Tyler S. Drumheller | CIA officer, 63

Tyler S. Drumheller, 63, a high-level CIA officer who publicly battled agency leaders over one of the most outlandish claims in the U.S. case for war with Iraq, died Sunday at a hospital in Fairfax County, Va. The cause was complications from pancreatic cancer, said his wife, Linda Drumheller.

Mr. Drumheller held posts in Africa and Europe over a 26-year career during which the CIA's focus shifted from the Cold War to terrorist threats.

But he was best known publicly for his role in exposing the extent to which a key part of the administration's case for war with Iraq had been built on the claims of an Iraqi defector and serial fabricator with the code name Curveball.

A scathing 2005 report on the intelligence failures in Iraq did not mention Mr. Drumheller by name but concluded that officials in the agency's European division had "expressed serious concerns about Curveball's reliability to senior officials at the CIA," and that the warnings were inexplicably dismissed. When then-CIA Director George Tenet denied that he had ever been warned about Curveball, Mr. Drumheller fought back in public, saying that "everyone in the chain of command knew exactly what was happening." - Washington Post