Al-Qaeda’s quest for nuclear weapons started long before the United States knew there was a global terrorist threat, and the hunt continues to this day.
That’s what George Tenet says in his much-talked-about new book, “At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA.” The former director of the Central Intelligence Agency writes compellingly about the nuclear terrorism threat. He says pre-Sept. 11 intelligence assessments that “guys in caves can’t get WMD,” or that terrorists are not working to develop strategic weapons of mass destruction, were “simply wrong.”
Through international nuclear proliferation networks, al-Qaeda has obtained chemical and biological weapons and may have acquired nuclear material. “I am convinced that this is where [Osama bin Laden] and his operatives desperately want to go,” he writes. “They understand that bombings by cars, trucks, trains and planes will get them some headlines…. But if they manage to set off a mushroom cloud, they will make history.”
It’s a scary scenario.
Tenet recounts a February 2001 federal trial when a key witness testified that he helped bin Laden try to get uranium in Sudan in 1993. Al Qaeda was willing to pay $1.5 million for an unknown quantity, he said. Since then, the CIA has found other al-Qaeda connections to fissile material.
Tenet, of course, chronicles the run-up to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq and explains his “slam dunk” comment as referring broadly to the case that could be made against Saddam, not that the presence of WMDs could be proved.
Those passages are being broadly criticized, but the book is about much more. Among other things, it gives insight into the inner workings of the Bush administration before and after Sept. 11.
Tenet also recounts the evolution of the Bush administration’s controversial terrorist surveillance program and the unfolding of strategies for handling terror suspects.
The interrogation techniques that we’ve now heard so much about, from sleep deprivation to water boarding, eventually were applied only, he says “to the worst terrorists on the planet.” He says the information obtained helped foil several plots. As to nuclear terrorism, Tenet writes that even in the darkest days of the Cold War “we could count on the fact that the Soviets, just like us, wanted to live. Not so with terrorists. [Al-Qaeda] boasts that while we fear death, they embrace it.”
