The Washington Post (pg. A1)  [Printer-friendly version]
April 28, 2007

TENET DETAILS EFFORTS TO JUSTIFY INVADING IRAQ;

Former CIA Director Says White House Focused on the Idea Long Before
9/11

By Karen DeYoung, Washington Post Staff Writer

White House and Pentagon officials, and particularly Vice President
Cheney, were determined to attack Iraq from the first days of the Bush
administration, long before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and
repeatedly stretched available intelligence to build support for the
war, according to a new book by former CIA director George J. Tenet.

Although Tenet does not question the threat Saddam Hussein posed or
the sincerity of administration beliefs, he recounts numerous efforts
by aides to Cheney and then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to
insert "crap" into public justifications for the war. Tenet also
describes an ongoing fear within the intelligence community of the
administration's willingness to "mischaracterize complex intelligence
information."

"There was never a serious debate that I know of within the
administration about the imminence of the Iraq threat," Tenet writes
in "At the Center of the Storm," to be released Monday by
HarperCollins. The debate "was not about imminence but about acting
before Saddam did."

White House counselor Dan Bartlett yesterday called Tenet a "true
patriot" but disputed his conclusions, saying "the president did
wrestle with those very serious questions." Responding to reports from
the book in yesterday's New York Times, Bartlett suggested that the
former CIA director might have been unaware of all the discussions.
President Bush, Bartlett said on NBC's "Today Show," "weighed all the
various consequences before he did make a decision."

In their threat briefings for the incoming Bush administration in late
2000, Tenet writes, CIA officials did not even mention Iraq. But
Cheney, he says, asked for an Iraq briefing and requested that the
outgoing Clinton administration's defense secretary, William S. Cohen,
provide information on Iraq for Bush.

A speech by Cheney in August 2002 "went well beyond what our analysis
could support," Tenet writes. The speech charged, among other things,
that Hussein had restarted his nuclear program and would "acquire
nuclear weapons fairly soon... perhaps within a year." Caught off-
guard by the remarks, which had not been cleared by the CIA, Tenet
says he considered confronting the vice president on the subject but
did not.

"Would that have changed his future approach?" he asks. "I doubt it
but I should not have let silence imply an agreement." Policymakers,
he writes, "have a right to their own opinions, but not their own set
of facts."

New details about the origins of the current terrorist threat -- and
the way the Clinton and Bush White Houses dealt with it -- add to a
growing body of information about the tumultuous late 1990s and the
first years of the new century. For the future, Tenet describes his
deepest fear as "the nuclear one." He is convinced, he writes, that
this is where Osama bin Laden "and his operatives desperately want to
go. They understand that bombings by cars, trucks, trains and planes
will get them some headlines, to be sure. But if they manage to set
off a mushroom cloud, they will make history."

Despite all efforts to thwart them, he says, "I do know one thing in
my gut: al-Qa'ida is here and waiting."

The book breaks Tenet's long public silence since he resigned in June
2004 over what he considered White House attempts to turn him into a
scapegoat, as U.S. efforts in Iraq were bogging down, for the faulty
intelligence used to justify the invasion in the first place.

Tenet writes that Bush talked him out of resigning in May 2003. But he
decided it was time to go nine months later when a book by The
Washington Post's Bob Woodward quoted him as telling Bush in December
2002 that the intelligence case against Iraq was a "slam dunk," a
statement he says was taken out of context but subsequently used by
the administration to blame him for faulty Iraq intelligence. "I
couldn't quit immediately over something that appeared in a book,"
Tenet writes, "but I didn't see any way I could or should stay on much
longer." Bush made no attempt to keep him when he finally resigned in
June 2004.

Tenet blames himself, among other things, for the hastily compiled
October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, which concluded that Iraq
possessed chemical and biological weapons, issued on the eve of a
congressional vote authorizing the war. The NIE, he said, "should have
been initiated earlier. I didn't think one was necessary. I was
wrong." The document, he acknowledged, was "not cautious in key
judgments" and at times used single sources who turned out to be
wrong.

A perennial problem, he writes, was a tendency by intelligence
analysts to assume other people thought like they did. When judging
whether Hussein was lying when he said Iraq had no weapons of mass
destruction, "we did not account for... the mind set never to show
weakness in a very dangerous neighborhood."

One of the "lowest moments of my seven-year tenure," Tenet recalls,
was when a congressman told him in a public hearing in the spring of
2004 that "we depended on you, and you let us down."

Tenet's account of his CIA years moves through explanation,
accusation, defensiveness and occasional apology. When he became
acting director in December 1996, Tenet writes, he found an agency "in
shambles," its budget slashed, its recruiting moribund and its morale
"in the basement." Analysis and clandestine operations had
deteriorated, and there was "no coherent, integrated and measurable
long-range plan. That's where I focused my energy from day one."

Much of the first half of the book is a detailed account of what Tenet
describes as efforts by himself and his lieutenants to meet the
emerging al-Qaeda threat and to convince the White House to take
aggressive action. Rejecting later criticism of CIA foot-dragging,
Tenet writes that "after 9/11 some senior government officials
contended that they were surprised at the size and nature of the
attacks. Perhaps so, but they shouldn't have been. We had been warning
about the threat at every opportunity."

He titles one chapter of the 549-page book "Missed Opportunities," but
Tenet misses few opportunities himself to settle scores with Cheney
and Rumsfeld and their top aides, and with Bush's first-term national
security adviser and current secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice. He
characterizes Rice as a "remote" figure who "knew the president's mind
well but tended to stay out of policy fights." Under Rice, he says,
the National Security Council failed to explore options and reach
consensus. Rumsfeld, he says, refused to recognize worsening reality
in Iraq and on several occasions undercut CIA efforts with cavalier
treatment of secret information.

By contrast, Tenet's treatment of Bush, who presented Tenet with a
Medal of Freedom six months after his departure, is relatively gentle.
He says he and others sometimes failed to give Bush the information he
needed. "The president was not well served," he says by way of
example, "because the NSC became too deferential to a postwar strategy
that was not working."

Tenet writes defensively about the controversial program to intercept
domestic telephone calls involving terrorism suspects. The program was
Cheney's idea, and the vice president briefed "the leaders of the
House and Senate Intelligence committees 12 times prior to its public
disclosure" in late 2005.

He reiterates a claim last year by Bush that the CIA's harsh
interrogations of captured al-Qaeda figures "helped disrupt plots
aimed at locations in the United States, the United Kingdom, the
Middle East, South Asia, and Central Asia." He says the agency used
"the most aggressive" techniques -- which he does not detail -- on "a
handful of the worst terrorists on the planet" and that the
questioning was "carefully monitored at all times to ensure the safety
of the prisoner."

Tenet describes as "baloney" a claim made in a book last year by
journalist Ron Suskind that the agency overstated the value of
intelligence collected from al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaida, whom
Suskind depicted as "mentally unstable." Zubaida, Tenet says, was
central to many al-Qaeda operations and shared "critical information
with his interrogators." Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed, he
says, initially told interrogators that he would talk only after
seeing a lawyer in the United States. "Had that happened," Tenet
writes, "I am confident that we would have obtained none of the
information he had in his head about imminent threats against the
American people."

Al-Qaeda has responded to the U.S. intelligence focus on young Arab
men as potential risks, he says, by recruiting "jihadists with
different backgrounds. I am convinced the next major attack against
the United States may well be conducted by people with Asian or
African faces, not the ones that many Americans are alert to."

Staff writers Walter Pincus and R. Jeffrey Smith and staff researcher
Julie Tate contributed to this report.