Vice President Dick Cheney and other Bush administration officials wanted to “handpick” Iraq’s leaders after the fall of Saddam Hussein and limit Iraqi involvement in choosing a new government, former CIA Director George Tenet says in his book.
Cheney and Pentagon officials pressed for the installation of a ruling coalition that included Ahmed Chalabi, an Iraqi exile who provided bad information on the country’s weapons programs, Kurdish leaders and other exiled Hussein opponents, Tenet writes in “At the Center of the Storm.” “Rather than risking an open-ended political process that Americans could influence but not control, they wanted to be able to limit the Iraqis’ power and handpick those Iraqis who would participate,” Tenet writes.
The plan never was implemented because the administration couldn’t reach a consensus on Chalabi, he writes.
“You had the impression that some Office of the Vice President and DOD reps were writing Chalabi’s name over and over again in their notes, like schoolgirls with their first crush,” Tenet writes.
Administration officials have argued that establishing a democratically elected government in Iraq was among the rationales for the war.
White House spokesman Tony Snow told reporters today that, while he hadn’t asked President George W. Bush for his reaction to the book, administration officials didn’t single Tenet out for blame for missteps on Iraq.
“We do not believe he was scapegoated,” Snow said.
The book, the first published account by Tenet, 54, since he resigned from the Central Intelligence Agency in 2004, was released for sale today. CBS’s “60 Minutes” yesterday broadcast an interview with Tenet in which he said al-Qaeda may have terrorist cells in the U.S. planning attacks.
In the book, Tenet writes that President George W. Bush asked Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser, at a White House meeting in early 2004 to have the U.S. stop using Chalabi for intelligence. “I want Chalabi off the payroll,” Tenet quotes Bush as saying.
In a subsequent meeting, the Defense Intelligence Agency said it was paying Chalabi’s organization $350,000 a month to provide information, Tenet says.
“Somehow the president’s direction to pull the plug on the arrangement continued to be ignored,” he writes.
The CIA often found itself left out of decision-making, Tenet said. The agency was not consulted before L. Paul Bremer, administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority, decided to fire anyone in the Iraqi government and civil institutions who belonged to Hussein’s Baath party, he says.
Bremer also dissolved the Iraqi army, “again, without any formal discussion or debate back in Washington – at least any that included me or my top deputies,” Tenet writes.
Tenet said he regrets not reading Bush’s 2003 State of the Union speech before the president delivered it so he could have urged him to take out the 16 words wrongly accusing Iraq of seeking uranium for nuclear weapons in Niger.
“Part of the fault was truly mine,” he writes.
In other sections of the book, Tenet defends his actions and those of other senior intelligence officials.
He writes that he signed off on then-National Security Agency Director Michael Hayden’s program to eavesdrop on phone calls between suspected al Qaeda associates overseas and people in the U.S.
Tenet, who believes a domestic spy agency is worth considering, says Hayden observed privacy protections for U.S. citizens. “In some ways the safest place for an al Qaeda member to hide was inside the United States,” he writes.
Civil-liberties groups protested the program’s existence when media reports disclosed it in 2005.
In his “60 Minutes” interview, Tenet said there may be al- Qaeda cells in the U.S., sent around the time of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, waiting for a time to strike.
“My operational presumption is that they infiltrated a second wave or a third wave into the United States at the time of 9/11,” he said.
Tenet, who headed the spy agency when the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were hit, said his opinion was based on “operational intuition,” not hard evidence.
Wrong Conclusion The CIA sifted through “lots of data” before incorrectly concluding in a National Intelligence Estimate of threats facing the U.S. that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons, Tenet said. The conclusion helped Bush win support for a congressional resolution authorizing the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
“Remember, when you write an estimate, when you estimate, you’re writing what you don’t know,” he said. The information might be enough to “win a civil case,” Tenet said. “You’re not going to win a criminal case, in terms of evidence.” Tenet said he felt the Bush administration already had determined what course it would take in Iraq before the estimate was finished in October 2002. He recalled going to the White House to brief Bush on Sept. 12, 2001, and running into Richard Perle, then chairman of the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, an independent Pentagon consultant.
Perle “said to me, ‘Iraq has to pay a price for what happened yesterday, they bear responsibility,”‘ Tenet said. “I remember thinking to myself as I’m about to go brief the president, ‘What the hell is he talking about?”‘ Tenet said the CIA never proved a link between Iraq and the Sept. 11 attacks.
Rice, now secretary of state, responded to one of the assertions Tenet made in the interview, that she brushed aside his warnings in the summer of 2001 about the threat of an imminent attack by al-Qaeda and advice to make a pre-emptive attack on terrorist bases in Afghanistan.
“Well, it’s very interesting, because that’s not what George told the 9/11 Commission at the time,” Rice, who was the national security adviser in 2001, said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” program yesterday. “He said that he felt that we had gotten it.” Rice said her deputy, Stephen Hadley, met with intelligence agencies to determine a course of action. “But the idea of launching preemptive strikes into Afghanistan in July of 2001, this is a new fact,” she said.
Tenet was named CIA director in 1997 and left just before the release of a congressional report criticizing the agency’s conclusions about Iraq’s weapons capability.
