Tenet Says Al-Qaeda Terrorists May Have Cells Waiting in U.S.
By Jeff Bliss
April 29 (Bloomberg) -- Al-Qaeda may have other terrorist cells in the U.S., sent around the time of the Sept. 11 attacks, waiting for a time to strike, former CIA Director George Tenet said.
``My operational presumption is that they infiltrated a second wave or a third wave into the United states at the time of 9/11,'' Tenet said in an interview on CBS's ``60 Minutes'' program that was broadcast tonight.
Tenet, who headed the spy agency when the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were hit, said his opinion was based on ``operational intuition,'' not hard evidence.
Tenet, 54, granted the interview ahead of publication of his book, ``At the Center of the Storm,'' which is scheduled for release tomorrow. He was named director of the Central Intelligence Agency in 1997 and resigned in 2004 just before the release of a congressional report criticizing the agency's conclusions about Iraq's weapons capability.
In the interview, Tenet said al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden has been trying to get a nuclear weapon since 1993 and that the group had planned an attack on the New York subways in 2003 until it was called off ``in favor of something larger.''
``If al-Qaeda were to acquire nuclear capability, the thousands of weapons we have would be irrelevant,'' Tenet said.
`Data' on Iraq
Tenet also said the CIA sifted through ``lots of data'' before incorrectly concluding in a National Intelligence Estimate examining threats facing the U.S. that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons.
The estimate's conclusion helped President George W. Bush win support for a congressional resolution authorizing the U.S.- led invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
``Remember, when you write an estimate, when you estimate, you're writing what you don't know,'' he said. The information might be enough to ``win a civil case,'' Tenet said. ``You're not going to win a criminal case, in terms of evidence.''
Tenet said he felt the Bush administration already had determined what course it would take in Iraq before the estimate was finished in October 2002. He recalled going to the White House to brief Bush on Sept. 12, 2001, and running into Richard Perle, then assistant secretary of defense.
Perle ``said to me, `Iraq has to pay a price for what happened yesterday, they bear responsibility,''' Tenet said. ``I remember thinking to myself as I'm about to go brief the president, `What the hell is he talking about?'''
Tenet said the CIA never proved a link between Iraq and the Sept. 11 attacks.
`Slam Dunk'
He also said in the CBS interview that senior Bush administration officials made him a scapegoat for U.S. mistakes in Iraq by leaking a distorted version of his comment that making the case for Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction was a ``slam dunk.''
``It's the most despicable thing that ever happened to me,'' Tenet said. ``You don't throw somebody overboard just because it's a deflection. Is that honorable?''
Tenet said he was referring to putting more information into the public presentation of the case for Saddam Hussein's possession of biological and chemical weapons, not the argument for going to war.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice responded to one of the assertions Tenet made in the interview, that she brushed aside his warnings in the summer of 2001 about the threat of an imminent attack by al-Qaeda advice to make a pre-emptive attack on terrorist bases in Afghanistan.
`New Fact'
``Well, it's very interesting, because that's not what George told the 9/11 Commission at the time,'' Rice, who was the White House national security adviser in 2001, said on CBS's ``Face the Nation'' program. ``He said that he felt that we had gotten it.''
Rice said her deputy, Stephen Hadley, met with intelligence agencies to determine a course of action. ``But the idea of launching preemptive strikes into Afghanistan in July of 2001, this is a new fact,'' she said.
She also disputed Tenet's characterization of his ``slam dunk'' comment. ``When George said slam dunk, everybody understood that he believed that the intelligence was strong,'' Rice said.
In the interview, Tenet criticized the administration's decision to reveal Valerie Plame worked for the CIA.
Plame has said the administration leaked her identity as retaliation for her husband, Joseph Wilson, former acting ambassador to Iraq, publishing a newspaper article disputing the Niger story.
``That's wrong. Big-time wrong, you don't get to do that,'' he said. ``Just because her husband's out there saying what he's saying, the country's intelligence officers are not fair game. Period.''
To contact the reporter on this story: Jeff Bliss in Washington at jbliss@bloomberg.net
Last Updated: April 29, 2007 21:47 EDT |
