The George Tenet "Slam Dunk" Memoir "At the Center of the Storm, My Years at the CIA"

The new George Tenet memoir that launches today was reviewed by Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times yesterday in a piece called "An Ex-C.I.A. Chief on Iraq and the Slam Dunk That Wasn't".

Kakatuni called it both "withholding and aggrieved, earnest and disingenuous" and "is interesting less for any stunning new revelations than for fleshing out a portrait of the Bush White House already sketched by reporters and former administration members."

The book describes a White House entitled to its own set of facts as the former director of central intelligence lashes out at Vice President Dick Cheney and other Bush administration officials, saying they pushed the country to war in Iraq without ever conducting a serious debate about whether Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat to the United States.

Elsewhere in the book, Tenet defends his now infamous "slam dunk" comment about the case for going to war in Iraq. I found the Sunday TIME Magazine interview that runs down his side of the story plus a few other choice tidbits:

TIME: Slam Dunk? What were you thinking?

TENET: The way this is portrayed is that this was the decision meeting. That's just ridiculous. I walk out of the room that day [and] I never thought anything of that. I will never believe until the day I die that that comment had anything to do with the timing or the legitimacy of going to war. It was about we were trying to construct a public case. Yes, we had a responsibility to make sure that the we just produced an estimate. We testified. We talked to hundreds of members of Congress. We said [we had] high confidence on chem/bio weapons. I believed it. But the way this gets dressed up and thrown out the door is, 'wow, this was the moment that this decision was made.' It's just not right.

TIME: So when 'slam dunk' comes out in Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack, did you think the hard-liners inside the White House and Pentagon were hanging you out to dry?

TENET: Well, you know, so this is a really painful moment for me. This is a matter of honor and trust, and trust was broken. Trust in the sense of, what are you doing here? So here are the guys [at the CIA] that give [the White House], you know, four days after 9/11, we give [them] the war plan on Afghanistan. Here are the guys that do A. Q Khan. Here are the guys that do Libya. Here are the guys who [the White House] sends to see the [Saudi] Crown Prince anytime there's a problem. And now what you've done is, you know, it's all going to shit. It's not particularly good, so now we're going to justify this by saying I have to tell you, it's just enormously, you know, you live with it for the rest of your life, and you think it's wrong, and it's not honorable.

TIME: You complained about this treatment to White House chief of Staff Andy Card, he said nothing

TENET: He's a very disciplined guy and I understood. I understood where we were and there it is. But here's the teaching point, if you're teaching kids about intelligence and policy: Intelligence does not absolve policymakers of responsibility to ask tough questions, and it doesn't absolve them of having curiosity about the consequences of their actions. So here's what I'll say: we stand up and take responsibility when we're wrong. They need to take responsibility for the way they, for how they integrate their thinking with us and don't simply say, "Well, they told us," when it's convenient. "They told us, and we don't ask any questions when they tell us because that's not the way this works." When you're telling them things that they don't like, there are 100 questions. When you're telling them things that essentially comport with what I want to do, well, maybe there aren't very many. Well, that's not the way this works.

So let's all understand that there's always collective responsibility. And so what obligation does the policymaker have to get underneath something? We have priority responsibility. I have priority responsibility on WMD. Let's not shirk our responsibility. What's your responsibility? What's your responsibility? You know, make sure that you understand that we're in the right place, and make sure you understand the texture with which you're doing it. So I find it to be, you know, I find it to be a little bit disingenuous to say, "Well, let's let it all on them when it goes wrong."

TIME: You write in the book that there was never any serious debate about whether to go to war; instead, at some mysterious point in 2002, it just became obvious inside the government that the U.S. was going to war with Iraq. When did the U.S. decide to go to war?

TENET: Well, I don't know the answer to that question. [Other CIA analysts] and people who are going to these meeting which they describe in kind of weird terms

TIME: Weird terms?

TENET: They describe these meetings. I mean, one of them says in the book something like, you know, "It's not a question of if we're going to do it, but how we're going to do it." And that's the feeling they are getting but I can't tell you that I go to a meeting when I can say, well, boom, here's the moment that this is going to happen.

TIME: What is the source of the neoconservatives' obsession with Iraq?

TENET: I wasn't in the same geopolitical strategic loop. It brought the town a certain fixation about regime change in Iraq as the means and mechanism by which we will change the face of the Middle East and democratize the region. This was a compelling, unstated, overwhelming, you know, thought process on the part of these folks. This was the way to transform a region that needed transformation. And they thought about this in macro, big terms, sometimes without much understanding of the cultural context that this was all going to occur in. There was a quality of that. There was a quality of unfinished business.

TIME: How aware were you that there were some in the Vice President's office and the Pentagon didn't like the CIA, didn't trust its conclusions?

TENET: Look, look, look, were we aware that neocons in particular don't like us and think we don't evaluate threats the way we should evaluate threats, we're too close to the Sunnis, we have not a particularly good view of what you know, we understand all that.

TIME: Did you ever feel that the West Wing pushed the agency to produce a certain outcome?

TENET: On the WMD question, absolutely not. They didn't even really know the [national intelligence] estimate was under way because we were doing it at the request of Congress.

TIME: But what about when it came to linking Saddam and Al-Qaeda?

TENET: Well, the al-Qaeda thing, you've got quotes from analysts, did they feel that we were being pushed? Yes. Did they buckle? No. We understood all that. But we were good boys and girls, and we understand there's gambling in this. We understand how this works. That was a different issue because of the way it was, you see, that issue is different because there was always the urge, the attempt to create command linkages where none existed. There was always that push, but at the end of the day, we never went that far and we never buckled.

TIME: But you said in the book that the CIA was in some places more assertive with the President than it was elsewhere

TENET: I think that we were more assertive on aluminum tubes. We were not as assertive on saying [Saddam was going to have] a nuclear weapon real soon, but on some issues. Now, do I think the analysts ever would have said he has no weapons? I seriously doubt it.

I noticed the following on ThinkSecret, commenting on an open letter written by group of former CIA and other intelligence officials to Tenet, urges him to dedicate a significant portion of his royalties to soldiers and families of those killed or wounded in Iraq. They write:

Mr. Tenet, you cannot undo what has been done. It is doubly sad that you seem still to lack an adequate appreciation of the enormous amount of death and carnage you have facilitated. If reflection on these matters serves to prick your conscience we encourage you to donate at least half of the royalties from your book sales to the veterans and their families, who have paid and are paying the price for your failure to speak up when you could have made a difference. That would be the decent and honorable thing to do.

So, how is it as a book? Here's the Kakatuni excerpt:

Since the publication of Bob Woodward's 2004 book, Plan of Attack, George J. Tenet, former director of central intelligence, has become best known for two words: slam dunk that is, for reportedly telling President Bush that intelligence about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was a slam dunk case! Those words have been quoted countless times, most notably by Vice President Dick Cheney, who, during a Meet the Press appearance last year, suggested that the administration had made a choice to go to war based on the slam dunk intelligence provided by the C.I.A. intelligence that later turned out to be wrong.

In his much-anticipated and intermittently fascinating new memoir, At the Center of the Storm, Mr. Tenet writes that the whole slam dunk scene described in Mr. Woodward's book took his words out of context and had been fed deliberately to Woodward by someone in the White House eager to shift blame from the White House to the C.I.A. for what turned out to be a failed rationale for the Iraq war. In short, he says, he and the agency were set up as fall guys, and he was made to look like a fool rising up, throwing his arms in the air and saying those two words, as if he were Tom Cruise jumping on Oprah Winfrey's couch.

In fact, Mr. Tenet says he doubts that W.M.D.'s were the principal cause of the United States' decision to go to war in Iraq in the first place, that it was just the public face that was put on it. The real reason, he suggests, stemmed from the administration's largely unarticulated view that the democratic transformation of the Middle East through regime change in Iraq would be worth the price.

Mr. Tenet notes that his slam dunk remarks came 10 months after the president saw the first workable war plan for Iraq, and two weeks after the Pentagon had issued the first military deployment order sending U.S. troops to the region. He points out that many senior Bush administration officials, including Paul D. Wolfowitz and Douglas J. Feith, were focused on Iraq long before 9/11, and that Mr. Cheney asked Bill Clinton's then-departing secretary of defense, William Cohen, before the 2001 inauguration to give the incoming president a comprehensive briefing on Iraq and detail possible future actions.

On the day after 9/11, he adds, he ran into Richard Perle, a leading neoconservative and the head of the Defense Policy Board, coming out of the White House. He says Mr. Perle turned to him and said: Iraq has to pay a price for what happened yesterday. They bear responsibility. This, despite the fact, Mr. Tenet writes, that the intelligence then and now showed no evidence of Iraqi complicity in the 9/11 attacks.

Alternately withholding and aggrieved, earnest and disingenuous, At the Center of the Storm is interesting less for any stunning new revelations than for fleshing out a portrait of the Bush White House already sketched by reporters and former administration members. Mr. Tenet depicts an administration riven by factional fighting between the State and Defense Departments, hard-liners and more pragmatic realists, an administration given to out-of-channels policymaking, and ad hoc, improvisatory decision-making.

There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat, he writes of a war that has already resulted in more than 3,300 American military deaths, at least 60,000 Iraqi civilian deaths and already cost more than $420 billion. Nor, he adds, was there a significant discussion regarding enhanced containment or the costs and benefits of such an approach versus full-out planning for overt and covert regime change.

Mr. Tenet's book also ratifies the view articulated by former military, intelligence and Coalition Provisional Authority insiders that the White House repeatedly ignored or rebuffed early warnings about the deteriorating situation in post-invasion Iraq. Mr. Tenet writes that the C.I.A.'s senior officer in Iraq was dismissed as a defeatist for warning in 2003 of the dangers of a growing Iraqi insurgency, though it was already clear then that United States political and economic strategies were failing. Although the trends were clear, he adds, those in charge of policy operated within a closed loop. In that atmosphere, he says, bad news was ignored: the agency's subsequent reporting, which would prove spot-on, was dismissed.

Mr. Tenet writes that there was no strategy for when U.S. forces hit the ground in Iraq, aside from a desire to put the exile Ahmed Chalabi (who had provided administration hawks with much unreliable prewar intelligence) in charge of the country: You had the impression, Mr. Tenet sarcastically writes, that some Office of the Vice President and D.O.D. reps were writing Chalabi's name over and over again in their notes, like schoolgirls with their first crush.

He is not optimistic about the current surge in Iraq: sectarian violence, he argues, has taken on a life of its own, and he sees American forces becoming increasingly irrelevant to the management of that violence.

On the controversial matters of the C.I.A.'s use of coercive interrogation techniques, its covert prison system abroad and its use of extraordinary rendition (whereby foreign terrorism suspects are sent to third countries for interrogation), Mr. Tenet simply stonewalls. He asserts that the most aggressive interrogation techniques conducted by C.I.A. personnel were applied to only a handful of the worst terrorists on the planet and that those interrogations were conducted in a precisely monitored, measured way intended to try to prevent what we believed to be an imminent follow-on attack.

Mr. Tenet does not grapple with reports that the C.I.A. has possibly been implicated in the deaths of at least four detainees in Afghanistan and Iraq. He does not grapple with the problem of sorting out the innocent people sometimes swept up in arrests along with genuine Qaeda suspects. And he sheds no light on the secret Justice Department memos establishing interrogation techniques. On the subject of Mr. Bush's secretly authorizing the National Security Agency to eavesdrop without a court order on calls and e-mail messages between the United States and other countries, Mr. Tenet suggests that the idea originated with Vice President Cheney, who he says called him shortly after 9/11 to ask if N.S.A. could do more than it was then doing under laws in place since the 1970s.

Although Mr. Tenet acknowledges that the C.I.A. failed to predict the specifics of the 9/11 attack, he cites repeated warnings it issued, over the years, about the dangers posed by Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Most notably, he describes the alarming intelligence he presented to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice at a July 10, 2001, meeting including information from late June of that year that predicted a big event was coming. Mr. Tenet's efforts to spin the C.I.A.'s own failure to watch-list two of the 9/11 hijackers when they first came across the agency's radar screen two and a half years earlier feel particularly lame: had they been caught, he suggests that Al Qaeda would simply have replaced the two men with other recruits.

As for the C.I.A.'s role in the lead-up to the Iraq war, Mr. Tenet admits that the agency's reports about W.M.D.'s, cited in the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, were flawed. He adds, however, that he himself believed Saddam Hussein possessed W.M.D.'s and he contests allegations that the C.I.A. caved to pressure from administration hard-liners on the matter of W.M.D.'s: Intelligence professionals did not try to tell policy makers what they wanted to hear, he writes, nor did the policymakers lean on us to influence outcomes.

Mr. Tenet also disputes the allegation made by Tyler Drumheller, the C.I.A.'s former head of the European division, that he Mr. Drumheller had raised serious questions about the credibility of a key source known as Curveball with top agency officials before the invasion. He does not, however, come to terms with Mr. Drumheller's other allegation, made on 60 Minutes, that a C.I.A. source in Mr. Hussein's inner circle said in the fall of 2002 that the dictator had no active weapons-of-mass-destruction program and that this information was ignored.

Mr. Tenet describes himself as like his father, a very trusting man, loath to say anything bad about anyone, and notes that his staff jokingly called him the subliminal man based on a Saturday Night Live skit in which one of the cast members would say normal things like 'How are you, madam?' and then quickly and quietly mutter something different under his breath, such as 'You miserable twit.' And while he has some nice things to say in these pages about President Bush and Vice President Cheney, there often seems to be an unspoken subtext.

According to Ron Suskind's 2006 book on the C.I.A., The One Percent Doctrine, Mr. Tenet felt indebted to the president for allowing him to keep his job after the 9/11 attacks, and Mr. Tenet repeatedly praises Mr. Bush in these pages as a focused leader, absolutely in charge, determined and directed. And yet, at the same time, Mr. Tenet depicts him as presiding over an often dysfunctional administration in which crucial decisions were made without a considered weighing of pros and cons, and expert advice often went unheeded.

As for Mr. Cheney, Mr. Tenet describes thinking of him as very supportive of the intelligence community but then goes on to note numerous occasions in which the vice president delivered or planned to deliver bellicose speeches about Saddam Hussein that exceeded the available intelligence.

Mr. Tenet is more willing to take the gloves off with lower-ranked members of the administration. Condoleezza Rice comes across here as an ineffectual national security adviser, unwilling to make hard calls or mediate among warring parties. Stephen Cambone, undersecretary of defense for intelligence, comes across as a fool who discounted the C.I.A.'s warnings about Al Qaeda in the summer of 2001, asking Mr. Tenet if he had thought about the possibility that Al Qaeda's threat was just a grand deception, a clever ploy to tie up our resources. And Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy, who headed a Pentagon unit that provided the White House with dubious information about a possible Al Qaeda-Iraq connection, is mocked for providing Feith-based analysis.

Paraphrasing Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Mr. Tenet concludes: Policymakers are entitled to their own opinions but not to their own set of facts.

Finally, how'd this all play out in the actual intelligence collection and analysis that was produced under Tenet's oversight? Here's a peek from the New York Times:

Some of our analysts, junior and senior, chafed at the constant drumbeat of repetitive inquiries on Iraq and Al Qaeda, Mr. Tenet wrote.

He describes the C.I.A.'s top analyst, Jami Miscik, complaining that Mr. Libby, Mr. Wolfowitz and other officials never seemed satisfied with our answers.

Meanwhile, Mr. Tenet had learned about the contacts with Iranian exiles, organized by Mr. Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute and involving two Defense Department officials. They seemed to be in touch with, among others, Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian exile who had been a middleman in the Iran-contra affair in the 1980s and who the C.I.A. believed was completely unreliable.

What we were hearing sounded like an off-the-books covert-action program trying to destabilize the Iranian government, Mr. Tenet writes, calling such a program Son of Iran-contra.

He recounts how he called on Stephen J. Hadley, then deputy national security adviser, to try to stop such contacts. Mr. Ledeen said Friday night that the meeting with the exiles was held to receive information about possible Iranian plots against American troops in Afghanistan, and had nothing to do with destabilizing Iran.

Mr. Tenet also directs scorn at the Pentagon intelligence analyses by Douglas J. Feith, then undersecretary of defense for policy. He describes his fury in August 2002 as he watched a slide show by Mr. Feith's staff at C.I.A. headquarters suggesting a mature, symbiotic relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

He said C.I.A. officers came to call such reports, in a play on words, Feith-based analysis. In an interview on Friday, Mr. Feith said Mr. Tenet's account distorts the facts of the Pentagon effort and obscures Mr. Tenet's own public statements before the war. Mr. Feith noted that Mr. Tenet, in October 2002, sent the Senate intelligence committee a letter that said, We have solid reporting of senior level contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda going back a decade. Mr. Tenet describes Tina Shelton, who presented part of the Feith slide show at the C.I.A. in 2002, as a naval reservist and quotes her as saying in introductory remarks, It is an open-and-shut case.