At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA

by George Tenet;Bill Harlow

  Even as we were drafting our statement taking responsibility, we were hearing from reporters that the sniping at us aboard Air Force One was intensifying. I told my staff to stay calm and not be taken in by one of the oldest reporter’s tricks in the book: “Did you hear what they said about you?” Still, it was maddening that we were seeing no signs of that “shared responsibility” that I had been promised by Hadley. Reporters kept calling our press office with accounts from “senior administration officials” on Air Force One who continued to insist that the CIA’s share of the fault was 100 percent.

  Late on Thursday, July 10, I asked John McLaughlin to send a copy of the draft of my statement to Hadley. “Make clear to them, John,” I instructed, “that we are sending the draft over for their information only. We were not soliciting their concurrence, and we are for damn sure are not seeking their edits.”

  Around 2:00 A.M., Mountain Time, I was rousted from my bed by my special assistant, Scott Hopkins, to take a call from Condi Rice, who was somewhere in Africa.

  Condi might have been responding to the draft of our statement I had sent to Hadley. He, no doubt, had forwarded it to Air Force One. Or maybe she was reacting to a CBS Evening News report by Pentagon correspondent David Martin. According to sources, Martin said, CIA officials had warned the White House that the Niger reporting was “unreliable,” but the White House had gone ahead with it anyway. Martin had the story only partly right. We had warned the White House against using the Niger uranium reports previously but had not done so with the State of the Union; still, a story like that was bound to spike the blood pressure on Air Force One. CIA seemed to be deflecting blame. Here was a perfect storm, with all the key players in different time zones and continents.

  Early Friday morning, the CIA press office was suddenly inundated with calls from reporters looking for a reaction to a press briefing that had just taken place on board Air Force One about the Niger issue. En route to Entebbe, Uganda, Condi Rice had conducted an on-the-record press briefing of nearly an hour, during which time she was peppered with questions, mostly about that single sentence in the State of the Union speech. Soon wire stories began appearing quoting Condi as saying, “If the CIA, the Director of Central Intelligence, had said, take this out of the speech, it would have been gone, without question.” The Reuters wire service carried a story headlined “White House Points at CIA over Iraq Uranium Charge.”

  In response to questions, Condi denied that she was blaming CIA and she stressed that the president still had confidence in me and the Agency. She was sure I would not “knowingly” have put false information in the speech, even though the line somehow got in there. That was hardly a ringing endorsement, but the question itself was just as worrisome. When reporters start asking if the president still has confidence in you, you know you are in a world of trouble.

  Later that morning, McLaughlin received a call from Hadley, who, despite our admonishments, had a few suggestions to offer to “improve” our draft. The opening paragraph of the draft, for example, was not as strong as I had wanted it to be with regard to our taking responsibility. I knew that Condi and Hadley would press us on taking the blame more directly. They did not disappoint us. I conceded a few points and strengthened that part, and was pleased that the administration was not focusing much on the latter portion of the statement, which for anyone who read it carefully, laid out a roadmap for arriving at the complete story. That portion was a neon sign that pointed to the fact that we were especially unhappy at having allowed the sixteen words to get into this speech, since we had previously expressed serious doubts about the reliability of the information and did not think that it was a reason to believe that Saddam was reconstituting his nuclear weapons program.

  I guess we struck a nerve. Although I didn’t know it at the time, it was revealed in Scooter Libby’s trial in February 2007 that the draft of my statement was being passed around the White House. Someone, whose handwriting reportedly resembled the vice president’s or perhaps Steve Hadley’s, wrote “unsatisfactory” on the draft. Also penciled in was a proposed change that we did not accept that would have rendered the press release factually incorrect. They wanted us to say that Niger was “just one” of the factors we relied on to make the nuclear reconstitution case. In fact, we said it was “not one” of the factors.

  Despite what some White House officials have subsequently said, I was anxious to get the statement out. The story had taken on a life of its own, and I didn’t want to go through another weekend with more media speculation as to who said what to whom. I also didn’t want to issue the statement late on a summer Friday night, a technique usually reserved in Washington for statements that officials want to bury. That was not the case with this statement. The only reason for getting it out there was so it would get attention.

  Even as we were preparing to release the statement, we began to hear from other precincts. Senator Pat Roberts, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a close confidant of the vice president’s, told reporters that he was “disturbed by what appears to be extremely sloppy handling of the issue from the outset by the CIA.” Roberts reportedly said that he was most concerned about “a campaign of press leaks by the CIA in an effort to discredit the president.” To top things off, he accused me of failing to warn the president about any doubts at the Agency regarding the Niger information. The chairman convicted us of trying to discredit the president and of sloppy work—without ever once bothering to ask us the facts. I wondered at the time, “Where is he getting his information?”

  All this sniping was going on while we were working to finalize the text of a statement in which we would take our “share” of the responsibility. Meanwhile Hadley called wanting to set up a conference call with Condi Rice to talk about the draft. Reluctantly, I agreed. There were four of us on the line—me in Sun Valley, Condi in Uganda, Hadley from the West Wing, and John McLaughlin holding down the fort at Langley.

  I could tell by the tone of her voice that Condi was furious. I resisted asking why she had felt it necessary to hold an airborne press conference hours earlier hanging all the responsibility on me. I had an equal right to be angry, but that wasn’t going to help get a statement out.

  Finally, I told them that I was comfortable with my statement, and I asked John McLaughlin to tell Bill Harlow to send it out. As the call was wrapping up, someone expressed the hope that we could get this issue behind us. I still hadn’t heard any sign of “shared responsibility” from the administration. “What are you going to do about Cincinnati?” I asked Condi. There was dead silence on the line. I reminded her that I had intervened to get similar language out of the Cincinnati speech, and yet it had found its way back into the State of the Union address. The conversation ended uncomfortably.

  I felt a certain sense of relief once the decision was made to release the press statement. ”We’re finally free to take in some of this Idaho scenery,” I told Stephanie when I got off the conference call. Soon thereafter, we got in an SUV driven by my security detail and headed through the mountains to a nearby lake for some much-needed relaxation—or as close as you can get to relaxation when you’re DCI.

  My staff used to joke about how I would claim, when going off on a rare vacation, that I wasn’t going to give work a moment’s thought, and then, before my car had left the Agency compound, I’d call in on my cell phone to see how things were going. Here in Idaho, it was no different. I was anxious to learn what the reaction was to the release of my statement. Unfortunately, though, none of our sophisticated cell phones seemed to work in the mountains of Idaho. My communications team was still in Sun Valley, so we decided to stop at a rustic roadside store in search of a pay phone—a place called the Smiley Creek Lodge, in Sawtooth City. Not exactly a major metropolis. It turned out the place had only one working pay phone, and four people waiting in line to use it.

  One of my security team asked if I wanted him to tell those waiting that it was a national emergency so we could jump ah
ead of the queue. “That’s all I need,” I thought, “some guy flashing a badge to get me head-of-the-line privileges.” I opted to wait for the folks ahead of us to complete their calls, although I did allow one of my security detail to take my place in line while I got a milkshake and fries. (I highly recommend both the next time you are in Sawtooth City.) When my turn for the phone came, I learned that the Agency press staff was swamped with incoming calls, but it was too soon to gauge how the story was playing.

  When we finally got to the lake, Stephanie and I got in a two-person kayak and paddled around, taking in the majestic beauty of the nearby mountains. It was peaceful, quiet, and quite romantic—just Stephanie, me, and the other canoes with my security detail. Some of the beefier members of my security team almost swamped their kayaks.

  On the way back to Sun Valley, we stopped at the Smiley Creek Lodge again to use the pay phone. By now, the predictable uproar was in full swing. All three network news programs had led with stories about my taking the blame for the now-famous sixteen words. Every major newspaper was covering this as well, and many speculated that my days as DCI were numbered as a result.

  Early the next morning, a Saturday, I was awakened in Sun Valley, this time not by Condi Rice but by a call from our then-sixteen-year-old son, John Michael, who had stayed behind at our home in Washington’s Maryland suburbs. He was quite upset. “Dad,” I can remember his saying, “there are a bunch of television camera crews out in front of our house. They are just standing on the neighbor’s lawn with their cameras pointed at our house. What should I do?”

  I tried to explain to him that this is what happens when you find yourself all over the front page. (“CIA Director Takes the Blame,” the New York Times headline shouted that morning, I would later find out.) But my son thought a bunch of strangers “staking out” our house was a bit too much.

  “Dad, I’m going to go out there with my baseball bat and slug one of them,” he said, full of a sixteen-year-old’s bravado.

  I was glad his mother was not on the line.

  “No, John Michael, those cameramen are just doing their jobs.” I reminded him that one of our closest family friends, George Romilly, whom he called “Uncle George,” was a cameraman for ABC News. Had he been on duty that morning, Uncle George might have had to stake me out just like the others.

  I called the security officer on duty in the basement of our house and told him to slip our son out the rear door, across the yard of our back-door neighbor’s, and have him wait on a nearby street, where Stephanie’s brother, Nick, would pick him up. In the meantime, I asked CIA’s very able deputy spokesman, Mark Mansfield, to race over to my house and chat up the TV crews.

  “You guys are welcome to stay out here and stare at that house,” Mark told them once he arrived. “But I thought you ought to know that Director Tenet is out of town. You could be in for a long, long wait.”

  “When will he be back?” they asked.

  “Can’t say—we never discuss his movements, for security reasons,” Mark told them with a smile, as he wiped his brow to emphasize that the temperature was ninety degrees and certain to climb higher. “You guys could be in for a lot of overtime.” Mark left, and shortly thereafter, the TV crews did, too. I returned, as previously scheduled, late that evening.

  That same day, the White House sent around draft talking points for administration officials who would be interviewed on the Sunday talk shows the next day. My chief of staff, John Moseman, was stunned to see that the talking points still tried to justify their including the “sixteen words” in the State of the Union speech. John called the NSC staff and told them they were nuts to keep beating that dead horse. He suggested they just take my statement from the day before and stick with it. Those words should never have been in the president’s speech. Period.

  I took some comfort in a small article buried in the New York Times on the day after I returned to Washington from Idaho. The article reported that, at CIA’s behest, the White House had removed any mention of African uranium from the Cincinnati speech in 2002. I was especially pleased that the reporter attributed this fact to “Administration officials involved in drafting the speech.” This had to have come from the White House. Perhaps they were about to step up and admit some error, too.

  On Sunday, July 13, I got a call from Secretary of State Colin Powell asking me to come over to his home. I was just back from Sun Valley; Colin was just back from the African trip along with Condi, the president, and others. Together, we drank lemonade on his back patio. Colin, it turned out, had been asked by the president to deliver a message to me.

  “Keep your building quiet,” he said. Washington is the only place in the world where buildings are believed to speak. What he meant was that I was somehow supposed to get the thousands of Agency employees to quit responding when officials in the administration took rhetorical shots at them, deserved or not.

  Colin also wanted to give me some of the atmospherics from Air Force One. There had been a lively debate among staffers on the aircraft and back in Washington, he said, about whether to continue to support me. In the end, the president said yes, and said so publicly. But Colin let me know that other officials, particularly the vice president, had quite another view.

  Reactions to my “mea culpa” continued to pour in, and not just from the media. My old boss and mentor, Senator David Boren, now president of the University of Oklahoma, was livid. He sent word that he was very disappointed that I had not consulted with him personally before issuing the statement. Had I done so, he insisted, he never would have agreed with the wisdom of my accepting blame for the incident. He had been after me to resign from the Agency for some time. If I left now, however, everyone would believe I had been fired. “You’re stuck,” he said.

  While my staff continued researching what had gone wrong with the State of the Union process and what had gone right with the Cincinnati speech, the “who screwed up?” stories percolated day after day, fed by a White House spin machine that kept trying to find ways to turn the issue to its favor.

  During the middle of the week, NSC officials called asking us to declassify just a couple of paragraphs from page twenty-four of the NIE dealing with uranium from Africa. The person responsible for handling the request at the Agency refused to do it. “It’s misleading,” he explained to John Moseman. “Put out those two paragraphs and you imply that the Niger stuff was a major part of our thinking. It wasn’t. We did not even cite the reports as among the reasons we thought Saddam was reconstituting his nuclear weapons program.”

  Moseman told the NSC we wouldn’t do it. On July 17, a written request came in asking that we declassify the reasons why we thought Saddam was pursuing nuclear weapons. That was followed the next day by another written request that we declassify the NIE’s “Key Judgments” and the paragraphs concerning yellowcake from page twenty-four. Both requests were signed by Condi Rice. Although less than an ideal solution, it was better than declassifying the Niger stuff alone. We complied.

  In fact, it was a few years later that we learned through court papers and the media that, much earlier, the White House had apparently declassified parts of the NIE without telling us. Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald said in a court filing on April 5, 2006, that “[Libby] testified (before the Grand Jury) that the Vice President later advised him that the President had authorized [Libby] to disclose the relevant portions of the NIE.” From the court documents, it is clear that these briefings occurred on or before July 12, 2003.

  I now believe that one of the reasons some people in the White House were unhappy with my “mea culpa” statement was that the details in it might lead some of the journalists who received background briefings on the NIE—without our knowledge—to discover that they had been misled regarding the importance we attached to intelligence reports alleging that Iraq had vigorously pursued yellowcake in Niger. My statement made clear that we put little stock in that reporting and we did not rely on it for our judgment regarding whe
ther Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program.

  On the afternoon of Friday, July 18, two senior White House officials held a lengthy background briefing during which they discussed the situation with the media. At the start of the briefing they released to the press the Key Judgments and the Niger paragraphs from the NIE, both of which we had declassified that morning. Their intent was obvious: they wanted to demonstrate that the intelligence community had given the administration and Congress every reason to believe that Saddam had a robust WMD program that was growing in seriousness every day.

  The briefers were questioned about press accounts saying that the White House had taken references to Niger out of the Cincinnati speech at CIA’s request. Why then, did they insert them again in the State of the Union? The senior officials said that the material that was taken out of the first speech was quite different from the material the president used before Congress. That simply wasn’t so. It was not clear to me then, nor is it clear now, whether they even understood the facts, but it was clear that the entire briefing was intended to convince the press corps that the White House staff was an innocent victim of bad work by the intelligence community. Here, again, was the familiar mantra: the intelligence community made us do it. Apparently, I was expected to go along with the notion that only we had screwed up. In any event, instead of spiking the sixteen-words story, the briefing just gave it more life. More stories about “what the White House knew and when they knew it” kept rolling out all weekend long.