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    WASHINGTON, June 25 (Xinhua) -- Top U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officials ignored warnings in late 2002 and early 2003 on intelligence that had been fabricated about Iraq's rumored weapons of mass destruction (WMD), The Washington Post reported Sunday.

    In late January 2003, as then U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell prepared to argue the Bush administration's case against Iraq at the United Nations, veteran CIA officer Tyler Drumheller went through a classified draft of Powell's speech to look for errors and found a whopper: a claim about mobile biological labs built by Iraq for germ warfare, the report said.

    Drumheller instantly recognized the source, an Iraqi defector suspected of being mentally unstable and a liar, and crossed out the whole paragraph, Drumheller told the newspaper.

    A few days later, the lines were back in the speech, and Powellstood before the UN Security Council on Feb. 5 and said: "We have first-hand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails."

    "We thought we had taken care of the problem," said Drumheller, who was the CIA's European operations chief before retiring last year.

    While the administration has repeatedly acknowledged intelligence failures over Iraqi weapons claims that led to war, new accounts by former insiders such as Drumheller shed light on one of the most spectacular failures of all: How U.S. intelligence agencies were eagerly drawn in by reports about a troubled defector's claims of secret germ factories in the Iraqi desert, the newspaper reported.

    The mobile labs were never found.

    Drumheller described in extensive interviews with the newspaper repeated attempts to alert top CIA officials to problems with the defector, code-named Curveball, in the days before the Powell speech.

    Other warnings came prior to President George W. Bush's State of the Union address on Jan. 28, 2003, which contained the now famous "16 words" on Iraqi attempts to acquire uranium and in which Bush spoke in far greater detail about mobile labs "designed to produce germ warfare agents."

    The warnings triggered debates within the CIA but ultimately made no visible impact at the top, current and former intelligence officials were quoted as saying.

    More than a year after Powell's speech, after an investigation that extended to three continents, the CIA acknowledged that Curveball was a con artist who drove a taxi in Iraq and spun his engineering knowledge into a fantastic but plausible tale about secret bioweapons factories on wheels.

    A Baghdad native, Curveball lived in Germany the life of an important spy in the fall of 2002, and in return for immigration permits for himself and his family, he supplied Germany's foreign intelligence service with what appeared to be a rare insider's account of one of Iraq's long-rumored WMD programs, the report said.

    The German intelligence agency passed Curveball's stories to the Americans, but a German official offered a startlingly candid assessment about the intelligence, the report said.

    The German officials said Curveball was believed to be "a fabricator" and have "psychological problems," and that the German intelligence "never validate his reports," Drumheller was quoted saying. Enditem