as authorities weighed their words and their fates.
After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Zirndorf became a focal point for
the flood of hope released by the collapse of communism. Refugees poured
in as borders and regulations fell across Eastern Europe. When those
rivers began to ebb, other streams suddenly swelled. In the mid1990s,
the aging barracks overflowed with families fleeing the bloodletting in
the Balkans. Mostly men came, but some brought fearful women clutching
wide-eyed children, and they jostled for room with runaways from
Algeria, Belarus, Congo, Eritrea, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Mongolia, Sudan,
and almost everywhere else. The dispossessed of the world, it seemed,
passed through Zirndorf. The administrators tried to keep abreast of
headlines since each new civil war or blast of ethnic cleansing sent
another wave crashing their way. But they also kept a weather eye on
older animosities. So they assigned Iraqis separate rooms from
Iranians, their traditional enemies. They housed Serbs apart from
Croats, and kept Muslims who only ate halal foods separate from pork
eaters. After several racial altercations, they learned to separate
Russians from Africans. And they isolated the Gypsies, known as Roma,
from everyone. Newcomers got free medical care and a small stipend,
just cigarette money, really. They could take classes to study local
food and culture, or study introductory German: Guten Morgen.
Willkommen in Zirndorf! The computer-literate could work on a couple of
aging desktops. Ahmed had heard of e-mail and Internet Web sites, of
course, and now he could try them firsthand. His physical freedom was
sharply restricted, however. He could walk to nearby parks or caf_s.
But strict rules barred refugees from going into Nuremberg or anywhere
else unless they obtained a special written pass.

More important, Ahmed and the others could only stay at Zirndorf for
ninety days. Each month, authorities hauled hundreds of refugees to
grim government-run group homes and barracks, especially in the harsh
factory towns of the former East Germany, to await word of their asylum
applications. A year or three might disappear in paperwork, interviews,
and hearings. If the authorities ultimately granted political asylum,
if they determined the applicant had a well-founded fear of
persecution, they issued a small three-page residence permit. It
permitted the bearer to find work, travel outside the country, and stay
indefinitely in Germany. After five years, he could apply for citizenship.

But German immigration officials granted asylum, on average, to only one
in twenty-five applicants. They rejected nearly all the rest as economic
migrants who simply sought a better life in the West. Such ambition was
understandable. It was even laudable. But it wasn't permitted. So
rejected applicants appealed to higher courts. Five years would pass,
maybe seven. In many cases, courts finally ordered them to leave the
country or face deportation. But most refugees found ways to prolong
their appeals. And German immigration authorities tended to be
tolerant, rarely forcing them out.

As a result, several hundred thousand refugees lived in legal limbo.
Some stayed in the bleak halfway houses and depressing dormitories.
Others submerged deeper into the shadows, struggling to survive in the
margins. Laws sharply limited how and where they could work.

The Federal Employment Ministry acknowledged their plight the month
Ahmed arrived. "In the future," the ministry announced, "asylum seekers
and recognized refugees will be able to submit applications for work
permits after two years instead of four to six years." Even then, they
were permitted to work only if no German or another citizen of the
European Union had applied for the job. It usually meant menial labor
at minimum wage or less. Refugees worked at McDonald's and Burger King,
or scrubbed lavatories and scraped gum as airport cleaning crews. Some
sold flowers in bars at night, going table to table with plaintive looks
and wilted bouquets.

For Iraqis on the run, the route to Zirndorf was more a maze than a
pipeline. Most spent weeks or months en route, escaping to Turkey or
Jordan and then slipping across porous borders in Eastern Europe with
the help of human smugglers. No matter how they came, however, most
Iraqis insisted that they simply climbed into the back of a closed
truck and were driven straight to Germany and never knew the route.
That way, they couldn't be pushed back to the last country they had
transited. Nearly every Iraqi asylum seeker shared that one constant.
They lied to immigration and intelligence authorities about their
travels. "We hear all kinds of stories," explained Robert Dirrigl, the
deputy director of Zirndorf. "Most of them are not true."

After their initial processing, Iraqis usually were ordered to appear
at the fenced-off building back down the driveway. The main office for
questioning housed a special team from the Bundesnachrichtendienst, the
Federal Intelligence Service. The BND, as it was known, was Germany's
primary spy service.

BND officials knew that Germany's generosity to Iraqis was much admired
in the Arab world. Enterprising Egyptians, Palestinians, and others
often posed as exiles from Saddam's regime in hopes of gaining quick
asylum. So the intelligence officers first sought to ensure the applicant
was not a pretender. They had a checklist of questions.

What is the color of the Iraqi dinar? Describe the coins. You say you
are from Diwaniya. What is the distance from there to Najaf? How far is
it to Baghdad? What road do you take? How long does it take?

Once satisfied that the applicant was indeed an Iraqi, they pulled out
more relevant queries.

What was your job? Were you a member of the Ba'ath Party? Did you serve
in the army? Where did you serve? Who were your officers? Did you work
for the government? What was your role?

It usually proved a futile exercise. Many Iraqis could describe the
inside of a jail cell or torture chamber. But few knew useful
intelligence about Saddam's regime. In the vast majority of cases, the
interviewers said thanks and sent the asylum seeker back up the
driveway to resume his long wait.

The BND provided a far warmer welcome to the rare refugee who offered
solid intelligence about Saddam's inner circle or his security
apparatus. Even more prized were those few who brought credible
eyewitness details about Iraq's efforts to build illegal weapons of
mass destruction. Those refugees were escorted to the front of the
asylum line at Zirndorf and given red-carpet treatment.

"If they had good information, the Germans gave them a fabulous
package," said a U.S. intelligence official who worked in Germany at the
time. "They got a stipend, a house, a job. Germany was the best in
Europe. Not only was it the best program, but there was a huge Iraqi
population around Munich. Everybody knew about it back in Baghdad."
Bitter cold gripped Zirndorf by the time a visiting BND team scheduled
an interview with Ahmed. It was nearly Christmas 1999, about six weeks
after he had arrived. Someone finally had reviewed the Iraqi's paperwork
and noticed that he was a chemical engineer who worked for a military
commission in Baghdad.

"We said, 'Okay, let's talk to this guy,'" a BND supervisor later
recalled. "We were trolling for sources. And we fished him out of the
net." No one foresaw a special prize. Saddam largely had faded from the
headlines in late 1999. "Iraq was not a prime target for us."

But Ahmed obviously was primed for them. He told the BND officers that
he was miserable in the ghastly confines of Zirndorf. He recoiled at the
prisonlike bars, the clanging metal doors, and the strict rules about
coming and going. He dreaded the notion of winding up in a flophouse and
flipping bratwurst or cleaning toilets for the rest of his life. It
wasn't the freedom he expected, the bold new life he had planned for so
long.

Thanks to misinformation in the refugee rumor mill, Ahmed feared that
the Germans might deport him back to Iraq. Even if he didn't get thrown
out, he knew he might wait years for asylum, especially after a
Zirndorf official told him "the end of the line is over there" behind
all the other friendless refugees clogging the system. Most important,
Ahmed had learned that he could shorten the wait if he gave the Germans
the information they sought.

The room was small and stuffy when Ahmed finally sat across a table from
the BND team at the federal questioning center. But he motioned them
closer to take them into his confidence. He wanted to share a secret. He
would enlighten them about his vital job back in Baghdad, he said. He
was ready to trade his valuable information for his fantastic asylum
package. He was all set for his munificent stipend, fancy manor house,
and silver Mercedes. He would happily assist his new German friends, he
vowed.

He began to tell them of Saddam's secret program to churn out what BND
reports later memorably would describe as Biowaffen.

In English, it meant germ weapons.

Bob Drogin is the author of CURVEBALL: Spies, Lies and the Con Man Who
Caused a War (Random House, 2007). 

© 2007 Independent Media Institute.