Good morning! This is Day Three of my Curveball blog.

We've enjoyed a fairly spirited discussion the last two days. One very committed writer seems fervently convinced that the Senate Intelligence Committee, the Robb Silberman Commission, the Iraq Survey Group, the so-called Butler Report in the British Parliament, plus my new book CURVEBALL, all missed or covered-up the truth. That "truth," he writes, is that the tiny Office of Special Plans at Don Rumsfeld's Pentagon secretly and knowingly fed Curveball's false information to the Bush White House to hoodwink the nation.

It's an interesting theory. But there is no evidence - zero, nada, zip - to support it. Nor does it make any sense. As I wrote yesterday, Curveball's interrogations in Germany began during the Clinton administration. During the run-up to war, his flawed intelligence was not "stove piped" through secret channels or whispered in someone's ear. It was the OFFICIAL determination of the U.S. intelligence community. That's what makes the case so grotesque and the story so fascinating. Curveball's information was key to the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, the president's 2003 State of the Union speech, Colin Powell's presentation to the U.N. Security Council, threat assessments given to Congress, and hundreds of classified documents and reports.

There was no need to slip this in the back door of the White House. George Tenet presented it to the president, and key members of Congress, on a silver platter, complete with charts, graphs and cartoon drawings. That's the real scandal in this case. It wasn't a dark conspiracy. It was worse - dreadful tradecraft, inept analysis, and spineless leadership that ignored warnings of problems.

Let me give you some examples.

The German intelligence agency, known as the BND, coordinated all the debriefings and interrogations of Curveball after he first turned up in Munich in November 1999. Most took place at a fortress-like site called the Nuremberg JIC, the joint interrogation center, which U.S., British, French and German authorities used as an intelligence base during the Cold War. (In 2000, the former head of the JIC, George Trofimoff, was sentenced to life in prison for spying for the Soviets for 25 years. The former Army colonel is the highest-ranking U.S. military officer ever convicted of espionage.) But Curveball also was interviewed at safe houses and on a German military base.

The BND repeatedly refused to allow the DIA and the CIA come interview Curveball. They similarly refused until very late in the game to release transcripts of their interviews. They instead released only their own analysis in German of what their informant had said in Arabic. This infuriated the CIA, but relations between the two services was terrible. In the end, the U.S. analysts got these thrice-translated analyses of Curveball's supposed stories, with additional comments and analysis steadily added on. The process was like a children's game of telephone, or what the British call Chinese whispers. As the information was passed up the chain, Curveball's apparent expertise grew stronger and and his story steadily more terrifying.

The BND's ostensible excuse for refusing to allow Americans to interview Curveball was he didn't speak English and he hated Americans. The fact is Curveball spoke better English than German. The CIA or DIA could always send a case officer who spoke fluent Arabic or German.

The Germans acted that way for two reasons. First, Curveball told them that the mobile biological production vehicles carried German equipment. That was potentially hugely embarrassing. German companies built much of Saddam's chemical and nuclear programs in the 1980s, and the Schroeder government - which ardently opposed the war - didn't want to give the Americans any cause to launch an invasion.

Secondly, relations between the BND and the CIA were poisonous. During the Cold War, the Americans treated the BND as an adjunct spy service that couldn't be trusted. They had good reason. The East Germans and other Soviet bloc forces repeatedly penetrated West German intelligence. But relations only grew worse after the Berlin Wall came down. The CIA and BND expelled each others' spies, battled in the press, and barely cooperated. To make matters worse, Schroeder's coordinator for intelligence had served as police chief in Hamburg. He was furious when the Bush administration suggested that the Germans bore partial blame for the 9/11 attacks because local authorities had failed to arrest the so-called Hamburg Cell led by Mohammed Atta. Most of the Atta's group, of course, moved to the United States long before 9/11.

As a result, he and other senior leaders at the BND openly distrusted and resented the CIA. And they saw no reason to suddenly cooperate. So they kept Curveball under wraps. It was partially "pride of service," partially spite, and partially recognition that the CIA would NEVER let the BND interview a key CIA informant. Except in very rare cases, the CIA doesn't even allow the DIA, the Pentagon's intelligence wing, to interview a CIA source.

Not surprisingly, when a colleague and I first broke the Curveball story in the Los Angeles Times in 2004, the CIA's first response was to blame German intelligence for not granting access to their secret source. It was classic blame-shifting, just as they had done after the 9/11 attacks.

U.S. law enforcement and intelligence authorities, most investigators concluded, failed to "connect the dots" of evidence that could have prevented the 9/11 attacks. The problem in Curveball was much worse. The CIA and DIA made up the dots to conjure up a threat that didn't exist.