(This essay, which considers At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA
by George Tenet with Bill Harlow, appears in the July 19 issue of the
New York Review of Books and is posted here with the permission of the
editors of that magazine.)
How the US got into Iraq is the great open question of the decade, but George
Tenet in his memoir of his seven years running the Central Intelligence Agency
takes his sweet time working his way around to it. He hesitates because he has
much to explain: the
claims made by Tenet's CIA with "high confidence" that Iraq was dangerously
armed all proved false.
But
mistakes are one thing, excusable even when
serious; inexcusable would be charges of collusion
in deceiving the US Congress and the public to
make war possible. Tenet's overriding goal in his
carefully written book is to deny "that we somehow
cooked the books" about Iraq's weapons of mass
destruction (WMD). If he says it once he says it a
dozen times: "We told the
president what
we did on Iraq WMD because we believed it."
But repetition is not enough. Tenet's problem is that the intelligence and the
war proceeded in lockstep: no intelligence, no war. Since Tenet delivered the
(shockingly exaggerated) intelligence, and President George W Bush used it to
go to war, how is Tenet to convince the world that he wasn't simply giving the
boss what he wanted? Tenet naturally dislikes this question, but it is evident
that the US public and Congress dislike it just as much.
Down that road lie painful truths about the character and motives of the
president and the men and women around him. But getting out of Iraq will not be
easy, and the necessary first step is to find the civic courage to insist on
knowing how we got in. Tenet's memoir is an excellent place to begin; some of
what he tells us and much that he leaves out point unmistakably to the genesis
of the war in the White House - the very last thing Tenet wants to address
clearly. He sidles up to the question at last on page 301: "One of the great
mysteries to me," he writes, "is exactly when the war in Iraq became
inevitable."
Hans Blix, director of the United Nations weapons-inspection team, did not
believe that war was inevitable until the shooting started. In Blix's view,
reported in his memoir Disarming Iraq, the failure of his inspectors to
find Saddam Hussein's WMD meant that a US invasion of Iraq could certainly be
put off, perhaps avoided altogether. For Blix it was all about the weapons.
Tenet's version of events makes it clear that WMD, despite all the ballyhoo,
were in fact secondary; something else was driving events.
Tenet's omissions begin on Day 2 of the march to war, September 12, 2001, when
three British officials came to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, "just
for the night, to express their condolences and to be with us. We had dinner
that night at Langley ... as touching an event as I experienced during my seven
years as DCI" (director of central intelligence). This would have been an
excellent place to describe the genesis of the war, but Tenet declines. We must
fill in the missing pieces ourselves.
The guests that night were David Manning, barely a week into his new job as
British prime minister Tony Blair's personal foreign-policy adviser; Richard
Dearlove, chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service, known as MI6, a man
Tenet already knew well; and Eliza Manningham-Buller, the deputy chief of the
Security Service or MI5, the British counterpart to the Federal Bureau of
Investigation (FBI).
Despite the ban on air traffic, Dearlove and Manningham-Buller had flown into
Andrews Air Force Base near Washington that day. But Manning was already inside
the United States. The day before the attack on New York's World Trade Center,
on September 10, he had been in Washington for a dinner with then-national
security adviser Condoleezza Rice at the home of the British ambassador,
Christopher Meyer. Early on September 11, Manning took the shuttle to New York
and from his airplane window on the approach to John F Kennedy International
Airport he saw smoke rising from one of the World Trade Center towers. By the
time he landed, the second tower had been struck.
It took a full day for the British Embassy to fetch Manning back to Washington
by car, and he arrived at Langley that night carrying the burden of what he had
seen. It was a largish group that gathered for dinner. Along with the three
British guests and Tenet were Jim Pavitt and his deputy at the CIA's
Directorate for Operations; Tenet's executive secretary Buzzy Krongard; the
chief of the Counter Terrorism Center, Cofer Black; the acting director of the
FBI, Thomas Pickard; the chief of the CIA's Near East Division, still not
identified; and the chief of the CIA's European Division, Tyler Drumheller.
Tenet names his British guests, but omits all that was said. Tyler Drumheller,
barred by the CIA from identifying the visitors in his own recent memoir, On the
Brink, reports an exchange between Manning and Tenet, who were probably
meeting for the first time. "I hope we can all agree," said Manning, "that we
should concentrate on Afghanistan and not be tempted to launch any attacks on
Iraq."
"Absolutely," Tenet replied, "we all agree on that. Some might want to link the
issues, but none of us wants to go that route."
Target Iraq
Manning already understood that people close to Bush wanted to go after Iraq,
and Tenet of course knew it too. Conspicuous among them, in his mind that
night, was the neo-conservative agitator and polemicist Richard Perle, an
outspoken advocate of removing Iraqi president Saddam Hussein by military
force.
On the very first page of Tenet's memoir, he tells us that he had run into
Perle that very morning - September 12 - as Perle was leaving the West Wing of
the White House. They knew each other in a passing way, as figures of note on
the Washington scene. As Tenet reached the door, Perle turned to him and said,
"Iraq has to pay a price for what happened yesterday. They bear
responsibility."
This made a powerful impression on the director of the CIA:
I was
stunned but said nothing ... At the Secret Service security checkpoint, I
looked back at Perle and thought: What the hell is he talking about? Moments
later, a second thought came to me: [Whom] has Richard Perle been meeting with
in the White House so early in the morning on today of all days? I never
learned the answer to that question.
The meeting with Perle and
the dinner with Manning and Dearlove took place on Wednesday. On Saturday,
Tenet was at Camp David, where Bush was weighing the US response to the attacks
of September 11. During the discussion, arguments for removing Saddam were
pressed by Paul Wolfowitz, another neo-conservative and longtime friend of
Perle who was the deputy secretary of defense under Donald Rumsfeld. "The
president listened to Paul's views," Tenet writes, "but, fairly quickly, it
seemed to me, dismissed them." The vote against including Iraq "in our
immediate response plans" was 4-0 against, with Rumsfeld abstaining. Tenet
adds, "I recall no mention of WMD."
Four days later, at a meeting in the White House, Bush made a request of Tenet.
Through a video hookup, Vice President Dick Cheney was in the room as well. "I
want to know about links between Saddam and al-Qaeda," said the president. "The
vice president knows some things that might be helpful."
What the vice president thought he knew was that one of the September 11
hijackers, Mohamed Atta, had met in Prague earlier in the year with an official
of Iraqi intelligence. Tenet responded within days to say that evidence from
phone calls and credit cards demonstrated that Atta was in the United States at
the time of the alleged meeting, living in a Virginia apartment not far from
the CIA. A proven link between Saddam and September 11 would have ended the
debate about "regime change" right there.
None was ever established, then or later, but Cheney and his personal national
security adviser, I Lewis Libby, known by his nickname Scooter, argued and
re-argued the case for the link until the eve of war. Often they went to the
agency personally, bringing fresh allegations acquired from their own sources,
and pressing CIA analysts to "re-look" at the evidence.
Under continuing White House pressure the agency treated their claims
respectfully. Analysts conceded that "cooperation, safe haven, training and
reciprocal non-aggression" were all discussed by al-Qaeda and Iraqi officials.
"But operational direction and control?" Tenet asks. "No."
The vice president did not take no for an answer. He often cited the link in
public and he wanted the CIA to back him up. In June 2002, the deputy director
for intelligence, Jami Miscik, complained to Tenet that Libby and Wolfowitz
would not let the subject drop. Tenet reports that he told Miscik, "Just say,
'We stand by what we previously wrote.'"
But six months later, in January 2003, Stephen Hadley at the National Security
Council summoned Miscik to the White House for yet another revision of a "link"
paper. Infuriated, Miscik went to Tenet's office and told him she would resign
before she would change another word. Tenet says he called Hadley. "'Steve,' I
said, 'knock this off. The paper is done ... Jami is not coming down there to
discuss it anymore.'"
Author Ron Suskind tells the same story but quotes Tenet differently on the
phone to Hadley: "It is fucking over. Do you hear me! And don't you ever
fucking treat my people this way again. Ever!" Even that was not the end. In
mid-March 2003, less than a week before the US launched its attack, Cheney sent
a speech over to the CIA for review making all the old arguments that there was
a "link".
Tenet tells us that he telephoned Bush to say, "The vice president wants to
make a speech about Iraq and al-Qaeda that goes way beyond what the
intelligence shows. We cannot support the speech, and it should not be given."
Why did Cheney press this point so relentlessly? Tenet tells a story that helps
to explain the motives behind the struggle over "intelligence" between
September 11 and the day US cruise missiles began to land on Baghdad, 18 months
later. Only a few days after September 11, Tenet writes, a CIA analyst attended
a White House meeting where he was told that Bush wanted to remove Saddam. The
analyst's response, according to Tenet:
If you want to go after that
son of a bitch to settle old scores, be my guest. But don't tell us he is
connected to 9/11 or to terrorism, because there is no evidence to support
that. You will have to have a better reason.
The better reason
eventually settled on by Bush was Saddam's WMD. The evidence for WMD turned out
to be even weaker than the evidence for "the link", but Cheney, with the full
backing of the White House and the National Security Council, hammered without
let-up on the horrific consequences of error - discovering too late that Iraq
had nuclear weapons meant that the smoking gun would be a mushroom cloud.
It was vaguely believed at the time, by the public and foreign intelligence
services alike, that the CIA must have learned something new; why else in early
2002 had Saddam suddenly become a threat to the world?
In fact only one thing had changed - the US frame of mind, something clearly
understood by advisers to Blair, who had decided immediately after September 11
that he was going to back the US response, whatever it was. Manning's hope,
expressed at his dinner with Tenet, that the Americans would settle for the
invasion of Afghanistan and the overthrow of the Taliban, was soon dashed. A
week later, Blair himself was at the White House. Bush took him immediately by
the elbow, according to the British ambassador, Meyer, and moved the prime
minister off into a corner of the room.
Don't get distracted, Blair told the president; Taliban first.
"I agree with you, Tony," Bush replied. "We must deal with this first. But when
we have dealt with Afghanistan, we must come back to Iraq."
The Taliban were in retreat by the end of the year; on March 1, 2002, Robert
Einhorn, an assistant secretary of state for non-proliferation, testified in
Congress that Bush had come back to Iraq: "A consensus seems to be developing
in Washington in favor of 'regime change' in Iraq, if necessary through the use
of military force."
As it happened, it took a year to get from point A to point B - from developing
consensus to war. During that year Tenet's CIA played an indispensable part in
raising fears of Saddam's WMD, but in his memoir Tenet is reluctant to approach
the Iraq problem. He writes proudly of the agency's success in removing the
Taliban - which was in fact a marvel of the light touch, especially in
retrospect - and insists he was slow to recognize that Iraq was next:
My
many sleepless nights back then didn't center on Saddam Hussein. Al-Qaeda
occupied my nightmares ... Looking back, I wish I could have devoted equal
energy and attention to Iraq ... Iraq deserved more of my time. But the simple
fact is that I didn't see that freight train coming as early as I should have.
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president what
we did on Iraq WMD because we believed it."
