Swinging at Curveball: When You Want It Bad, You Get It Bad (with Bob Drogin)

About this episode

The episode discusses the fabrication of Iraqi weapons stories by a refugee and its implications for U.S. intelligence and current events.

In 2003, a single Iraqi refugee — codenamed Curveball — fabricated stories about Iraqi weapons. The U.S. intelligence community, desperate for sources after 9/11, laundered his claims into a National Intelligence Estimate produced in under three weeks. Bob Drogin, the award-winning journalist who broke the story and wrote the definitive book on it, joins John & Jerry to examine how political will, institutional groupthink, and bureaucratic cowardice allowed a con man’s tales to be treated as fact. But history repeats itself as now, in 2026, fuzzy claims about Iranian weapons undergirds another Middle East war. Watch Mission Implausible on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MissionImplausiblePod

People in this episode

Hosts: John, Jerry

Guest: Bob Drogin

Topics covered

• Iraqi refugee
• weapons fabrication
• U.S. intelligence
• political will
• Middle East war

Keywords

• Curveball
• Iraqi weapons
• Bob Drogin
• intelligence community
• Middle East

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: U.S. intelligence community

Places: Iraq, Iran

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