From war informant to burger flipper

Rafid Ahmed Alwan, aka “Curveball,” refuses to be blamed for the war in Iraq, says John Goetz and Bob Drogin in the Los Angeles Times. Alwan, a chemical engineer in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, fled to Germany in 1999 and became a key Western intelligence source on Saddam’s supposed weapons of mass destruction. It turned out, of course, that Saddam had no such weapons, and Alwan has faced international scorn as the principal source of the bad intelligence behind the Iraq invasion. But Alwan, 41, who lives with his family in a cramped, low-rent apartment near Nuremberg, says flatly that “never in my whole life’’ did he claim that Iraq had WMD. When asked how the Bush administration got it so wrong, he says, “I am not the source of these problems.” Alwan says, in fact, he delivered good intelligence to the Germans, but was cheated out of the financial reward he was promised. Nearly destitute, over the past few years he has flipped burgers at McDonald’s and Burger King, rolled pretzels at all-night bakery, and washed dishes at a Chinese restaurant. Several former colleagues now say that Alwan was always a sketchy figure who fled Iraq under a cloud of corruption, and that he inflated what he knew in exchange for money and housing from the Germans. But Alwan insists he’s been libeled. “Everything that has been written about me is untrue. The main thing is, I’m an honest man.”

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