BERLIN -- The German intelligence officials responsible for one of the most important informants on Saddam Hussein's suspected weapons of mass destruction say the Bush administration and the CIA repeatedly exaggerated his claims during the run-up to the Iraq war.

Five senior officials from Germany's Federal Intelligence Service, or BND, told the Los Angeles Times that they warned U.S. intelligence authorities that the source, an Iraqi defector codenamed Curveball, never claimed to produce germ weapons and never saw anyone else do so.

According to the Germans, President Bush mischaracterized Curveball's information when he warned before the war that Iraq had at least seven mobile factories brewing biological poisons. Then Secretary of State Colin Powell also misstated Curveball's claims in his prewar presentation to the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003, the Germans said.

The German account emerges as Washington is engaged in a political battle over prewar intelligence. The White House lashed out last week at Senate Democrats and other critics who allege the administration manipulated intelligence to go to war. Democrats have forced the Senate intelligence committee to resume a long-stalled inquiry. Democrats in the House are calling for a similar inquiry.

An investigation by the Times based on interviews since May with about 30 current and former intelligence officials in the U.S., Germany, England, Iraq and the United Nations shows that U.S. bungling in the Curveball case was far worse than official reports have disclosed.

The White House, for example, ignored evidence that United Nations weapons inspectors disproved virtually all of Curveball's accounts before the war. President Bush and his aides issued increasingly dire warnings about Iraq's germ weapons as the invasion neared, even though intelligence from Curveball had not changed.

At the Central Intelligence Agency, senior officials embraced Curveball's claims even though they could not verify them or interview him until a year after the invasion. They ignored multiple warnings about his reliability, punished in-house critics who provided proof that he had lied and refused to admit error until May 2004, 14 months after invasion.

After the CIA vouched for Curveball's information, President Bush warned in his State of the Union Speech in January 2003 that Iraq had "mobile biological weapons labs" designed to produce "germ warfare agents." The next month, Bush said in a radio address and a statement that Iraq "has at least seven mobile factories" for germ warfare.

Curveball told his German handlers, however, that he had assembled equipment on only one truck and had heard secondhand about other sites. Moreover, he could not identify what the equipment was designed to produce.

David Kay, who headed the CIA's post-invasion search for illicit weapons, said Curveball's accounts were madden-ingly murky. "He was not in charge of trucks or production," Kay said. "He had nothing to do with actual production of biological agent. He never saw them actually produce agent."

But Powell highlighted Curveball's "eyewitness" account when he warned the U.N. Security Council on the eve of war that Iraq's trucks could brew enough weapons-grade microbes "in a single month to kill thousands upon thousands of people."

In a telephone interview, Powell said CIA director George J. Tenet and his top deputies personally assured him before the Feb. 5, 2003, speech that intelligence on the mobile labs was "solid."

CIA officials now concede that he fused fact, research off the Internet and what former co-workers called "water-cooler gossip" into a nightmarish fantasy that played on U.S. fears after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. His motive, they say, was to get a German visa, not start a war.

After the invasion, the CIA's Iraq Survey Group, headed by Kay, found that Curveball was fired from his job in 1995, at the time he said he was starting work on germ weapons.

A former CIA official said records showed he had been jailed for an apparent sex crime and that for some time he drove a Baghdad taxi. His childhood friends called him a "great liar" and a "con artist."

"The Iraqis were all laughing when we asked about him," recalled a former CIA investigator. "They were saying, This guy? You've got to be kidding.'"

The case began in November 1999, when the Baghdad-born chemical engineer flew into Munich on a tourist visa and applied for political asylum. The Germans sent him to a refugee center outside Nuremberg.

During interrogations in 2000 and 2001, the Iraqi told BND officers he had worked on a secret weapons program between 1995 and 1999. He said he worked for Dr. Rihab Taha, known as "Dr. Germ," and had helped build a mobile germ factory at Djerf al Nadaf, a grain-handling facility southeast of Baghdad.

The Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency, working from a clandestine operating base called Munich House, became the liaison for U.S. intelligence and assigned his code name. German officials insisted Curveball hated Americans, so the DIA was not allowed to interview him.

As a result, the DIA like the BND never tried to check Curveball's background. Despite that failure, CIA analysts accepted the incoming intelligence reports as credible and passed them to senior policymakers. CIA officials admit now the system failed.

Like many defectors, Curveball at first seemed eager to please. But as the questions intensified, Curveball grew moody and irritable. His memory began to fail. He confused places and dates. He fretted about his personal safety, about his parents and wife in Baghdad, and about his future in Germany.

Curveball largely ceased cooperating in 2001 once he was granted asylum, officials said. He would refuse to meet for days, and then weeks, at a time. He also increasingly asked for money.

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