George Tenet Targets Cheney, Clinton in New Book
Ronald Kessler
Monday, April 23, 2007
Former CIA Director George Tenet's long-awaited book will hit book stores in the next week - and its release won't be happy news for either Democrats or Republicans.
At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA will take shots at key members of President Bush's inner circle. NewsMax has learned that Vice President Dick Cheney is a particular target, relating how he pushed too hard for intelligence that might tie Iraq to the attacks of 9/11.
Tenet served as director of Central Intelligence under Presidents Clinton and Bush and oversaw the country's intelligence response during the stormy days in the wake of Sept. 11 and the run up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Tenet will not only be tough on Republicans. The former chief spook also takes on Bill Clinton. In "At the Center of the Storm," he describes how he had to establish a back-channel relationship in the late 1990s with Republican Newt Gingrich, who was then House speaker, to obtain a much-needed influx of dollars for the intelligence community.
Clinton's annual budgets slashed the CIA's clandestine service by 25 percent at a time when it was trying to penetrate Osama bin Laden's organization.
Over the objections of the Clinton administration, Tenet had to try to offset the cuts by obtaining additional funding through supplemental appropriations. Supplementals, however, are only good for a year and are no way to rebuild an agency, which was decimated by Clinton.
Beyond the hits at Democrats, Republicans will be cheered that the book leaves Bush relatively unscathed. Some Democrats have charged that Bush and his key lieutenants manipulated pre-war intelligence to make a strong case that Saddam had or was about to acquire weapons of mass destruction. Tenet provides these critics no smoking guns. Besides the fact that every major intelligence agency in the world believed Saddam had WMD, Saddam's own generals believed it.
Tenet is not simply using his book to point fingers. He tries to present a factual narrative rather than deliver judgements. And Tenet is tough on himself for mistakes made by the CIA during his time at the helm, according to a source familiar with the book.
Some of the early leaks about the book have been wrong. For example, Chris Matthews asserted on MSNBC's "Hardball" that Tenet will deny having made the claim that "there was a slam dunk case to be made that Saddam Hussein possessed those banned weapons."
When Bob Woodward interviewed Bush for his book "State of Denial," the president attributed the remark to Tenet, saying that Tenet told him the case that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction was a "slam dunk."
According to a source, Tenet does not deny uttering the words but argues that the comments' context and implication were subsequently misstated.
The 576-page book is said to be jam packed with new disclosures. In writing the book, Tenet had access to classified documents at the CIA. The book had to be reviewed by the CIA to make sure no sensitive information that is still classified was disclosed. The CIA allowed the vast majority of the draft manuscript to be published.
Some of the censored material described successful CIA operations to obtain intelligence and stop terrorist plots.
Publicity begins this coming Sunday with an appearance by Tenet on CBS' "60 Minutes." The book goes on sale Monday, April 30.
