The administration knew long before the war that the Iraq-Niger connection was bogus -- it was struck from the speech Bush gave in Cincinnati on Oct. 7, 2002. Given your knowledge of the CIA's inner workings, how could something so flagrant possibly make it into a presidential State of the Union address three months later?

It's very clear to me how: Condoleezza Rice has actually told us how it happened. Her explanation says the evidence was in the National Intelligence Estimate prepared last August and September on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq -- which is true. The NIE is by far the most authoritative pronouncement, not only by the CIA, but by the entire intelligence community. It's very carefully done. This story about Iraq trying to get uranium from Niger was in there -- this was evidence long since disproved, and yet someone insisted it be included in the document. The State Department was so shocked by this, they put in a footnote saying that in their view, the information was garbage. Rice says the footnote appeared on Page 55 or something like that, so that nobody paid any attention to it.

So the real question is, how did that information get into the NIE last fall? The reality is that the vice president's office knew that it was spurious -- but the vice president had led the charge on Aug. 26, saying Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program, and there wasn't a shred of evidence of that. So they dusted off this forgery and peddled it on the Hill to get Congress to vote for war. Since the NIE was in progress at that time, they insisted it be included despite [objections] at the State Department and the Department of Energy.

So around Christmastime, here's this drafter of the State of the Union speech, whom Condoleezza Rice instructs to draft a couple of paragraphs about WMD in Iraq, and the drafter says, "Where do I get that?" and she says, "Well, consult the NIE." So the damage had already been done with the NIE report itself. Condi should've known better with this. The key question is, who allowed it to stand in that report? It's exactly the kind of pressure that folks who are malleable managers do not have the guts to resist. The senior person in charge of the NIE bowed to the pressure that came from the White House, and presumably from the vice president's office, so that the report would support what the vice president had already said. Cheney set the terms on Aug. 26, and who's going to come out with a report that says otherwise?

In the old days, that's exactly what we would've done, and we'd be persona non grata in the vice president's office. Not so anymore.

If George Tenet is to blame for the blunder, why is President Bush backing him now with "absolute confidence," rather than asking for Tenet's immediate resignation?

Well, George Tenet is not to blame. If you look at his statement carefully -- and this is vintage Tenet -- he says, "I confess, she did it." He says, "I confess I didn't catch the error because I didn't read it carefully enough, but I didn't put the error in there."

So he's taking responsibility by saying, "I'm captain of the ship and this happened on my watch?"

But he's not the captain of the ship. Condoleezza Rice is. She's responsible for this text of the president's speech, not George Tenet. And she's explained it: She says, "We got it from the NIE report." People don't realize what that really means. The NIE report, having already been prostituted, means the deceit and the damage run that much deeper.

But who is ultimately responsible for the NIE report?

That is Tenet. But if we're talking about the president's speech, Condoleezza Rice is responsible. But you're right about the NIE report -- that's George Tenet, and the malleable manager he appointed to manage it.

That said, how does the president blaming Tenet square with the widespread accounts of CIA warnings about the Niger report months prior?

Tenet's influence and stature is like that of a successful congressional staffer. He's a lawyer, and he knew how to ingratiate himself with both sides of the aisle -- usually a good thing in politics, but not a good thing when it comes to the responsibilities of a CIA director. Because if he's going to speak truth to power he's going to make lots of enemies.

But he doesn't have the stature of Rumsfeld or Cheney. If you look at Cheney's Aug. 26 speech -- remember, this is around the time when Cheney visited the CIA on multiple occasions -- there's great pressure on the analysts to produce. Will it be an honest estimate, saying there's no evidence of an Iraqi nuclear program? Or will they stick stuff in there that they know will make Cheney look right? I hate to say it, but this was the course chosen, and Tenet is that kind of person. Where does that leave Tenet now? Well, he played the team game. He should've threatened to resign if that kind of fraudulent stuff appeared as "intelligence," but he didn't. He hung around as part of the team.

No wonder the president has complete confidence in him. He does what he's told, no matter what his analysts think.

What do you make of Tenet's pointing the finger at Robert Joseph of the NSC during Wednesday's Senate Intelligence Committee hearing?

The only thing Tenet confessed to before was being a lousy proofreader. What Tenet's really saying now is, "How many times did I have to tell these guys that the report was bogus?" The fact that Tenet now mentions Joseph's name doesn't surprise me -- somebody has to draft these things, and my information was that it was Joseph who drafted that section of the speech. He was the natural choice; he's a proliferation guy at the NSC and very much a hard-liner.

Is there any precedent for this kind of intelligence breakdown? You were in the CIA during the LBJ administration -- how does the Iraq-Niger debacle compare to the Gulf of Tonkin escalation in Vietnam?

There's always pressure of this kind, and it's always intense with matters of war and peace. Gulf of Tonkin maybe rivals this, though it doesn't strike me at all as being nearly as contrived and concerted and jointly plotted over a long period of time. I was [at the CIA] during Tonkin, and I know the second incident didn't happen: the initial report of a big firefight going on, which was disputed by a Navy pilot, James Stockdale, who was flying overhead at the time and reported pitch blackness. The initial report was a mistake, a lightning storm or something, but there was certainly no attack on U.S. ships.

My colleague who was writing this up for the next daily report outlined this in his draft and sent it up the line. He was told, "We're not going to put a piece out for tomorrow morning." He asked, "What could be more important than this?" and the word came back down that the White House had already decided to go to war, and that the agency wasn't going to wear out its welcome there.

So you're saying this has happened before, but not on the same scale in terms of planning.

Look, I'm not at all excusing what happened back then -- these are both really egregious sins. Just consider what happened after Tonkin. Years later, McGeorge Bundy told a wonderful vignette on the "McNeil Lehrer News Hour." He explained that the president came in the next day [after the alleged incident] and said to him, "OK, Mac, we've got the documentation we need, now go over to the Hill and sell that resolution." Bundy protested that the evidence wasn't good at all, and LBJ turned to him and asked, "Look, are you part of the team?" Well, we know his answer. That was August 1964. Eleven years of war in Vietnam followed, with almost 60,000 U.S. soldiers killed, and over a million Vietnamese killed.

McNeil and Lehrer didn't bother to ask Bundy why he did it. I mean, Bundy was no slouch -- he was [a dean at] Harvard, so he wasn't going to be out in the street looking for a job. So you can imagine the severe pressure from policymakers at that level, especially a president who makes very clear he wants to hear "yes, sir." Bundy caved in, and that's what's happened here.

You seem to be saying that intelligence is always politicized to some degree by the White House.

No, I don't agree that intelligence is always politicized. It depends on who's president, and who that president selects as head of the CIA. There have been incredibly honest CIA directors who wouldn't bend to this kind of pressure. I'm thinking of Bill Colby and Stan [Stansfield] Turner -- and I'm also thinking of a fellow named George H. Bush. When the first President Bush was CIA director, he'd been chair of the Republican National Committee, so all of us were afraid he'd be inclined to participate in policy decisions, and perhaps even mess with the intelligence. He solemnly promised not to do that.

Well, I worked directly for him, and you know what? He kept his promise. He recused himself when policy decisions were made, and he was very faithful in representing what we analysts thought, down at the White House. And when he was president he knew, and expected the same from his CIA directors.

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