Is the CIA Still Hiding Embarrassing Details of its WMD Debacle in Iraq?

A former CIA officer is suing his former employer over its bungling on Iraq’s phantom nuclear, biological and chemical weapons

UN Security Council, Feb, 5, 2003: Secretary of State Colin Powell famously held up a small vial, suggesting it contained anthrax, to illustrate the potential threat posed by an Iraqi biological weapons program. CIA Director George Tenet faied to tell him that the agency had never interviewed “Curveball.”

Jerry Watson wasn’t always at war with the CIA.

His home office is lined with accolades and honors from a 31-year CIA career running clandestine operations and producing analysis for policymakers: a DNI national intelligence award, an exceptional service medallion, intelligence commendation medal, exceptional performance awards, even a medal for an injury in Iraq.

Watson served as a CIA operations officer for 21 years, and an analyst for 10. He led two branches at the National Counterterrorism Center, and served in an alphabet soup of other divisions and centers.

His career cratered in the WMD debacle in Iraq, however. He backed CIA misjudgments before the 2003 invasion, but his relentless post-war effort to force a reckoning for the infamous Curveball case—in which the agency swallowed the tale of an Iraqi refugee who claimed Saddam Hussein had mobile biological warfare labs—made him a pariah at Langley. In the end, he was banished to a desk in a storage room among cardboard boxes and file cabinets, and was never promoted again.

“They treated him like shit,” Larry Fox, who spent 33 years at the CIA, mostly as a senior analyst, told me. “I’d never seen that happen before. Never, ever. The problem was, Jerry was very good, and very tenacious. He didn’t give up. And he pissed them off.”