Volume 54, Number 12 · July 19, 2007
What Tenet Knew
By Thomas Powers
At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA
by George Tenet with Bill Harlow
HarperCollins, 549 pp., $30.00
How we got into Iraq is the great open question of the decade but George Tenet in his memoir of his seven years running the Central Intelligence Agency takes his sweet time working his way around to it. He hesitates because he has much to explain: the claims made by Tenet's CIA with 'high confidence' that Iraq was dangerously armed all proved false. But mistakes are one thing, excusable even when serious; inexcusable would be charges of collusion in deceiving Congress and the public to make war possible. Tenet's overriding goal in his carefully written book is to deny 'that we somehow cooked the books' about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. If he says it once he says it a dozen times. 'We told the president what we did on Iraq WMD because we believed it.'
Review, 7300 words
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