Germany's former foreign minister Joschka Fischer has accused the former head of the CIA George Tenet of making implausible claims about the handling of the Curveball case by the US.
On Wednesday Tenet, the director of central intelligence between 1997 and 2004, issued a statement on his website saying he discovered "too damn late" that Curveball – the Iraqi defector who became a key source for the CIA and the German secret service (BND) – might be a fabricator.
Reprinting an extract from his autobiography, Tenet claimed he only found out in 2005, two years after the Iraq invasion, that the BND had doubts about Curveball's claims to have witnessed first-hand Saddam Hussein's bio-weapons programme.
Asked by the Guardian whether Tenet's claims were plausible, Fischer said: "No. I don't think so."