Washington awaits a CIA chief's revenge

WASHINGTON is braced for a showdown between the Central Intelligence Agency, the White House and the Pentagon when George Tenet, the former CIA chief, publishes his memoirs next week.

Anxious to restore his reputation after failing to prevent the September 11 attacks and overreacting to flimsy evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Tenet is said to spread the blame freely among other senior members of President George W Bush’s administration.

The intelligence chief, who ran the CIA from 1997 to 2004 under Bill Clinton as well as Bush, is under considerable pressure to spill secrets. Tenet received $4m (£2m) for the book, which has a print run of 300,000. But repeated delays to the publication date, now set at April 30, suggest there have been arguments with the vetters about what could be included.

The reputation of Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, who was national security adviser at the time of the 9/11 attacks, is certain to take a battering. The two have already clashed over Tenet’s s claim that in July 2001 he gave Rice a full briefing about the threat of a spectacular Al-Qaeda attack on America. She said she could not remember such an explicit warning.

Tenet is also out to settle a few scores with Vice-President Dick Cheney and his office and neoconservative former Pentagon officials such as Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith. They fought long and hard to discredit the CIA’s belief that there was little evidence of a link between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Al-Qaeda, and ran their own separate intelligence-gathering operation at the defence department.

But Tenet is vulnerable to the charge that he exaggerated the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Bob Woodward, the veteran Washington reporter, wrote in his book Plan of Attack that the CIA chief told Bush their existence was a “slam dunk case”. Tenet is finally going to have to reveal whether he really used such definitive words, when there was no conclusive evidence.

Michael Scheuer, an Al-Qaeda expert at the CIA under Tenet, said his old boss “was a very attractive individual with the same people skills as Bill Clinton, but at the end of the day he never understood the difference between leading and cheerleading”.

The gregarious Tenet, a Democrat supporter appointed by Clinton, managed to hold on to his job after the presidency went to Bush in 2000 because he was “very attuned” to what his political masters wanted to hear, according to Scheuer. “This book is going to be his effort to rehabilitate himself with the Democratic party.” One of the few people to come out well from the book is Colin Powell, the former secretary of state, but then Tenet owes him. Powell’s famous 2003 speech to the United Nations about Saddam’s weapons programmes, which did so much to make the case for the war in Iraq but was rapidly demolished, was scripted by Tenet and his deputy.