Tenet taking the hit on Iraq
By John Diamond, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON - CIA Director George Tenet's hold on power, already weakened by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, has reached its most tenuous point now that he has been blamed for President Bush's unsubstantiated charge in his State of the Union address that Iraq sought to buy uranium for nuclear weapons from Africa.
After national security adviser Condoleezza Rice made it clear to Tenet last week that he would have to admit fault for failing to excise the allegation from Bush's speech, the president came to Tenet's defense. He told reporters Saturday: "I've got confidence in George Tenet." Rice went further Sunday, saying Bush's statement ? that the British had information about Iraq's attempts to buy uranium ?was technically correct. (Related story: Administration backs Iraq arms claim)
But intelligence professionals and former senior CIA officials familiar with the push and pull between the White House and the CIA said it appears that Bush had decided to make Tenet a sacrificial lamb in order to deflect criticism from the White House about exaggerated charges used in making the case for war on Iraq.
"The long knives are out, no doubt about it," said Richard Stolz, who headed the CIA's clandestine service under the elder President Bush.
Kent Harrington, a former senior CIA official, said, "If they're going to try to put this issue behind them, there's no question that this is a tried and true technique, to pick a 'stickee' and stick him."
And former U.S. senator Bob Kerrey, D-Neb., who chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee, said last week's events make clear that the administration decided, " 'OK, we'll make George Tenet walk the plank.' "
The dilemma now facing the Bush administration is whether forcing Tenet out would tamp down the controversy or intensify it. An angry ex-CIA director can be more damaging to a president than a disgruntled current director. That was President Clinton's experience after he pushed out CIA director James Woolsey, only to have Woolsey become one of the leading critics of Clinton on national security issues.
If Tenet stays, his influence with Bush, which has been considerable at times, will almost certainly be diminished. On the other hand, resignation would amount to admitting a broader degree of fault at the CIA for the intelligence used in making the case for war in Iraq. In fact, Tenet and his senior staff take pride in their past refusal to endorse some intelligence on Iraq that they regarded as substandard.
WASHINGTON Seeking to end a controversy that overshadowed President Bush's five-nation trip to Africa, top administration officials said Sunday that Bush's State of the Union address did not misstate evidence that Iraq was seeking nuclear weapons.
But those assertions, along with a defense of embattled CIA Director George Tenet, failed to deter critics in Congress from calling for an investigation into the administration's case for waging war.
National security adviser Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld tried to move past the controversy on Sunday talk shows. Rice said on CNN's Late Edition that Tenet "absolutely" should not resign. Rumsfeld said on ABC's This Week that the charges, first made by the British government, may yet prove true.
In what two senior White House officials called a breakdown of the speech-review process, Tenet was given a draft copy of Bush's State of the Union address but apparently never responded.
"It's time for a thorough inquiry," Sen. Carl Levin, top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, told CNN. He said the key question is "who is pushing Tenet" to accept unsupported claims.
Rice, appearing on Fox News Sunday, called it "ludicrous to suggest that the president of the United States went to war on the question of whether Saddam Hussein sought uranium from Africa."
A CIA spokesman says Tenet has no plans to leave. Rice and other Bush administration officials reiterated Sunday that they are not seeking his resignation. But the White House has quietly let all senior appointees know that if they don't want to stay for a second term, the president would prefer that they leave this summer. And Tenet told friends over the past year he would be looking to leave government sometime this spring or summer.
CIA under investigation
Tenet, a lone holdover from the Clinton administration, is still dealing with a special commission investigating whether the CIA failed to provide sufficient warning of the threat of terrorism prior to the Sept. 11 attacks. Now he faces the opposite criticism: that he overemphasized the threat posed by Iraq or, at the very least, failed to adequately warn the White House that it was using dubious intelligence to make some of its charges against Iraq.
With multiple congressional investigations of the Iraq-related intelligence about to begin, some in the Bush administration are arguing privately for a CIA director who will be unquestioningly loyal to the White House as committees demand documents and call witnesses.
Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, criticized Tenet for "sloppy handling" of the questionable intelligence on Niger. Echoing the White House view, Roberts said Tenet should have raised objections to any reliance on the Niger allegations. Instead, the CIA said in an October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate that it could not confirm reports by foreign intelligence services that Iraq was seeking uranium in Africa.
At the time, Tenet may have believed he was doing the Bush administration a favor by failing to highlight doubts about the Africa intelligence. The administration last fall was struggling to gain international support for its Iraq policy, and Tenet was under orders to round up all the available intelligence about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction programs.
But Roberts and others are angry over apparent inconsistencies in the CIA's handling of the Iraq-uranium intelligence. In October, for example, the CIA told the White House to delete a reference to Iraq seeking a uranium deal with Niger from a presidential speech. Three months later, the CIA allowed a less specific reference, attributed to the British, to remain in the State of the Union address.
Officials in Vice President Cheney's office are angry at Tenet because they believe the CIA leaked to reporters last week that it had told White House officials ? before the State of the Union address ? that allegations Iraq was trying to buy uranium were probably bogus.
Bush administration officials who were hawkish on war in Iraq also have lingering resentment toward Tenet for his tendency to be skeptical about the intelligence implicating Iraq. These officials took note that the envoy the CIA sent to Niger in February 2002 to investigate the uranium rumors was Joseph Wilson, a career diplomat who had served on Clinton's National Security Council. Last year, Wilson made frequent TV appearances in which he voiced opposition to war in Iraq.
Column triggered events
It was an op-ed column by Wilson in The New York Times two Sundays ago that set in motion last week's events, beginning with the White House announcement that Bush's allegation about Iraq and uranium should not have been in the speech and ending Friday with Tenet accepting blame. Wilson wrote that Cheney's office was almost certainly aware of his findings that Iraq had not purchased, or contracted to purchase, uranium. Nevertheless, he wrote, the administration continued to level unsupported charges at Iraq.
For such criticism to have been directed against Bush and Cheney in The New York Times by an official who had acted as a special investigator for the CIA under Tenet's leadership can only have further eroded White House support for Tenet. It may be one reason why the administration has blamed Tenet for leaving the questionable passage in Bush's speech, rather than Secretary of State Colin Powell, who also reviewed the speech draft and whose State Department experts had equal doubts about the uranium allegations.
In a little-noticed part of the CIA director's mea culpa, Tenet said that Wilson had been asked to go to Niger by "CIA counterproliferation experts, on their own initiative." It appeared to be an attempt by Tenet to distance himself from Wilson's criticism of the administration.
The Iraq-uranium allegations fell apart in March, when United Nations nuclear watchdogs reported that documents that had been obtained by the CIA purportedly pointing to a uranium sale were crude forgeries.
The British government, meanwhile, stands by its conclusion that Iraq did seek to buy uranium in Africa. Aides to Prime Minister Tony Blair were furious at the CIA last week when anonymous U.S. intelligence officials were quoted as saying that the CIA had warned the British not to publish its charge against Iraq.
However loyal Bush is to Tenet, his loyalty to the politically embattled Blair, his staunchest ally in the campaign against Iraq, is greater.
Another reason behind the rancor at the White House toward Tenet is a belief that Bush went out of his way after Sept. 11 to protect Tenet from those calling for his resignation for allowing the nation to be caught by surprise. Bush went to CIA headquarters shortly after the attacks to give a pep talk to agency staffers, and he said repeatedly and publicly that he had full confidence in Tenet.
The CIA clashed frequently with Bush administration policymakers in the months leading up to the war. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld set up his own in-house intelligence adviser, in part as a counterweight to the skepticism on Iraq and weapons of mass destruction coming from the CIA. One of the issues Democrats in particular are seeking to probe is whether frequent visits to CIA headquarters by Cheney amounted to undue pressure on intelligence analysts to tilt their reports in a way preferred by the White House.
But Tenet has also been criticized by some for joining with administration officials in exaggerating the case against Iraq. In testimony a month before the U.S.-led invasion began, Tenet said in prepared testimony to lawmakers that Iraq "retains, in violation of U.N. resolutions, a small number of Scud missiles that were produced before the Gulf War." Four months earlier, a declassified intelligence estimate said only that discrepancies in Iraqi reporting "suggest that Iraq retains" a small Scud force.
"I would argue that's an important difference," Greg Thielmann, until last fall a senior official in the State Department's intelligence branch, told reporters last week. "I cannot for the life of me understand how, in a prepared statement to Congress, that very important precision would have become so imprecise."
Tenet hinted at leaving
Even before the furor over the evidence used to justify war in Iraq erupted, people close to Tenet were saying that the CIA director was weary of the grueling work schedule that has only intensified with the global war on terrorism and major military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.
About a year ago Tenet, who became CIA director in July 1997 and had been acting director for seven months before that, was quietly letting it be known that he might be looking to leave this spring or summer. He wants to spend more time with his teenage son before he goes to college. He could make many times his current salary in the private sector.
But Tenet, a native of the Queens borough of New York and the son of Greek immigrants, is also a man of great pride. He hoped to stay in office long enough to see either Saddam Hussein or al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden captured or killed.
Some intelligence officials are dismayed that Tenet agreed to accept blame for the unsubstantiated charge included in Bush's speech. One CIA veteran who still works with U.S. intelligence agencies on a contract basis said, "If he takes this lying down, as it were, without standing up and saying CIA is not at fault, he should resign."
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