State of War

The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration

James Risen

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9781416526216
• eBook ISBN: 9781847375117
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

With relentless media coverage, breathtaking events, and extraordinary congressional and independent investigations, it is hard to believe that we might not know some of the most significant facts about the presidency of George W. Bush. Yet beneath the surface events of the Bush presidency lies a secret history -- a series of hidden events that makes a mockery of many of the stories on the surface. This hidden history involves domestic spying, abuses of power, and outrageous operations. It includes a CIA that became caught in a political crossfire it could not withstand, even against the wishes of the commander-in-chief. It features a president who created a sphere of deniability, in which his top aides were briefed on matters of the utmost sensitivity -- but the president was carefully kept in ignorance. STATE OF WAR reveals this hidden history for the first time, including scandals that will redefine the Bush presidency.

1 “WHO AUTHORIZED PUTTING HIM ON PAIN MEDICATION?”

BY THE EARLY SPRING of 2002, George Tenet had developed an extraordinarily close and complicated relationship with George W. Bush, perhaps the nearest thing to a genuine friendship that has ever developed between a CIA director and the president he served. It was a relationship in which George Tenet started out as the aggressive suitor, but the imbalance in power between the two men inevitably meant that Tenet ended up as the one seduced.

Bush found in Tenet not just a fellow jock—Tenet is a true expert on college basketball and an ardent fan of Georgetown University, his alma mater—but a streetwise, tough-talking Greek kid from Queens, an image enhanced by his nasty habit of swilling chopped cigars around his mouth as he speaks. Tenet struck a chord with a president who once owned the Texas Rangers and who revels in jocular banter. The president prizes plain speaking above almost all else; Tenet gave it to him. Unlike Bush, Tenet was overweight and in poor physical shape, and suffered heart problems at an early age during the Clinton years. Still, Tenet was a gruff battler, spending time exercising and playing pickup basketball with other CIA employees, which had to appeal to the fitness freak in Bush.

As a successful former Senate and White House staffer, Tenet was a master at managing individual relationships with older and more powerful men. Finding ways to please one powerful man was the path to success in the hothouse culture of Capitol Hill. Tenet had also transferred to Washington an ethnic Greek sense of the importance of relationships. For Tenet, public policy could always be broken down into a series of personal transactions.

At the same time, at least a few who worked closely with Tenet didn’t necessarily believe that his ability to co-opt powerful men was a good thing, and it was a trait that eventually wore out its welcome. By the end of the Clinton years, Tenet was quite popular with the CIA rank and file; he was seen as the man who had led them out of the wilderness of the bleak Deutch years. He also engendered fierce and lasting loyalty among some of his top lieutenants. Yet there were at least a few at the CIA and the White House who had gradually discovered another side to Tenet’s personality. In public, Tenet struck a pose as an honest broker of intelligence; in private, he was sometimes seen as someone who would tell people what they wanted to hear but would later say the opposite to others. At least a few insiders at the CIA and White House found it frustrating whenever they tried to get a fix on him. Tenet seemed to these insiders to be extremely adaptable, and while that was to be expected in a politician, it was a little bit unsettling in the man charged with running the U.S. intelligence community.

Some of Tenet’s aides were convinced that if Al Gore won the election, Tenet would not be one of the Clinton people kept on in the new Gore administration. But Al Gore did not win, so to keep his job, all Tenet had to do was to make a good first impression on one man, George W. Bush, and he was a master at that. For Tenet, managing George Bush was not that much different from managing Senator David Boren, Tony Lake, or John Deutch, Tenet’s previous bosses. First, you find out what they want, and then you make sure you are the one who gives it to them.

Longtime Tenet watchers knew that if he had enough time alone with Bush, he would win him over. At the CIA, the word soon spread that Tenet had “case officered” the new president, a high compliment within the spy world. Bush even tagged Tenet with an insider nickname—“Jorge”—a sign that the rumpled and affable CIA director had been accepted at the Bush White House.

Yet Tenet only narrowly survived the Clinton-Bush transition. In fact, Bush had nearly dumped Tenet, who was initially seen among Bush aides as a Clinton holdover with no particular political standing. He was kept on only at the last minute, only when Bush’s father urged his son to do so, and only when there was no other obvious candidate to fill the job. The Bush transition team had at first envisioned Donald Rumsfeld as the new director of central intelligence. Dick Cheney’s old mentor during the Nixon and Ford days, Rumsfeld had recently chaired two commissions: one on the ballistic missile threat facing the United States and the other on the military and intelligence uses of space. Both panels had become deeply involved in reviewing the performance of the intelligence community during the 1990s. Rumsfeld came away from those commissions convinced that the CIA was broken, and he seemed intrigued by the job of fixing it.

But the Pentagon opened up instead. After a personal meeting, Bush had soured on the leading candidate for secretary of defense, former Senator Dan Coats of Indiana. Suddenly, the idea of having Rumsfeld, a headstrong executive with few doubts about his own managerial abilities, return to the job that he had held briefly during the Ford administration, seemed appealing, both to Cheney and Rumsfeld. Some Bush administration officials believed that Cheney wanted a strong figure like Rumsfeld at the Pentagon to provide a counterbalance to the power and influence he expected to be exerted by Colin Powell, who was poised to become secretary of state. Richard Armitage, a close friend of Powell’s, had been slated to be Coats’s number two at Defense, and the idea of having Powell at State and Armitage at the Pentagon seemed to worry Cheney. He feared that Powell and his camp would have the whole administration wired. Armitage ended up as Powell’s deputy at State instead.

Shifting Rumsfeld to the Pentagon meant that the CIA post was still up in the air. But even with Rumsfeld out of the picture, Tenet still didn’t have a lock on keeping his job, at least in part because of the man handling intelligence issues for the Bush transition team. Richard Haver, a former naval intelligence officer with strong Republican ties—he had worked as Cheney’s intelligence aide at the Pentagon in the first Bush administration—was running the CIA transition team for the younger Bush, and he was no fan of George Tenet. During the transition, Haver made it clear to Cheney that he believed that the new administration should get rid of Tenet. Haver had built his reputation as a key player in some of the navy’s riskiest and most secretive Cold War intelligence operations, most notably the use of submarines to tap into Soviet navy communications cables off the Soviet Union’s coast, and he had become a leading critic of Tenet and the culture of risk aversion that he believed Tenet had allowed to fester at the post–Cold War CIA. Haver believed Tenet was too weak and too political to be DCI.

For Haver, Tenet was the embodiment of everything wrong with the Clinton administration’s feckless and misguided approach to national security. Other leading Republicans agreed. Senator Richard Shelby, the Alabama Republican who was chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee at the time, had developed into a painfully public critic of Tenet, and he couldn’t help wondering why Bush was even considering keeping Tenet on. Bush never asked Shelby for his advice on the matter, however.

A number of CIA officials believed that Haver was not an impartial observer and that he was interested in the job for himself. That was a prospect that many at the CIA dreaded, since his dislike for the agency was well known and went far beyond his personal distaste for George Tenet. As an outsider to the CIA culture, Haver had been brought in to lead the agency’s damage assessment of the Aldrich Ames spy case, and he had spared no one in his scathing criticism of the way in which the CIA allowed Ames to operate freely for the nine years prior to the Soviet mole’s 1994 arrest.

When Haver told Cheney that they should dump Tenet, he phrased his recommendation indirectly. He said that Tenet had been ignored during the Clinton years, and that the Bush administration should not have a DCI who is ignored by the president. Cheney understood his meaning and didn’t argue with Haver’s assessment of Tenet. But he told Haver that the decision was out of his hands. It was up to the president-elect, and Bush was talking to his father about it.

It now seems clear that George H. W. Bush saved George Tenet’s job. George W. Bush’s father counseled his son that he should keep the CIA out of the political cycle, that the CIA director’s job shouldn’t change hands each time a new administration came in. The elder Bush had served as CIA director for one year under Gerald Ford, prior to Ford’s defeat in the 1976 election. Bush had then appealed to Jimmy Carter to keep him on at the CIA under the new administration. But Carter had rejected the idea and replaced Bush with his own man, Stansfield Turner. That old slight still rankled with Bush senior, who felt it was important to signal that the CIA was free from politics. That meant keeping Tenet.

“I think it was the father,” said one former Tenet aide, referring to Bush Sr.’s role. “I’ve been told that Bush talked to his father, and his father told him that you have plenty of other things to worry about, and you can leave him there for a while, and that’s what he thought Carter should have done for him—take it out of the direct election process. But I don’t think he thought he needed to keep him forever.”

It also didn’t hurt that Tenet had been ingratiating himself with the elder Bush for the last several years, perhaps anticipating a Bush family restoration. He had presided over the 1999 ceremony renaming CIA headquarters the George Bush Center for Intelligence. He had arranged, later that same year, for the CIA to sponsor a Cold War history conference at the George Bush Presidential Library, featuring speakers from the first Bush administration. More quietly, he had also arranged a series of classified intelligence briefings for the former president, including some in Houston, Bush’s hometown, during the later stages of the Clinton administration. Former presidents are entitled to such CIA briefings, but some CIA insiders wondered whether the briefings given the elder Bush went beyond the normal practice.

Tenet’s allies lobbied for him as well. David Boren, the president of the University of Oklahoma and a former Democratic senator from Oklahoma, who had been the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee when Tenet was its staff director, was Tenet’s most important mentor. Like both Bushes, Boren was a Yale graduate (Class of 1963) and a member of Skull and Bones, the elitist secret Yale society that George W. Bush (Class of 1968) joined a few years later. Boren was said by other Tenet allies to have strongly recommended Tenet to Bush.

One outside friend of Tenet knew the Bush family. Over breakfast in December 1999, he tried to convince the Texas governor that he and Tenet were a lot alike, that they talked the same and swore the same, and that they would get along if Bush gave Tenet a chance.

During the abbreviated transition, Tenet’s personal intelligence briefings for the president-elect went well, and the younger Bush seemed impressed. Finally, at the end of one briefing in mid-January 2001, just before the inauguration, Bush asked everyone except Tenet to leave the room. Alone, he told Tenet he would like him to stay on as CIA director, at least for a while. He would decide later how their relationship was developing. Bush added that he hoped it would work out.

Within the Bush transition team, this decision was seen as something of a setback for Cheney and his conservative foreign policy camp, which was still coalescing around the vice president’s office and had not yet turned the Pentagon into a sanctuary. Days later, Haver ran into Tenet’s friend in Washington and admitted defeat. “Congratulations, you guys won.” Instead of CIA director, Haver became Rumsfeld’s special assistant on intelligence at the Pentagon, the same job he had held under Cheney a decade earlier. Haver’s presence in the Office of the Secretary of Defense did not bode well for the future of Pentagon-CIA relations.

When Bush decided to keep Tenet, he made his decision public in the most offhand way possible. Four days before Bush’s inauguration, Ari Fleischer, the transition spokesman who was about to become White House press secretary, simply told a reporter in response to a question in a press briefing that Tenet was staying at the CIA for the foreseeable future. “Director Tenet has been asked to stay on the job for what will amount to an undetermined period of time,” Fleischer said, “but he has been asked to stay on.” Bush made no announcement himself. It was clear that Tenet was in the job at the sufferance of the White House and could be tossed at any moment.

Tenet quickly made the most of the opportunity. Bush decided to resume the daily intelligence briefings that Clinton had abandoned, and Tenet, at Bush’s urging, attended them himself each day. That was a significant break from tradition; past CIA directors had allowed agency analysts to handle the briefings themselves. No other CIA director had ever scheduled himself to meet with the president every single morning to discuss the day’s intelligence. By contrast, Clinton had completely abandoned his morning CIA briefing and simply read the written President’s Daily Brief instead. But with Bush, Tenet went to the White House each morning, accompanied by a senior analyst who would provide the president with the regular daily briefing. Tenet would then talk with Bush personally about the most sensitive issues of the day.

Tenet prized his time with Bush, and it quickly paid off. After a morning intelligence briefing not long into the new administration, Bush told Tenet that he wanted him to stay. Let’s keep this going, Bush told Tenet. It’s working out. Tenet’s closest and most loyal aides were soon bragging that Tenet had spent more time with Bush in just a few short months than he had spent with Clinton during his entire time in office.

Tenet kept his job despite some signs that the new national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice, was wary of him, just as some on the Clinton NSC staff had been before. Rice had a strong bullshit detector, and, according to former aides, that meant that she seemed on guard with Tenet. Some of Tenet’s allies suspected, on the other hand, that Rice was jealous of Tenet’s personal time with Bush; she wanted to be the ultimate gatekeeper. Much later in Bush’s first term, their dislike became open and mutual. Tenet and many of his lieutenants came to believe that Rice was not an honest broker between the CIA and the president.

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September 11 and its aftermath brought a unique dimension to the Bush-Tenet partnership. It was now forged in fire. After the attacks, Bush had to rely heavily on Tenet because he was the only person in the administration’s inner circle who knew anything about Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, particularly after White House counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke was shunted to the sidelines.

The U.S. military knew next to nothing about Afghanistan and was unprepared for war there. (The air force didn’t even have updated maps of the country for its pilots, who in desperation turned to old Russian maps to help plot their missions.) By contrast, the CIA had a long history in Afghanistan, dating back to the covert action program in support of the Afghan rebels fighting the Soviet army in the 1980s. In the years just before 9/11, agency officers had also resumed intermittent contact with one of the old mujahideen leaders, Ahmed Masooud, the leader of the rebel Northern Alliance fighting the Taliban. Before 9/11, the CIA had talked, in vain, with Masooud about helping the Americans capture bin Laden. The CIA also had paid assets among certain tribes in southeastern Afghanistan who had been gathering intelligence about bin Laden’s whereabouts. Bin Laden arranged to have Masooud murdered two days before the September 11 attacks, but the CIA still had enough contacts to lead the way into Afghanistan to battle al Qaeda and the Taliban that fall. Rumsfeld, the ultimate turf warrior, was deeply embarrassed that CIA officers were on the ground first, before the U.S. military, and that they were on hand to welcome Special Forces troops as they arrived in the country.

During those frantic days and weeks, Tenet was constantly at Bush’s side. The tentative nature of their pre-9/11 relationship seemed long forgotten. In the weeks and months after September 11, Bush also came to Tenet’s defense when questions about the CIA’s performance before 9/11 began to emerge. Bush deflected critics of the CIA and refused to consider dismissing Tenet when the public began to wonder why no one was being held accountable for 9/11. “George and I have been spending a lot of quality time together,” Bush told a crowd of CIA employees in late September 2001, the Washington Times reported the next day. “There’s a reason. I’ve got a lot of confidence in him, and I’ve got a lot of confidence in the CIA.”

In private that fall and winter, Tenet was extremely defensive about his agency’s handling of terrorism and al Qaeda prior to 9/11. He denied that September 11 represented an intelligence failure. He had been CIA director since al Qaeda first became a major problem for the United States in the 1990s, and he seemed to view criticism on the issue as a personal attack. He and his aides insisted that they had provided adequate warning that al Qaeda was planning a major attack, and that that was as much as anyone could expect. Once the terrorists were inside the United States, Tenet and his aides liked to say, they had become an FBI problem. “We don’t do America” was a line that began to come out of the seventh-floor executive suites at CIA headquarters. Tenet and his aides refused to accept the parallels between September 11 and Pearl Harbor, when the commander of the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Fleet was relieved of command. They also grew increasingly angry as leading members of Congress began pushing for an investigation of the intelligence community’s performance before September 11.

Tenet could never have maintained his defensive crouch if Bush had not provided him cover. Tenet was now in Bush’s debt twice over: once for keeping him on after the election and again for protecting him after 9/11. By early 2002, Tenet’s fortunes had become inextricably linked to those of Bush. That was also the period when the warmth of the Bush-Tenet relationship peaked. The sense of having shared a searing experience was still fresh and had not yet been dissipated by tensions over intelligence on Iraq. “George Tenet was too close to the president,” one of Tenet’s top lieutenants later acknowledged. “You shouldn’t be the president’s friend.” At that moment, George Tenet was willing to do many things for George W. Bush.

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In late March 2002, the National Security Agency obtained communications intercepts that indicated that Abu Zubaydah, a key lieutenant of Osama bin Laden, was hiding in Faisalabad, Pakistan, southwest of Lahore. Like most of al Qaeda’s senior leadership, Zubaydah had fled Afghanistan as the Taliban government fell. He was now being harbored by local Islamic extremists. Some top al Qaeda leaders had made their way west to Iran after the ouster of the Taliban, but a large number, including Osama bin Laden, went south to Pakistan. Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, his top deputy, found safe haven in the remote, mountainous tribal region along the Pakistani side of the Afghan-Pakistan border, but others, including Zubaydah, moved into Pakistan’s urban areas, where they became easier targets for American intelligence.

The information on Zubaydah’s location was precise enough to trigger late-night raids on several houses of suspected extremists in Faisalabad, conducted jointly by...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• A Note on Sources
• Prologue
• Chapter 1: “Who Authorized Putting Him on Pain Medication?”
• Chapter 2: The Program
• Chapter 3: Casus Belli
• Chapter 4: The Hunt for WMD
• Chapter 5: Skeptics and Zealots
• Chapter 6: Spinning War and Peace
• Chapter 7: Losing Afghanistan
• Chapter 8: In Denial: Oil, Terrorism, and Saudi Arabia
• Chapter 9: A Rogue Operation
• Afterword
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Index
• Copyright