When WMD meets office space: how petty bureaucratic jealousies in the intelligence world led to the invasion of Iraq.

• Author: Ackerman, Spencer
• Position: Curveball: Spies, Lies, and the Con Man Who Caused a War - Book review

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Curveball: Spies, Lies, and the Con Man Who Caused a War by Bob Drogin Random House, 319 pp.

A word of advice to reporters seeking to embed in Iraq: it helps to avoid the whole WMD thing. In March, I met an Army officer for dinner at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. In the course of a general discussion about whether the war's fortunes were as bad as they seemed, the conversation turned to Saddam Hussein's nonexistent chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. The whole reason the two of us were in Iraq in the first place, I mused, was the Bush administration's deception, and self-deception, over WMDs, as surreal as that long-ago justification seems in retrospect.

My dinner companion took my reminder of the years-old debacle as something of an affront. His compatriots didn't care about WMD, he said: whatever the reason they were sent to Iraq, the fact remains that they're there now. Remarking upon the long-disproven rationale for the war seemed to the officer to be an unfair distraction from the military's current efforts.

That night, over dinner, we were truly talking past one another. But on reflection, my friend's annoyance is completely understandable: no one serving in Iraq has the luxury of ruminating on past history. WMDs matter little when you're driving nervously down a road full of IEDs. And this is one more transgression wrought by the war: that salvaging what can be salvaged in Iraq requires ignoring the very reasons we invaded in the first place.

Enter Bob Drogin's new book, Curveball: Spies, Lies, and the Con Man Who Caused a War, an insightful and compelling account of one crucial component of the war's origins. Drogin, a national security correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, meticulously recreates the story of a twenty-something Iraqi (codenamed "Curveball") who leveraged a desire for plush asylum in Germany into an inconsistent, fantastical account of biowarfare machines hidden on trucks. This nonsense claimed by Curveball traversed tensions between partner intelligence agencies and internecine battles within the CIA to provide a pretext for the invasion. Had Drogin merely pieced together Curveball's story, it alone would have made for a thrilling book. But he provides something more: a frightening glimpse at how easily we could make the same mistakes again.

Ahmed Hassan Mohammed was the false name on the passport Curveball used to fly to Munich in 1999 and apply for asylum. (Curveball still lives in...