David Kay was hired by the CIA on June 10, 2003, to search for WMD in Iraq. “Over the next week or so, Kay embarked on a crash course in WMD intelligence. ‘…It was nothing new,’ he recalled. Anything with a strong or reasonable factual basis came from before 1998, when the U.N. inspectors had left. ‘Everything after that either came from a defector or came through a foreign intelligence service in an opaque sort of way.’ …Kay was aghast to realize that the CIA had never even independently interviewed [Iraqi informant] Curveball, but relied instead on the Germans’ reports of 112 interrogations they conducted. Worse still, it appeared that the Germans had warned that Curveball was an alcoholic, although this had been downplayed in the U.S. files. On the alleged Iraqi effort to restart its nuclear program, Kay found that the conclusion hinged on only one piece of physical evidence–‘high specification aluminum tubes.’ …The CIA file…contained information from foreign sources suggesting that Iraq had tried to purchase 60,000 such tubes to be used as artillery shells.”
– Bob Woodward, State of Denial, Pages 216-217