What George Tenet really knew about Iraq

When did war become inevitable? When did Tenet see the freight train coming? Does he really hope to convince us that it took him longer than the British, who signed on for war at a meeting with Bush at his Texas ranch in April 2002?

What we know about the extraordinarily close British-American relationship in the run-up to war comes mainly from a series of high-level British government papers known collectively as "the Downing Street memos." An unknown person gave them to the British newspaper correspondent Michael Smith -- a first batch of six, in September 2004, when Smith was working for the Telegraph; and two more the following May, after Smith had moved over to the London Times. These documents reveal British plans in a language of bald directness and candor. There is no fudge; there is no evasion of awkward fact; there is frank admission of where they want to get and how they plan to get there.

The British had no objection to overthrowing Saddam by military means but feared that the American willingness to go it alone would undermine the case, anger the world, and make it impossible for Britain to take part. The solution was to cast Saddam as the villain, and the British saw promise in his serial rejection of U.N. resolutions. If he could be coaxed to defy one last and final offer to disarm, worded carefully to make U.N. demands sound fair, then the world might come around to seeing war as reasonable. This was the strategy the British hoped to sell to the Americans in the spring of 2002. In a first step, David Manning in mid-March flew again to Washington where he met twice with the national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice. He reported in a memo to Blair on March 14:

These were good exchanges, and particularly frank when we were one-on-one at dinner ... Condi's enthusiasm for regime change is undimmed. But there were some signs, since we last spoke, of greater awareness of the practical difficulties ... From what she said, Bush has yet to find the answers to the big questions: how to persuade international opinion that military action against Iraq is necessary and justified; ... what happens on the morning after?

Blair was in a strong position, in Manning's view. "Bush will want to pick your brains," he told the prime minister in his memo. "He also wants your support." The price of that support, Manning told Rice, would be recognition of British concerns:

In particular: the UN dimension. The issue of the weapons inspectors must be handled in a way that would persuade European and wider opinion that the US was conscious of the international framework, and the insistence of many countries on the need for a legal base. Renewed refusal by Saddam to accept unfettered inspections would be a powerful argument.

A few days after Manning's dinner with Rice, Christopher Meyer invited Paul Wolfowitz to lunch at the ambassador's residence. He reported the result to Manning on March 18: "I opened by sticking very closely to the script that you used with Condi Rice last week." Yes, Britain supported regime change but the world had to be brought along. Wolfowitz wanted to talk about Saddam's crimes and his connections to al-Qaida -- "did we, he asked, know anything more about this meeting" of Mohamed Atta with the Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague? Meyer stuck to the script: "I then went through the need to wrongfoot Saddam on the inspectors and the UNSCRs [Security Council Resolutions]."

The British foreign secretary, Jack Straw, expanded on this argument in his options paper for Blair at the end of the month. Making the case, in Straw's view, meant going back to the U.N.:

That Iraq is in flagrant breach of international legal obligations imposed on it by UNSC provides us with the core of a strategy ... I believe that a demand for the unfettered readmission of weapons inspectors is essential, in terms of public explanation, and in terms of legal sanction for any subsequent military action.

Straw appended a memo from the Foreign Office political director, Peter Ricketts, who described the immediate challenge as explaining why Iraq, and why now?

The truth is that ... even the best survey of Iraq's WMD programmes will not show much advance in recent years on the nuclear, missile or CW/BW fronts: the programmes are extremely worrying but have not, as far as we know, been stepped up ... We are still left with a problem of bringing public opinion to accept the imminence of a threat from Iraq. This is something the Prime Minister and President need to have a frank discussion about.

Blair met with Bush in Crawford, Texas, on April 6 and promised to join a military campaign for Saddam's removal, but only, Blair stressed, after "the options for action to eliminate Iraq's WMD through the UN weapons inspectors had been exhausted." Bush did not say yes to this at the time, and as spring of 2002 moved into summer, the vice president argued against any return to the U.N. Cheney feared that Baghdad would renew its cat-and-mouse game with inspectors, the process would drag on, and the administration's determination to invade and occupy Iraq would gradually erode, leaving a defiant Saddam still in power.

The British made a final effort to convince Bush to obtain a U.N. resolution in July, beginning with a trip to Washington by MI6's director, Richard Dearlove, to check the temperature of American thinking. On Saturday, July 20, Dearlove and other British intelligence officials visited the CIA in Langley, where George Tenet took Dearlove aside for a private talk that lasted an hour and a half. On July 23, back in London, Dearlove reported on his frank discussions in Washington.

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But first let us consider Tenet's account of this episode in his memoir. It is deceptive in the extreme. "In May of 2002," he writes, Dearlove came to Washington and met with Rice, Hadley, Scooter Libby, and Congressman Porter Goss, then chair of the House Intelligence Committee. Three years later the documents leaked to the British press quoted Dearlove describing his findings in Washington at a Cabinet meeting. Tenet writes, "Sir Richard later told me that he had been misquoted."

May of 2002? Tenet is off by two months. I suspect that Dearlove really did come in May as well, and that Tenet cites the earlier visit to muddy the waters about his meeting with Dearlove on July 20 -- neither denying it took place nor lying about what was said. After May 2005 -- a full year after Tenet had left the CIA -- Dearlove "told me that he had been misquoted." Tenet knows what he told Dearlove; does he think his views were misrepresented by Dearlove's report to the Cabinet, as recorded in the minutes? Tenet does not say. He adds that Dearlove "believed that the crowd around the vice president was playing fast and loose with the evidence." In short, Tenet is trying to put a country mile of daylight between Dearlove's unvarnished report to the British Cabinet and Tenet's 90-minute private conversation with Dearlove at the CIA only three days earlier.

We may assume that the whole of Dearlove's remarks as reported in the Cabinet meeting minutes were colored by what Tenet told him:

C [the traditional designation for the chief of MI6] reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

Tenet has done his utmost -- short of lying -- to hide his role as Dearlove's informant, but every point the MI6 director made was something Tenet was uniquely positioned to tell him.

The danger from Blair's point of view was a bull-headed American drive to war which the British would find it politically impossible to join. He told the Cabinet that "it would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the UN inspectors." The Cabinet agreed that a strategy to "wrongfoot" Saddam through the U.N. was crucial. Jack Straw "would send the prime minister the background on the UN inspectors and discreetly work up the ultimatum to Saddam." Early in August Straw made a secret visit to argue Blair's case for the U.N. gambit with Secretary of State Colin Powell in the latter's house; Powell then pressed the point about the U.N. hard with Bush at a private White House dinner, and Bush at last agreed. Tenet attended a final meeting on the issue at Camp David on Saturday morning, Sept. 7:

Colin Powell was firmly on the side of going the extra mile with the UN, while the vice president argued just as forcefully that doing so would only get us mired in a bureaucratic tangle with nothing to show for it other than the time lost off a ticking clock. The president let Powell and Cheney pretty much duke it out.

Next page: As a ploy for war, "wrongfooting" Saddam was a bust -- and Cheney's clock was ticking