The yes man and the thug

In his disturbing new book, Times reporter James Risen reveals how George Tenet's gutless surrender to war-obsessed Donald Rumsfeld led to the total breakdown of U.S. intelligence.

By Farhad Manjoo

Read more: Books, Terrorism, Politics, News, Iraq, Security, CIA, Reviews, Book reviews, Weapons of mass destruction, Farhad Manjoo

Photos by AP/WideWorld

Former CIA director George Tenet and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld

Jan. 10, 2006 | Marketing copy is always suspect, so when journalist James Risen's new book "State of War" arrived accompanied by a press release containing the phrase "tip of the iceberg," I began to worry. "Tip of the iceberg" is a lemonade-from-lemons construction, an attempt by the publisher to allay concerns that the book's biggest scoops have already been widely aired. After all, several weeks ago the New York Times, where Risen covers national security issues, published much of what you'll read in the book's second chapter, which reveals that President Bush authorized a program to eavesdrop on Americans without warrants. Since then, Bush has acknowledged the existence of the wiretapping plan, and Risen and Times colleague Eric Lichtblau have uncovered a great deal more about the program that goes beyond what's in "State of War," including the fact that federal judges and senior members of Bush's own Justice Department have balked at it. After all this new news, it's natural to wonder whether "State of War," which made it to stores just last week, might already be stale on the shelf, a blockbuster-to-be that's now just bust.

Yet it turns out that far from an empty bit of P.R. puffery, "tip of the iceberg" may be the perfect phrase to describe Risen's compelling, disturbing, if ultimately somewhat unfulfilling, volume. In sketching the recent history of the American intelligence apparatus, Risen serves up scooplet after astonishing scooplet of our spy agencies' mistakes and misdeeds. There's much more here than illegal wiretapping; indeed, the wiretapping story is even a bit out of place in "State of War," a one-off chapter on the National Security Agency in a volume mostly about the CIA. (The book's subtitle is "The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration.")

Most of Risen's bombshell disclosures have to do with that agency, including new details on the CIA's interrogation practices and its stable of secret prisons. In addition, we learn that in the months before the United States invaded Iraq, the CIA obtained and then ignored specific intelligence pointing to the absence of weapons of mass destruction under Saddam Hussein, and that, as the famous Downing Street memo noted, the CIA was essentially fixing data around what it knew to be an inevitable war. In what may be the book's most sensational claim, Risen writes that as part of a bizarre, almost unbelievably ill-conceived attempt to disrupt the Iranian nuclear program, the agency recently provided the Iranian government with highly sensitive technical designs for making part of a nuclear bomb -- and then lost track of what the Iranians did with the blueprints.

The trouble is, for all the news in "State of War," you can't help feeling there's an even bigger story in what's not here. Risen's astounding findings are, for the most part, just skeletons of disaster and doom; in many cases, limitations inherent to national security journalism -- spymasters like to keep mum -- kept him from learning many of the details surrounding the programs he uncovers, and his account is often incomplete. He reports that in early 2005, members of a Defense Department intelligence unit "working in Latin America killed a man outside a bar," but he can tell us nothing more about that incident. He suggests that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the central planner of the 9/11 attacks who's now in U.S. custody, was treated so harshly by his CIA interrogators that he initially gave them false information just to stop the torture; more recently, he has disavowed his earlier testimony. But Risen, a careful journalist who always comes clean about his ignorance, makes clear he doesn't know what Mohammed is now recanting, how important his reversals may be in the war on terrorism, and whether the incident actually proves that torture yields bad information from detainees. Thus, the book reads more like a collection of disparate anecdotes about national security difficulties -- almost all from anonymous sources, and sometimes reported with little context -- than a coherent story of what's wrong with the American spy business. At times, it feels like all tip and no iceberg.

To the extent that Risen does put forward a theory for why U.S. intelligence has failed so frequently and so spectacularly under George W. Bush, the story focuses on two key players. The first is George Tenet, the former CIA director, whom Risen paints as a feckless yes man, a pusillanimous glad-hander who ruined the agency's credibility and integrity because he could never stand up to others in the administration. "George Tenet liked to talk about how he was a tough Greek from Queens, but in reality, he was a pussy," one former CIA insider tells Risen. "He just wanted people to like him."

Then there's Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the yin to Tenet's yang. Rumsfeld is a renegade who steps over just about everyone in the administration, including Tenet, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and even Bush himself, to get his way. Aided by Vice President Dick Cheney and influenced by Defense Department neoconservatives, Rumsfeld manages to wrest control of every aspect of American international affairs. "To others in the administration, mystified by the process -- or lack of a process -- it eventually became clear that Cheney and Rumsfeld had a backchannel where the real decision making was taking place," Risen writes. "The result was that the Bush administration was the first presidency in modern history in which the Pentagon served as the overwhelming center of gravity for U.S. foreign policy."

These two forces -- Tenet's weakness and Rumsfeld's strength -- combined to squeeze out the CIA, to politicize and muddy its intelligence-gathering efforts, and to push the agency into operations that some there were very nervous about, including the management of prisons and the interrogation of detainees captured in the war on terrorism. Risen writes that after 9/11, "the president made clear to agency officials in many ways that it was time for the gloves to come off." Once, inquiring about Abu Zubaydah, the al-Qaida lieutenant who was wounded during his capture in Pakistan, Bush asked Tenet, "Who authorized putting him on pain medication?"

It is possible, Risen notes, "that this was just one more piece of jocular banter between two plain-speaking men," and he says that White House officials went out of their way to make sure that Bush was never included in debates over how to handle prisoners so that he could maintain plausible deniability on the matter of torture. Still, Tenet got Bush's message and went about restructuring his agency to meet senior administration officials' wishes to get tough -- very tough -- with the enemy. An FBI official tells Risen that he once overheard a CIA official who was transferring an al-Qaida suspect to Egypt (where the suspect would likely be tortured) say to the prisoner, "You know where you are going. Before you get there, I am going to find your mother and fuck her."

Risen writes: "Several CIA officials who are familiar with the way the interrogations of high-value Al Qaeda detainees are actually conducted say that there are no doubts in their minds that the CIA is torturing its prisoners. Water boarding is used, not just once to simulate torture, but over and over again, according to one CIA source." Risen tells of a secret CIA report that "describes how Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was subjected to the application of several types of harsh interrogation techniques approximately a hundred times over a period of two weeks." (Among a parade of ugly CIA interrogation techniques, one is to force prisoners to listen to Eminem extremely loud for long periods of time.)

Tenet's eagerness to please Bush and the Pentagon establishment was especially evident in the run-up to the war in Iraq, when he faced a stark choice: going with the advice of his agency's analysts, who had no reliable evidence showing that Iraq was a threat, or going with hard-liners like Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, the former undersecretary of defense for policy, who believed Iraq was allied with al-Qaida and was intent on striking the United States.

Next page: The CIA ignores information from Iraqi scientists and basically tells Iran how to build a nuclear weapon