Cheat Sheet to George Tenet’s Memoir:
Dick, Condi and Plenty of Bull*&$!
On Friday, we got a sneak peek at the new memoir by former CIA director George Tenet, “At the Center of the Storm.”
Of course, it’s completely self-serving and takes plenty of not-so-subtle shots at a long line of enemies in the administration from Dick Cheney and Condi Rice to Steve Hadley and Scooter Libby. (And demonstrates that Tenet has a healthy imagination when it comes to key dates.)
But it also contains some new revelations about the War on Terror and the behavior of its main players:
“They sought to create a connection between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks that would have made WMD, the United Nations, and the international community absolutely irrelevant.”
Enemies
- Tenet characterizes the war between the CIA and Dick Cheney’s office as “one-sided,” adding that his team at the agency ”were noncombatants.”
- Tenet reserves particular scorn for NSC deputy Stephen Hadley. Among his crimes: ignoring a CIA request in early 2001 to allow the agency to kill Bin Laden, pestering a CIA official to make so many changes to a report that she almost quit.
- Blames Bob Woodward for telling him that the “slam dunk” anecdote wasn’t a signficant part of the journalist’s ”Plan of Attack” book. “I have another two-word reaction to that statement. The first word is ‘bull’.”
- Tenet blames then-FBI director Tom Pickard for accusing him of failing to notify the FBI about Zacharias Moussaoui. “Hell, it was the FBI’s case, their arrest. I had no idea that the Bureau wasn’t aware of what its own people were doing.” Despite repeated emails from CIA reps about Moussaoui’s terror links, the FBI claimed that they didn’t have enough info to get a FISA warrant to search him.
9/11
- As Tenet arrived at the West Wing on September 12, 2001 to brief the president, he ran into Pentagon strategist Richard Perle who nodded to him and said, “Iraq has to pay a price for what happened yesterday. They bear responsibility.” Tenet’s reaction: “I was stunned but said nothing… At the Secret Service security checkpoint, I looked back at Perle and thought: What the hell is he talking about? Moments later, a second thought came to me: Who has Richard Perle been meeting with so early in the morning on today of all days? I never learned the answer to that question.”
- The FAA produced 105 daily intellgence summaries for airline industry leaders between April 1, 2001 and September 11, 2000. Almost half of them mentioned al-Qaeda, Bin Laden or both.
War on Terror
- A low-level CIA operative confronted Tenet about the 1998 embassy bombings months after a proposal to strike one of Bin Laden’s compounds was cancelled. “If you had allowed us to go ahead with our operation, those people might still be alive!”
- Despite claims that al-Qaeda detainee Abu Zubaydah was mentally unstable because he adopted multiple personas in his personal diary, CIA analysts determined that the terrorist was using a sophisticated literary device to express himself, including his twisted sexual fantasies about women.
- When the first stories about Khalid Sheik Mohammed’s capture portrayed him as an al-Qaeda James Bond due to a photograph of him wearing his traditional robes, Tenet went on a media offensive. He got CIA spokesman Bill Harlow to pick out the infamous photo of Mohammed looking like a hung-over Ron Jeremy and leaked it to the AP.
- In several clandestine meetings since 1999, the CIA met with Libyan intelligence officers, including chief Musa Kusa, the mastermind of the Lockerbie bombings. The long-awaited deal with Libya almost collapsed when John Bolton planned a press conference to trumpet a weapons seizure. The CIA later learned that the Libyans had been ripped off by a middleman during the deal to acquire nuclear technology from Pakistani rogue scientist A.Q. Khan, paying $200 million for $100 million of materials.
- Tenet and Colin Powell were furious about conservative activist Michael Ledeen’s secret meetings with Italian intelligence and Iranian conman Manucher Ghorbanifar. The CIA came close to filing a “crimes report” about Ledeen with the Justice Department. When Condi Rice naively claimed that Pentagon officials happened to bump into Iranian dissidents while crossing a street in Paris, Tenet told her, “Condi, in this line of work there is no such thing as an accidental meeting.”
- Tenet’s defensiveness about the 9/11 Commission’s conclusion that he lacked a strategic plan to take on global terrorism. “How could a community without a strategic plan tell the president of the United States just four days after 9/11 how to attack the Afghan sanctuary and operate against al-Qaida in ninety-two countries around the world?”
Iraq War
- “If someone had told me to quit paying so much attention to terrorism in the months following September 11 and to start boning up on Iraq instead, I would have stared at them in disbelief.”
- The CIA predicted some of the chaos that would ensue in the wake of the invasion of Iraq, producing a December 13, 2002 report titled “The Perfect Storm: Planning for Negative Consequences of Invading Iraq.” Among them was anarchy and the territorial breakup of Iraq, major oil supply disruptions and a surge of global terrorism against US interests.
- When two CIA analysts claimed during a high-level meeting that a much stronger case could be made for Iran’s backing of international terrorism than could be made for Iraq’s, Doug Feith said their objections were “persnickety.”
- The CIA analyst who managed the NIE on Iraq, Bob Walpole, a motorcycle-driving Mormon, was against the war. “I just don’t believe in this war,” he told Tenet. “Some wars are justifiable, but not this one.”
- After his capture, Saddam Hussein told FBI special agent George Pirro that he pretended to have WMDs because he was trying to send a message to the UN Security Council to encourage a broader disarming of the Middle East and to longtime enemy Iran: “You guys just don’t understand. This is a rough neighborhood.”
- Paul Wolfowitz and Scooter Libby were the two most ardent proponents of a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda, asking CIA analysts repeatedly to recheck their information.
- Tenet implicitly claims that Democratic wrangling over the disputed 2000 election distracted the US from retaliating for al-Qaeda’s deadly attack on the USS Cole. “Perhaps it would have been difficult to launch new military ventures while the country was fixated on counting chads and Supreme Court votes.”
- Tenet dismissed Internet rumors that Osama Bin Laden had worked for the CIA during the Afghan-Soviet war, stating categorically that the al-Qaeda mastermind had no contact with the agency during that period.
- Tenet felt that the incoming Bush administration wasn’t focused on the al-Qaeda threat, citing “a lack of urgency.”
- Tenet criticized Pakistan’s former intelligence chief Gen. Mahmood Ahmed for his lack of cooperation. Two days before 9/11, the pair had lunch and Tenet claims that he pushed him on Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader protecting Bin Laden. Mahmood praised Omar and didn’t budge his position.
- CIA field officers had a sure-fire clue to figuring out when Iraq would be invaded: the Starbucks at CIA headquarters switched over to a twenty-four-hour-a-day operation.
- Tenet would have fired weapons inspector David Kay if he had been a regular officer at the agency. Kay outraged the CIA by refusing to lend some of his staff to the military’s efforts to track down insurgents in Iraq.
- The Coalition Provisional Authority was so committed to their optimistic propaganda that the White House had to rely on the British to tell them what was really going on in the country. One CIA analyst told Tenet that CPA “runs like a graduate school seminar, none of them speaks Arabic, almost nobody’s ever been to an Arab country and no one makes a decision but [Jay] Bremer.”
- The Pentagon was so determined to exclude Ba’athists and ex-Army members from the future of Iraq that a U.S. Army colonel, who had been DIA’s liason to Ahmed Chalabi, once advised, “We should round them all up and shoot them.”
- The administration was so obsessed with Chalabi that “you had the impression that some Office of the Vice President and DOD reps were writing Chalabi’s name over and over again in their notes, like schoolgirls with their first crush.” Tenet claims that President Bush was frustrated by the focus on Chalabi, twice asking “What the hell is going on with Chalabi” and concluding “I don’t think he ought to be working for us.”
- Joseph Wilson’s briefing about his notorious trip to Niger? He gave an oral briefing to two CIA analysts at his home one night over Chinese takeout food.
- Tenet goes out of his way to prove that the CIA made several attempts to get erroneous information about yellowcake out of presidential speeches in 2002.
Oddball
- When Tenet met his counterparts at Russia’s FSB at a fancy restaurant in Moscow, they were greeted by a voluptuous blonde flanked by two dwarves who escorted them inside. During dinner, Tenet’s aide John McLaughlin performed a magic trick where he turns a 1000-ruble note into a 100,000-ruble note, stunning FSB director Nikolai Kovalev.
- Tenet started a fire at CIA headquarters during a celebration over the capture of Pakistani terrorist Aimal Kasi. After he lit a victor cigar, it fell on the floor in all the excitement and set the carpet on fire in the 6th-floor Global Response Center. Later, that piece of burned carpet was framed and hung on the wall.
- During the 2000 summit at Sharm el-Sheik, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak made fun of Yasser Arafat. While Tenet was huddling with Arafat, he noticed Mubarak quietly laughing and “twirling his finger beside his head, the universal symbol for ‘This guy you’re talking to is nuts!’”
- During the Church of the Nativity crisis in 2002, when Palestinian gunman holed themselves up in the holy site, the CIA’s Geoff O’Connell almost saved the day. He proposed that the Palestinians’ weapons be thrown into the sea. But of course the deal fell apart over a dispute: the Palestinians wanted the guns thrown in the Dead Sea and the Israelis wanted them tossed into the Mediterranean.
- Tenet and his CIA buddies had a pool going over how long it would take Arafat to say “I’m still suffering.” They’d each pick a time and put their money down. Another time, when Tenet was lying on his back on the floor to ease his back pain, Arafat flopped down next to him, saying that he did the same thing for his back. Tenet’s team was petrified that some photojournalist would capture the scene for posterity.
- The CIA’s liason to the Saudis, John Brennan, once spooked the head of Iranian intelligence by walking up to his car and knocking on the window. “As John tells the story, the guy got out of the car, claimed that Iran was a peace-loving country, then jumped back in the car and sped away.”
- In the run-up to the Iraq War, the CIA got an urgent message from Chinese intelligence, sending along the geographic coordinates for their embassy in Baghdad. They were hoping that it was accurately listed in Pentagon databases after their Belgrade embassy was mistakenly bombed by U.S. aircraft in 1999.
- Tenet’s decision to resign was sealed over a meeting with former FBI chief Louis Freeh, whom he accidentally ran into at a local A&P when they were both shopping for Sunday meals.
Popularity: 2%
2 Responses to “Cheat Sheet to George Tenet’s Memoir:
Dick, Condi and Plenty of Bull*&$!”
Leave a Reply
Browse Through
Categories
Investigative
Media
News
Politics
-
RSS
Subscribe to Muckraked
April 30th, 2007 at 3:08 pm
- Tenet’s decision to resign was sealed over a meeting with former FBI chief Louis Freeh, whom he accidentally ran into at a local A&P when they were both shopping for Sunday meals.
- “Condi, in this line of work there is no such thing as an accidental meeting.”
May 1st, 2007 at 8:43 pm
What caused my cranial explosion was what he said about the Democrats wrangling over the election in 2000 caused the government to lose their focus.
WTF is he talking about. No matter the threat, Democracy goes on, or it should.
The Democrats were beholden to the people who voted for Al Gore to wrangle. It was an election! One that may well have changed the course of history, as it turns out.
What was really pathetic was the fact that many, many Americans had no clue about who bin Laden was on 9/11/01. Some had a vague rememberance of the name being mentioned.
Why did more Americans not understand why bin Laden was very important to our security? Why did they not know that he was a a very rich, tall Arab, who hated our guts, had declared war on us, bombed two of our embassies and one of our naval vessels, all acts of war. Why?
Bill Clinton’s penis, the ultimate WMD. That’s why!
The media and Americans were obsessed with the whole Clinton, Monica, whoever else, scandal and could have cared less about some nutty Arab thousands of miles away, living in a cave, or some such thing.
Tenet is still a big loser in my book.