Global Dashboard have spotted an incredible interview in the LA Times with “Curveball”, one of the most important “disinformation” agents in the run up to the invasion of Iraq.

Rather depressingly, it shows that a good deal of Colin Powell’s UN presentation on WMD was based on the word of a jobbing burger flipper who failed to even win the trust of his colleagues at Burger King.

This passage is unforgettable:

In early 2002, a year before the war, he told co-workers at the Burger King that he spied for Iraqi intelligence and would report any fellow Iraqi worker who criticized Hussein’s regime.

They couldn’t decide if he was dangerous or crazy.

“During breaks, he told stories about what a big man he was in Baghdad,” said Hamza Hamad Rashid, who remembered an odd scene with the pudgy Alwan in his too-tight Burger King uniform praising Hussein in the home of der Whopper. “But he always lied. We never believed anything he said.”

Another Iraqi friend, Ghazwan Adnan, remembers laughing when he applied for a job at a local Princess Garden Chinese Restaurant and discovered Alwan washing dishes in the back while claiming to be “a big deal” in Iraq. “How could America believe such a person?”