PoliticsA slam dunk, if you don't know, is the expression used when a basketball player manages to shoot through the hoop with forceful style. In colloquial terms though it can be used to suggest that something presents no difficulty. They are words that George Tenet, former director of the CIA, must greatly regret having used and which will haunt him forever.
Three months before the US and their allies launched the war against Iraq, President Bush's war cabinet discussed the issue of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Tenet was among them and a more determined group of pugilistic conservatives it would be hard to find. Nevertheless, there was some soul-searching about the supposed WMD, because that, in theory, was the basis for any invasion. The UN had to be persuaded of the WMD proposition, as did potential allies. Tenet assured the meeting that Iraq's WMDs were a "slam dunk case".
When Iraq was invaded and a countrywide search proved that Iraq had no such weapons, Tenet insisted first that he had never used the phrase, then that if he had he didn't remember doing so, and finally that while he did utter those words he had meant something else entirely. He then claimed that the words could not have mattered much anyway. Unfortunately, Bush and Cheney have both gone on record as saying they did. Credibility score: zero.
Tenet is feeling sore and bitter and this book is his way of getting back at his critics and, indeed, at the White House, for, as he sees it, making a scapegoat of him. According to Tenet and his ghostwriter, everybody else was at fault over Iraq except him. Such errors as he made were wholly understandable given the gung-ho attitude that had the White House intoxicated with war fever.
You could understand high levels of belligerence after the 9/11 attacks. But why, oh why, did the Bush administration decide that, instead of combating the very real threat of al-Qaeda (which it did so successfully in Afghanistan), it would go after Iraq, when al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, poles apart politically, were barely on speaking terms?
George Tenet is still wondering. He says the day after 9/11 Richard Perle, a high-flying administration hawk, met him in the White House and commented: "Iraq has to pay a price for what happened yesterday. They bear responsibility." Unfortunately, Perle was in Paris at that time. At the very least, Tenet has got his dates wrong. If Perle ever said that, he too was wrong. In the end, the US and their allies did a masterful job of bringing down the Taliban in Afghanistan and inflicted near-terminal wounds on the whole al-Qaeda organisation. Then, in screwing up in Iraq, it handed bin Laden a recruitment drive he could only have dreamed of.
TENET CAN, IT must be said, point to considerable evidence that the CIA was never as convinced as the White House about Iraq's supposed WMD capacity and the organisation, privately, was wholly dismissive of the suggestion that Iraq and al-Qaeda were in cahoots. But the critical word is "privately". Knowing what the mood was, Tenet kept quiet and stayed a team player. He knew Dick Cheney was gilding the lily when he announced that Saddam had WMD, but he stayed quiet. He sat behind (and provided information to) Colin Powell when he made that celebrated presentation to the UN. The information proved to be flawed and Powell was discredited around the world. Powell, not surprisingly, blamed Tenet. He in turn blamed subordinates and seems unprepared to accept the notion that he should take the rap for faulty intelligence.
Sometimes his approach beggars belief. In possession of reliable information two months before 9/11 that al- Qaeda was planning "a significant terrorist attack", he made a point of immediately telling Condoleezza Rice, then the national security advisor, and urging that the country "go on a war footing". Well, either Condi didn't pass on the information (highly unlikely), or she did and it was ignored. But Tenet heard no more about it and did and said nothing. This, despite the fact that he had a daily conversation with George Bush. He didn't tell the president, he said in a recent interview, because the president is not "the action officer". I'd say that came as a surprise to George Bush and every other occupant of the Oval Office.
Tenet's book, when you ignore the whingeing, self-serving and finger- pointing, does reveal interesting, if scary, aspects of the way in which the US government malfunctioned all over place when it came to Iraq. The neocons ran the war as they wanted it run. Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and his number two, Paul Wolfowitz (recently drummed out of the World Bank), took executive decisions that had not been properly cleared, never mind properly communicated. Sometimes, Tenet observes, it was easier to find out what the Iraqis were up to than the Americans.
GEORGE TENET, A son of Greek immigrants, came to the directorship of the CIA essentially because Bill Clinton's first choice, Anthony Lake, would have had difficulty with the confirmation process. Tenet had worked on Capital Hill and was uncontroversial. Very unusually, having been appointed by a Democrat, he was re-appointed by a Republican, in the person of George Bush, but he would seem to have been quite incapable of running a large organisation and ensuring that subordinates did exactly what they were told to do. "I am no Jack Welch," he admits, referring to the phenomenally successful boss of General Electric.
But it was his reluctance to speak out when it could have mattered that cost him his reputation. He operated on the accepted (by some) premise of political appointees that if you tell your bosses what they want to hear then you will hang on to your job. It didn't work for him, though. He was pushed out in 2004 with only the Presidential Medal of Freedom for camouflage. He is now Distinguished Professor of Diplomacy at Georgetown University in Washington.
Eoin McVey is a managing editor of The Irish Times
At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA By George Tenet, with Bill Harlow Harper Press, 549pp. £25