Tenet claims CIA was a scapegoat for war

Agency warned of anarchy and instability
As a consequence, Tenet contends, the administration rushed headlong into a war that he and his aides at the CIA had warned could lead to disaster.

In September 2002, the CIA contributed a section to a briefing book for policy-makers. It included a CIA paper outlining plans for dealing with the “negative consequences” of invading Iraq.

The paper laid out a series of worst-case scenarios:

• Anarchy and the territorial breakup of Iraq.
• Region-threatening instability in key Arab states.
• A surge of global terrorism against U.S. interests fueled by militant Islamism.
• Disruption of major oil supplies and severe strains on the Atlantic alliance.

Later, in January 2003, two months before the war, the CIA produced another paper with detailed warnings that, in hindsight, were eerily accurate. 

It forecast violent conflict among domestic groups and formation of an alliance of former members of Saddam’s regime who would be able to fight a deadly guerrilla war. It predicted that Islamist extremists would gain traction among the population. And it warned that anti-U.S. sentiment would fuel militants’ popularity and deadliness.

What went wrong with the intelligence
Tenet devotes a long passage to explaining the most famous CIA document cited in the buildup to the war, the National Intelligence Estimate of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, which turned out to be largely inaccurate.

From the beginning, Tenet writes, his chief non-proliferation analyst, Bob Walpole, was less than enthusiastic about the task at hand. According to Tenet, Walpole said: “I just don’t believe in this war. Some wars are justifiable. This one is not.”

In the final analysis, Saddam’s deceptions bamboozled the entire intelligence community, Tenet concludes. “We got it wrong because the truth was so implausible,” he writes.

In his interrogation, Saddam disclosed that he had two audiences, the United Nations and Iran, Tenet writes. Saddam hoped to deter Iranian aggression by fooling it into believing that he had weapons of mass destruction.

Specifically, Tenet notes that aluminum tubes that the CIA initially concluded were centrifuges for uranium enrichment later turned out to be nothing more than artillery tubes.

Moreover, a key section of analysts’ judgments was too assertive, conveying an air of certainty that did not exist in the rest of the paper, he writes.

To compound the error, an unclassified version of the CIA estimate was merged with a previously commissioned white paper on Iraq’s weapons programs.

“Out went the ‘we assesses’ and what was released would leave bolder assertions like ‘Saddam has,’ ” Tenet writes. “The classified NIE already had too few cautionary ‘we judge’s’ in the Key Judgments section. Now with a few strokes of the keyboard, the unclassified paper — the only one most Americans would ever see — came out sounding too assertive.”

Tenet concludes that the agency should have explicitly warned policy-makers that there was little direct evidence that Saddam had any weapons stockpiled.

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