What George Tenet really knew about Iraq

Unraveling the former CIA chief's cover story about bogus intelligence -- and the grand scheme that launched the war.

Editor's note: This piece will appear in the July 19, 2007, issue of the New York Review of Books. It has appeared on TomDispatch.com.

By Thomas Powers


July 2, 2007 | How we 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 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. 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 the president 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 American 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 U.S. 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 two of the march to war, Sept. 12, 2001, when three British officials came to CIA headquarters "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." 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 Tony Blair's personal foreign policy advisor; 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 MI5, the British counterpart to the FBI. Despite the ban on air traffic, Dearlove and Manningham-Buller had flown into Andrews Air Force Base near Washington that day. But David Manning was already inside the United States. The day before the attack on the World Trade Center, on Sept. 10, he had been in Washington for a dinner with Condoleezza Rice at the home of the British ambassador, Christopher Meyer. Early on Sept. 11 Manning took the shuttle to New York, and from his airplane window on the approach to Kennedy 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.

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