Tenet: CIA warnings went unheeded

In a stinging indictment of the U.S. handling of the Iraq war, former CIA Director George J. Tenet accuses the Bush administration in a new book of ignoring repeated warnings that the country was collapsing into civil war and voices deep skepticism that the current “surge” in troops can succeed.

Tenet accuses the White House of having “no strategy” for handling postwar Iraq, and concludes that the recent effort to deploy more troops has come far too late.

“It may have worked more than three years ago,” Tenet writes, “before a country that believed it had a national identity reverted to the politics of religious and ethnic identification.”

Throughout its 549 pages, “At the Center of the Storm” is laced with sharp criticism of an array of senior administration figures -- including Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and Rice’s successor as national security advisor, Stephen Hadley.

Tenet’s book represents the first account by a senior member of President Bush’s national security team about the unraveling situation in Iraq and its struggle in the war against terrorism. The book is certain to intensify political pressure on the White House at a time when the administration is pleading with Congress for patience with the new push to pacify Baghdad.

The publication of the book creates a highly unusual situation: A spy chief previously responsible for guarding the nation’s secrets is offering inside accounts of foreign policy debates, while passing judgment on decisions by policymakers he advised as recently as three years ago.

Tenet, who for four years briefed the president nearly every day, acknowledges that the CIA made grievous errors in its assessment of Baghdad’s alleged weapons programs, but argues that the agency was dismayed by equally disastrous mistakes that took place after the invasion.

“Our analysis assumed there was a plan for ensuring the peace,” he writes in one section of a chapter called “Mission Not Accomplished,” a pointed reference to Bush. “In fact, there was no strategy for when U.S. forces hit the ground.”

The book traces Tenet’s role as head of the CIA during one of the most tumultuous times in its history, from the years leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks through the aftermath of the Iraq invasion. In it, he acknowledges some failures while vigorously defending aspects of his legacy. He alternates between offering praise and polite criticism of Bush, who awarded Tenet the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2004.

The book includes new details on warnings that the CIA provided to the Bush administration in the months before Sept. 11 that went unheeded.

It recounts the agency’s successes in leading the U.S. response in Afghanistan, capturing Al Qaeda operatives and unraveling the illicit nuclear weapons ring of Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan.

Tenet defends some of the more controversial intelligence-gathering methods employed on his watch -- including the use of “enhanced” interrogation techniques that some consider torture -- and a domestic eavesdropping program implemented by Bush.

His harshest language is reserved for what Tenet calls the “disastrous” situation in Iraq. He concludes that the United States’ ill-managed intervention has plunged the Middle East into deeper instability than the region has seen in a generation.

Tenet also describes previously undisclosed warnings, delivered by senior CIA analysts to Bush and others in the administration, that a chaotic postwar situation in Iraq would be exploited by Al Qaeda.

In one November 2003 briefing in the Oval Office, Tenet writes, a CIA analyst warned Bush and others that “Iraq came along at exactly the right time for Al Qaeda.”

A copy of the book, scheduled for release Monday, was obtained by The Times. In it, Tenet is sharply critical of his colleagues in Bush’s inner circle.

“Those in charge of U.S. policy operated within a closed loop,” Tenet writes. “Bad news was ignored. Our own subsequent reporting -- reporting that eventually would prove spot-on in its predictions of what came to pass on the ground -- was dismissed.”

Rice is portrayed as an often feckless figure in the Bush administration, unwilling or unable to exert control over crucial foreign policy debates. Tenet writes that the CIA was particularly alarmed by the administration’s decision to bar all former members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party from the fledgling Iraqi government.

Tenet says he went to see Rice to complain that the order “had swept away not just Saddam’s thugs but also, for example, something like 40,000 schoolteachers who had joined the Baath Party simply to keep their jobs.”

Rice replied that “she was very frustrated by the situation, but nothing ever happened,” Tenet says.

He voices disdain for Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi, who produced a parade of defectors who made erroneous claims about Baghdad’s weapons programs but was influential with Cheney and other hawks.

Tenet is alternately defensive and apologetic about the CIA’s role in the prewar intelligence fiasco. He repeatedly accuses Cheney of exaggerating the threat from Iraq, but concedes he rarely complained or expressed concern.

In August 2002, for example, Cheney said in a speech that there was “no doubt” Iraq was amassing weapons of mass destruction and would acquire a nuclear weapon “fairly soon.” Tenet writes that he was surprised to read about the speech and that it “went well beyond what our analysts could support.” But he admits he said nothing to Cheney afterward.

“I should not have let silence imply agreement,” he writes.

In March 2003, however, he writes, he personally warned Bush that a different Cheney speech about Iraq’s ties to Al Qaeda “goes way beyond what the intelligence shows. We cannot support the speech and it should not be given.”

That speech was never delivered. Even so, Tenet says, “stretching the case continues to this day.”

Tenet writes that he could not determine when the invasion “became inevitable.”

“There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat,” he writes. “Nor was there ever a significant discussion” regarding the costs and benefits of a war as opposed to covert action against Hussein’s regime.

Tenet blames the rush of time and bureaucratic inefficiency for a raft of problems in the prewar intelligence. “There’s a saying that ‘if you want it bad, you get it bad,’ and that was precisely what we got,” he writes.

Before Sept. 11, the Bush administration was slow to recognize the magnitude of the terrorist threat, he writes. Compared with the Clinton administration, he says, there was “a loss of urgency.”

He recounts his version of a series of briefings he and J. Cofer Black, a senior counterterrorism official at the CIA, provided for Rice in the summer of 2001, warning that evidence was mounting of an imminent strike.

“I can recall no other time in my seven years as [director of central intelligence] that I sought such an urgent meeting at the White House,” he writes.

Black’s opening line was blunt: “There will be a significant terrorist attack in the coming weeks or months!”

Tenet’s briefers then pressed Rice to get Bush to sign off on a series of authorities needed to launch preemptive attacks against Al Qaeda, arguing, “We must take the battle to [Bin Laden] in Afghanistan.”

The authorities didn’t come through until after Sept. 11.

greg.miller@latimes.com

bob.drogin@latimes.com

Times staff writers Peter Spiegel and Julian E. Barnes contributed to this report.