An Iraqi defector named Rafid Ahmed and codenamed ‘Curveball’ claimed, while seeking asylum in Germany, that Iraq was using mobile labs to create WMD. “The United States never got access to Curveball. The testimony he gave to the Germans was filtered secondhand through DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency] and became the core of [Secretary of State Colin] Powell’s testimony on February 5, 2003. …By late spring, the mobile trailers Curveball had described as at the heart of Saddam’s biological weapons operation were found to produce hydrogen for weather balloons. They literally produced hot air.”
– Ron Suskind, The Way of the World, Page 178