At The Center Of The Storm Part 19

Presidential overseas trips are especially likely times for self-inflicted crises to spring up. A huge press contingent and many staffers travel with the president-so many people that two 747s, Air Force One and its twin, are not big enough to handle them all. The White House staff spends too much time cooped up together, and they tend to get one another spun up with the latest tales of what they are hearing from back home. Meanwhile, the press contingent is hungry for any tidbits or insider bickering to report. In the hothouse environment of Air Force One an "us against them" att.i.tude often leads to badly thought through reactions.

As it turned out, I had some traveling to do of my own: a long-standing speaking engagement in Sun Valley, Idaho. This was at an event sponsored by Herbert Allen, whose investment banking company specializes in working with major figures in the entertainment, communications, and technology fields.

I made an hour-long off-the-cuff presentation in the Sun Valley Lodge's conference room about the state of the world as I saw it. It was my second appearance in front of this crowd; I enjoyed the informal banter in the subsequent question-and-answer period with the eclectic group of partic.i.p.ants.

At one point, one of the attendees, NBC anchorman Tom Brokaw, suggested that I should be making this same kind of presentation on national TV. In front of the a.s.sembled group, which included some of his compet.i.tors, he offered me an opportunity to do so on NBC.

"Yeah, Tom," I said, "it's always been my dream to be grilled by you on national TV."

"Well, George," he replied, "you know we are in Sun Valley, and they call this 'the place where dreams come true.'"

Tom earned a big laugh-but no interview.

In addition to offering a chance to speak to an influential group of people, the trip also provided me an opportunity to take a day or two off in a beautiful setting. After checking with our ethics attorneys and agreeing to pay her expenses, I was able to bring Stephanie along for what I hoped would be a relaxing couple of days. But there was to be no relaxation. Almost from the moment I arrived in Idaho, I'd been bombarded with calls from Washington about growing concerns regarding the State of the Union controversy. Now, rather than enjoying the mountain trails and streams, I found myself fielding a never-ending flow of phone calls from headquarters telling me of the latest sniping going on across the Potomac and now across the Atlantic.

Stephanie and I were staying in a room in the main lodge that was said to have once been occupied by Ernest Hemingway. Unlike "Papa" Hemingway, though, we had to take over the adjoining room as well for a "command post." That was standard procedure. Whenever I traveled, even to a garden spot like Sun Valley, a team of communicators would arrive ahead of me and set up an office with sophisticated satellite communications equipment, allowing me to be in touch with national command authorities and to receive highly cla.s.sified voice and data transmissions. The team would work in shifts to ensure that someone was always in touch with our headquarters back home. When taking trips with multiple stops, communications teams would have to leapfrog ahead of me, moving hundreds of pounds of equipment that would permit encrypted communications as soon as I stepped off the airplane at the next destination.

The communications this time were virtually nonstop. The cla.s.sified fax machine kept humming, spitting out news stories, briefing transcripts, and editorials-a barrage that made it crystal clear this story wasn't going away soon.

Finally, at one point I decided that I had had enough. I called Steve Hadley at the White House. "We need to put an end to this," I told him. As I had explained to Condi in my call to her a few weeks before, including the uranium language in the State of the Union speech had been a mistake. Now, I said, I had decided that I would issue a statement accepting responsibility for the Agency's shortcomings in allowing the uranium language to make it into the speech. I would stand up and take the hit. Obviously, the process for vetting the speech at the Agency had broken down. We had warned the White House about the lack of reliability of the a.s.sertion when we had gotten them to remove similar language from the president's October Cincinnati speech, and we should have gotten that language out of the SOTU as well. It was because of my failure to fully study the speech myself that I took responsibility. We owed it to the commander in chief, and we had failed him, and now, I told Hadley, was the time to own up to that.

Hadley candidly responded that the process had not worked well at the White House, either-and that they would stand up with us. "It will be shared responsibility, George," he told me. For that reason, I fully expected Condi Rice to publicly state that she joined me in accepting responsibility.

I wasn't just being magnanimous. Part of the fault truly was mine. The day before the State of the Union, I was at a Princ.i.p.als' meeting in the White House Situation Room, a place where it seemed I spent more time than in my own home in recent years. As the meeting broke up, several of us were handed copies of a draft of the forthcoming speech. I remember going back to headquarters and giving the draft to one of my special a.s.sistants, unread, and asking that it be put "into the system for review."

I gave it no further thought. As always, other crises were banging on the door, but I fully expected that if there were any problems with the State of the Union draft, someone would have come and alerted me. That's exactly what had happened with the Cincinnati speech the previous fall. On another occasion, involving the 2002 State of the Union speech, my chief of staff, John Moseman, and spokesman, Bill Harlow, intervened at the last moment to stop the president's speechwriters from including language about the number of terrorists believed to have been trained in Bin Ladin's camps in Afghanistan, a number that was tens of thousands beyond what we thought true. Moseman called the NSC staff and said, "Look, if the president goes out and says that and tomorrow media call us and ask if we agree with the number, Harlow is going to have to say no. The number was corrected at the last minute-so late that an advance text copy of the speech put out at a background briefing at the White House that evening still contained the unsupportable tally.

In early 2003, though, the same system and same people that had rescued the president from incorrect a.s.sertions in previous speeches failed to catch the troublesome language in the State of the Union. Later, in trying to find out why alarm bells hadn't gone off, I was told that Alan Foley, head of WINPAC, had focused on clearing the speech for "sources and methods," rather than for substance. In other words, as long as the language didn't give away any secrets about how the intelligence was collected, they didn't worry about whether we believed the a.s.sertions in the speech were accurate. That was a terrible mistake. Our job was never to clear solely for sources and methods, but also for substance. And the last time I looked, as good as the British intelligence service is-and it is very good-it does not work for the president of the United States.

On the morning after I talked with Steve Hadley, I called Washington, pulled Bill Harlow out of the morning staff meeting, and told him that I had decided to issue a statement taking our share of the blame for the mix-up. I gave him a sense of how I wanted the statement to go, and read him a few opening paragraphs I had scribbled on a yellow legal pad overnight, since I hadn't been able to sleep.

My instructions were clear: "I want this statement scrubbed carefully. It has to be as accurate as we can make it. Factual, clear, and no whining allowed." But more than just saying "we screwed up and we're sorry," I wanted to lay out to the extent possible what had happened. The statement also needed to be a roadmap and to convey the clear impression that we never believed the Niger story. Most important, I wanted to say that we regretted having let the president down and that I took personal responsibility.

My deputy, John McLaughlin, and Bill Harlow labored long and hard trying to construct a statement that would accomplish what we wanted and stand up to scrutiny. It was a painful process. They wrote version after version trying to get the language right, faxing drafts back and forth to me in Idaho and checking with all the appropriate players at CIA headquarters. Among the people they needed to consult was Alan Foley, a senior CIA official who had discussed and eventually cleared the language for the State of the Union with Bob Joseph, a senior NSC official. John and Bill wanted to ensure that they understood Foley's actions and position, but as it turned out, he was on an official trip to Australia. So there I was in Idaho, coordinating a statement with my staff in Washington while they were reaching out to a key player in Australia, and we were all looking for more incoming flak from the traveling White House in Africa.

Early in the process, I decided that I wanted to inject some perspective. Yes, it was a bad thing that some of the language drafted for the president's remarks didn't rise to the level of certainty that one would expect, but after all, we were talking about a tiny fraction of his speech. That's when Bill counted and found that we were talking about only "sixteen words"-a phrase that would take on a life of its own. Later some would allege that this handful of words was critical to the decision that led the nation to war. Contemporaneous evidence doesn't support that, but just try convincing people of that today.

A better case could be made that the "sixteen words" started an unintended war between the White House and CIA. That was certainly not our intention. If there was such a war, it was largely one-sided. Neither I nor my senior leadership ever considered ourselves at war with the vice president or anybody else.

At one point, Steve Hadley asked me to call Scooter Libby, the vice president's chief of staff, to discuss my forthcoming statement. I refused to do so. The statement was to be mine and no one else's. I've subsequently seen reports that Libby and Karl Rove debated what they would like to see in my statement. Perhaps so, but I was unaware of their views at the time.

Sometime between drafts one and seventeen of my "mea somewhat culpa," Bill Harlow was interrupted by a call from syndicated columnist Bob Novak. Novak said that two administration sources had told him that the real story on the Joe Wilson trip was that Wilson's wife worked for the Agency and was responsible for sending her husband. Bill struggled to convince Novak that he had been misinformed-and that it would be unwise to report Mrs. Wilson's name. He couldn't tell Novak that Valerie Wilson was undercover. Saying so over an open phone line itself would have been a security breach. Bill danced around the subject and asked Novak not to include her in the story. Several years and many court dates later, we know that the message apparently didn't get through, but Novak never told Bill that he was going to ignore his advice to leave Valerie's name out of his article.

I was amused to hear Novak subsequently say that he is confident that I must have been aware of his call at the time and that if I had only phoned him to tell him not to run the item, he would have complied. I was not aware of Novak's call. I was consumed with the "sixteen words" flap, wondering if in the next few days I would need to resign or would perhaps be fired. About two weeks after Novak's column appeared, CIA lawyers sent to the Justice Department a formal notification that cla.s.sified information may have been inappropriately leaked to the media. CIA lawyers had to make that kind of notification about once a week on average. I was informed after the fact that a "crimes report" had been submitted. I supported the action but had nothing to do with the decision. It's been suggested I ordered the action to get back at the White House for some reason. This is absurd. At the time we had no idea where the leak had come from but were obligated by law to report it to the proper authorities. I was angered that someone, whether intentionally or not, blew the cover of one or our officers and that they appeared to be implying that some desk-bound a.n.a.lyst at Langley was sending her husband on a boondoggle. This was never the case. Nor can we have outsiders determine who is legitimately undercover, ever-because it suits the politics of the moment. To do so is irresponsible and dangerous.

Even as we were drafting our statement taking responsibility, we were hearing from reporters that the sniping at us aboard Air Force One was intensifying. I told my staff to stay calm and not be taken in by one of the oldest reporter's tricks in the book: "Did you hear what they said about you?" Still, it was maddening that we were seeing no signs of that "shared responsibility" that I had been promised by Hadley. Reporters kept calling our press office with accounts from "senior administration officials" on Air Force One who continued to insist that the CIA's share of the fault was 100 percent.

Late on Thursday, July 10, I asked John McLaughlin to send a copy of the draft of my statement to Hadley. "Make clear to them, John," I instructed, "that we are sending the draft over for their information only. We were not soliciting their concurrence, and we are for d.a.m.n sure are not seeking their edits."

Around 2:00 A.M. A.M., Mountain Time, I was rousted from my bed by my special a.s.sistant, Scott Hopkins, to take a call from Condi Rice, who was somewhere in Africa.

Condi might have been responding to the draft of our statement I had sent to Hadley. He, no doubt, had forwarded it to Air Force One. Or maybe she was reacting to a CBS Evening News CBS Evening News report by Pentagon correspondent David Martin. According to sources, Martin said, CIA officials had warned the White House that the Niger reporting was "unreliable," but the White House had gone ahead with it anyway. Martin had the story only partly right. We had warned the White House against using the Niger uranium reports previously but had not done so with the State of the Union; still, a story like that was bound to spike the blood pressure on Air Force One. CIA seemed to be deflecting blame. Here was a perfect storm, with all the key players in different time zones and continents. report by Pentagon correspondent David Martin. According to sources, Martin said, CIA officials had warned the White House that the Niger reporting was "unreliable," but the White House had gone ahead with it anyway. Martin had the story only partly right. We had warned the White House against using the Niger uranium reports previously but had not done so with the State of the Union; still, a story like that was bound to spike the blood pressure on Air Force One. CIA seemed to be deflecting blame. Here was a perfect storm, with all the key players in different time zones and continents.

Early Friday morning, the CIA press office was suddenly inundated with calls from reporters looking for a reaction to a press briefing that had just taken place on board Air Force One about the Niger issue. En route to Entebbe, Uganda, Condi Rice had conducted an on-the-record press briefing of nearly an hour, during which time she was peppered with questions, mostly about that single sentence in the State of the Union speech. Soon wire stories began appearing quoting Condi as saying, "If the CIA, the Director of Central Intelligence, had said, take this out of the speech, it would have been gone, without question." The Reuters wire service carried a story headlined "White House Points at CIA over Iraq Uranium Charge."

In response to questions, Condi denied that she was blaming CIA and she stressed that the president still had confidence in me and the Agency. She was sure I would not "knowingly" have put false information in the speech, even though the line somehow got in there. That was hardly a ringing endors.e.m.e.nt, but the question itself was just as worrisome. When reporters start asking if the president still has confidence in you, you know you are in a world of trouble.

Later that morning, McLaughlin received a call from Hadley, who, despite our admonishments, had a few suggestions to offer to "improve" our draft. The opening paragraph of the draft, for example, was not as strong as I had wanted it to be with regard to our taking responsibility. I knew that Condi and Hadley would press us on taking the blame more directly. They did not disappoint us. I conceded a few points and strengthened that part, and was pleased that the administration was not focusing much on the latter portion of the statement, which for anyone who read it carefully, laid out a roadmap for arriving at the complete story. That portion was a neon sign that pointed to the fact that we were especially unhappy at having allowed the sixteen words to get into this speech, since we had previously expressed serious doubts about the reliability of the information and did not think that it was a reason to believe that Saddam was reconst.i.tuting his nuclear weapons program.

I guess we struck a nerve. Although I didn't know it at the time, it was revealed in Scooter Libby's trial in February 2007 that the draft of my statement was being pa.s.sed around the White House. Someone, whose handwriting reportedly resembled the vice president's or perhaps Steve Hadley's, wrote "unsatisfactory" on the draft. Also penciled in was a proposed change that we did not accept that would have rendered the press release factually incorrect. They wanted us to say that Niger was "just one" of the factors we relied on to make the nuclear reconst.i.tution case. In fact, we said it was "not one" of the factors.

Despite what some White House officials have subsequently said, I was anxious to get the statement out. The story had taken on a life of its own, and I didn't want to go through another weekend with more media speculation as to who said what to whom. I also didn't want to issue the statement late on a summer Friday night, a technique usually reserved in Washington for statements that officials want to bury. That was not the case with this statement. The only reason for getting it out there was so it would would get attention. get attention.

Even as we were preparing to release the statement, we began to hear from other precincts. Senator Pat Roberts, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a close confidant of the vice president's, told reporters that he was "disturbed by what appears to be extremely sloppy handling of the issue from the outset by the CIA." Roberts reportedly said that he was most concerned about "a campaign of press leaks by the CIA in an effort to discredit the president." To top things off, he accused me of failing to warn the president about any doubts at the Agency regarding the Niger information. The chairman convicted us of trying to discredit the president and of sloppy work-without ever once bothering to ask us the facts. I wondered at the time, "Where is he getting his information?"

All this sniping was going on while we were working to finalize the text of a statement in which we would take our "share" of the responsibility. Meanwhile Hadley called wanting to set up a conference call with Condi Rice to talk about the draft. Reluctantly, I agreed. There were four of us on the line-me in Sun Valley, Condi in Uganda, Hadley from the West Wing, and John McLaughlin holding down the fort at Langley.

I could tell by the tone of her voice that Condi was furious. I resisted asking why she had felt it necessary to hold an airborne press conference hours earlier hanging all the responsibility on me. I had an equal right to be angry, but that wasn't going to help get a statement out.

Finally, I told them that I was comfortable with my statement, and I asked John McLaughlin to tell Bill Harlow to send it out. As the call was wrapping up, someone expressed the hope that we could get this issue behind us. I still hadn't heard any sign of "shared responsibility" from the administration. "What are you going to do about Cincinnati?" I asked Condi. There was dead silence on the line. I reminded her that I had intervened to get similar language out of the Cincinnati speech, and yet it had found its way back into the State of the Union address. The conversation ended uncomfortably.

I felt a certain sense of relief once the decision was made to release the press statement. "We're finally free to take in some of this Idaho scenery," I told Stephanie when I got off the conference call. Soon thereafter, we got in an SUV driven by my security detail and headed through the mountains to a nearby lake for some much-needed relaxation-or as close as you can get to relaxation when you're DCI.

My staff used to joke about how I would claim, when going off on a rare vacation, that I wasn't going to give work a moment's thought, and then, before my car had left the Agency compound, I'd call in on my cell phone to see how things were going. Here in Idaho, it was no different. I was anxious to learn what the reaction was to the release of my statement. Unfortunately, though, none of our sophisticated cell phones seemed to work in the mountains of Idaho. My communications team was still in Sun Valley, so we decided to stop at a rustic roadside store in search of a pay phone-a place called the Smiley Creek Lodge, in Sawtooth City. Not exactly a major metropolis. It turned out the place had only one working pay phone, and four people waiting in line to use it.

One of my security team asked if I wanted him to tell those waiting that it was a national emergency so we could jump ahead of the queue. "That's all I need," I thought, "some guy flashing a badge to get me head-of-the-line privileges." I opted to wait for the folks ahead of us to complete their calls, although I did allow one of my security detail to take my place in line while I got a milkshake and fries. (I highly recommend both the next time you are in Sawtooth City.) When my turn for the phone came, I learned that the Agency press staff was swamped with incoming calls, but it was too soon to gauge how the story was playing.

When we finally got to the lake, Stephanie and I got in a two-person kayak and paddled around, taking in the majestic beauty of the nearby mountains. It was peaceful, quiet, and quite romantic-just Stephanie, me, and the other canoes with my security detail. Some of the beefier members of my security team almost swamped their kayaks.

On the way back to Sun Valley, we stopped at the Smiley Creek Lodge again to use the pay phone. By now, the predictable uproar was in full swing. All three network news programs had led with stories about my taking the blame for the now-famous sixteen words. Every major newspaper was covering this as well, and many speculated that my days as DCI were numbered as a result.

Early the next morning, a Sat.u.r.day, I was awakened in Sun Valley, this time not by Condi Rice but by a call from our then-sixteen-year-old son, John Michael, who had stayed behind at our home in Washington's Maryland suburbs. He was quite upset. "Dad," I can remember his saying, "there are a bunch of television camera crews out in front of our house. They are just standing on the neighbor's lawn with their cameras pointed at our house. What should I do?"

I tried to explain to him that this is what happens when you find yourself all over the front page. ("CIA Director Takes the Blame," the New York Times New York Times headline shouted that morning, I would later find out.) But my son thought a bunch of strangers "staking out" our house was a bit too much. headline shouted that morning, I would later find out.) But my son thought a bunch of strangers "staking out" our house was a bit too much.

"Dad, I'm going to go out there with my baseball bat and slug one of them," he said, full of a sixteen-year-old's bravado.

I was glad his mother was not on the line.

"No, John Michael, those cameramen are just doing their jobs." I reminded him that one of our closest family friends, George Romilly, whom he called "Uncle George," was a cameraman for ABC News. ABC News. Had he been on duty that morning, Uncle George might have had to stake me out just like the others. Had he been on duty that morning, Uncle George might have had to stake me out just like the others.

I called the security officer on duty in the bas.e.m.e.nt of our house and told him to slip our son out the rear door, across the yard of our back-door neighbor's, and have him wait on a nearby street, where Stephanie's brother, Nick, would pick him up. In the meantime, I asked CIA's very able deputy spokesman, Mark Mansfield, to race over to my house and chat up the TV crews.

"You guys are welcome to stay out here and stare at that house," Mark told them once he arrived. "But I thought you ought to know that Director Tenet is out of town. You could be in for a long, long wait."

"When will he be back?" they asked.

"Can't say-we never discuss his movements, for security reasons," Mark told them with a smile, as he wiped his brow to emphasize that the temperature was ninety degrees and certain to climb higher. "You guys could be in for a lot of overtime." Mark left, and shortly thereafter, the TV crews did, too. I returned, as previously scheduled, late that evening.

That same day, the White House sent around draft talking points for administration officials who would be interviewed on the Sunday talk shows the next day. My chief of staff, John Moseman, was stunned to see that the talking points still tried to justify their including the "sixteen words" in the State of the Union speech. John called the NSC staff and told them they were nuts to keep beating that dead horse. He suggested they just take my statement from the day before and stick with it. Those words should never have been in the president's speech. Period.

I took some comfort in a small article buried in the New York Times New York Times on the day after I returned to Washington from Idaho. The article reported that, at CIA's behest, the White House had removed any mention of African uranium from the Cincinnati speech in 2002. I was especially pleased that the reporter attributed this fact to "Administration officials involved in drafting the speech." This had to have come from the White House. Perhaps they were about to step up and admit some error, too. on the day after I returned to Washington from Idaho. The article reported that, at CIA's behest, the White House had removed any mention of African uranium from the Cincinnati speech in 2002. I was especially pleased that the reporter attributed this fact to "Administration officials involved in drafting the speech." This had to have come from the White House. Perhaps they were about to step up and admit some error, too.

On Sunday, July 13, I got a call from Secretary of State Colin Powell asking me to come over to his home. I was just back from Sun Valley; Colin was just back from the African trip along with Condi, the president, and others. Together, we drank lemonade on his back patio. Colin, it turned out, had been asked by the president to deliver a message to me.

"Keep your building quiet," he said. Washington is the only place in the world where buildings are believed to speak. What he meant was that I was somehow supposed to get the thousands of Agency employees to quit responding when officials in the administration took rhetorical shots at them, deserved or not.

Colin also wanted to give me some of the atmospherics from Air Force One. There had been a lively debate among staffers on the aircraft and back in Washington, he said, about whether to continue to support me. In the end, the president said yes, and said so publicly. But Colin let me know that other officials, particularly the vice president, had quite another view.

Reactions to my "mea culpa" continued to pour in, and not just from the media. My old boss and mentor, Senator David Boren, now president of the University of Oklahoma, was livid. He sent word that he was very disappointed that I had not consulted with him personally before issuing the statement. Had I done so, he insisted, he never would have agreed with the wisdom of my accepting blame for the incident. He had been after me to resign from the Agency for some time. If I left now, however, everyone would believe I had been fired. "You're stuck," he said.

While my staff continued researching what had gone wrong with the State of the Union process and what had gone right with the Cincinnati speech, the "who screwed up?" stories percolated day after day, fed by a White House spin machine that kept trying to find ways to turn the issue to its favor.

During the middle of the week, NSC officials called asking us to decla.s.sify just a couple of paragraphs from page twenty-four of the NIE dealing with uranium from Africa. The person responsible for handling the request at the Agency refused to do it. "It's misleading," he explained to John Moseman. "Put out those two paragraphs and you imply that the Niger stuff was a major part of our thinking. It wasn't. We did not even cite the reports as among the reasons we thought Saddam was reconst.i.tuting his nuclear weapons program."

Moseman told the NSC we wouldn't do it. On July 17, a written request came in asking that we decla.s.sify the reasons why we thought Saddam was pursuing nuclear weapons. That was followed the next day by another written request that we decla.s.sify the NIE's "Key Judgments" and the paragraphs concerning yellowcake from page twenty-four. Both requests were signed by Condi Rice. Although less than an ideal solution, it was better than decla.s.sifying the Niger stuff alone. We complied.

In fact, it was a few years later that we learned through court papers and the media that, much earlier, the White House had apparently decla.s.sified parts of the NIE without telling us. Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald said in a court filing on April 5, 2006, that "[Libby] testified (before the Grand Jury) that the Vice President later advised him that the President had authorized [Libby] to disclose the relevant portions of the NIE." From the court doc.u.ments, it is clear that these briefings occurred on or before July 12, 2003.

I now believe that one of the reasons some people in the White House were unhappy with my "mea culpa" statement was that the details in it might lead some of the journalists who received background briefings on the NIE-without our knowledge-to discover that they had been misled regarding the importance we attached to intelligence reports alleging that Iraq had vigorously pursued yellowcake in Niger. My statement made clear that we put little stock in that reporting and we did not rely on it for our judgment regarding whether Iraq was reconst.i.tuting its nuclear weapons program.

On the afternoon of Friday, July 18, two senior White House officials held a lengthy background briefing during which they discussed the situation with the media. At the start of the briefing they released to the press the Key Judgments and the Niger paragraphs from the NIE, both of which we had decla.s.sified that morning. Their intent was obvious: they wanted to demonstrate that the intelligence community had given the administration and Congress every reason to believe that Saddam had a robust WMD program that was growing in seriousness every day.

The briefers were questioned about press accounts saying that the White House had taken references to Niger out of the Cincinnati speech at CIA's request. Why then, did they insert them again in the State of the Union? The senior officials said that the material that was taken out of the first speech was quite different from the material the president used before Congress. That simply wasn't so. It was not clear to me then, nor is it clear now, whether they even understood the facts, but it was clear that the entire briefing was intended to convince the press corps that the White House staff was an innocent victim of bad work by the intelligence community. Here, again, was the familiar mantra: the intelligence community made us do it. Apparently, I was expected to go along with the notion that only only we had screwed up. In any event, instead of spiking the sixteen-words story, the briefing just gave it more life. More stories about "what the White House knew and when they knew it" kept rolling out all weekend long. we had screwed up. In any event, instead of spiking the sixteen-words story, the briefing just gave it more life. More stories about "what the White House knew and when they knew it" kept rolling out all weekend long.

Just before six o'clock on Monday morning, July 22, the MLP secure telephone rang in the command post in the bas.e.m.e.nt of my home. One of the security officers on duty buzzed me on the intercom. Condi Rice wanted to talk to me. I wearily dragged myself downstairs to take the call. I had the impression that Condi was already at work. She told me that the administration had decided that this was the day that the White House would accept their share of responsibility. Finally.

"Don't do anything until I can talk to you," I said. "I want to make sure you've seen all the same material I have."

Later that morning I went to the White House as usual for the president's daily intelligence briefing. I brought with me two memos that my staff had recently dug up-memos we had sent the White House in October 2002 explaining in detail why the president should not cite the yellowcake information in his Cincinnati speech. Condi had told me earlier that she wouldn't be available that morning-she was traveling-so I went to see Steve Hadley before the briefing and handed him copies of the memos. As he read them, I could see his face go ashen.

We didn't have time for a lengthy discussion about the memos' content-the briefing was about to begin-but I had brought along a second set of the same memos to show the president's chief of staff, Andy Card, someone whom I admired and respected greatly. Just before the PDB got under way, I asked Andy if I could see him privately in his office once we were finished. "Sure," he said, "go down there and wait; there are a few things I need to discuss with the boss first." As I recall, the vice president and Hadley also stayed behind when the briefing was over.

Afterward, I waited in Andy's office for what seemed like an hour, a highly unusual circ.u.mstance. When he finally showed up, I handed him copies of the two memos.

"Andy," I told him, "some folks here still don't get it. Not only did I personally call Steve Hadley last October and demand he remove the yellowcake stuff from the Cincinnati speech, but my staff sent two, count 'em, two follow-up memos to make sure the NSC got the point."

Apparently, Andy had already been acquainted with the memos while I was cooling my heels waiting for him in his office. He told me that he just learned that Hadley, Rice, and the chief speechwriter, Michael Gerson, had read the memos when they were received in October. All three must have known from the memos that our objections to the Niger information were much broader than was alluded to in the background briefing at the White House the previous Friday.

"Why are you giving me these memos only now?" Andy asked. He looked stunned.

"I wanted to double-check on my end to make sure that not only did we write the memos, but that they were received as well. I had my staff confirm with the folks who keep the secure fax machine logs that the memos were in fact sent and received," I said.

Just to remove any doubt, I pa.s.sed Andy a slip of paper indicating the precise times each memo had arrived at the White House Situation Room.

"Besides," I said, "I presumed you were doing the same thing around here-looking for the facts. If I have the memos, surely your staff gave them to you, too, didn't they?"

Andy shook his head and simply said, "I haven't been told the truth."

Days later my staff was still digging through our files, trying to come up with a better understanding of the history of CIA's involvement with attempts to get the yellowcake information out of presidential speeches. That's when my executive a.s.sistant found a copy of draft remarks for a September 2002 speech, dated several weeks before the Cincinnati speech brouhaha. The White House staff had sent us some comments planned for use by the president in a Rose Garden event scheduled for September 26, 2002, following a meeting with congressional leaders. In the draft were these words:

We also have intelligence that Iraq has sought large amounts of uranium and uranium oxide, known as yellowcake, from Africa. Yellowcake is an essential ingredient of the process to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons. With fissile material, we believe Iraq could build a nuclear bomb within one year.

A footnote in the draft, typed in by the White House speechwriters, noted that the NSC and CIA were debating these three sentences. Apparently, we had earlier raised our concerns and were trying to persuade them to drop that segment of the speech. One of my a.s.sistants later marked the three sentences for deletion and penned in a note that read:

9-24-02 (8 PM)Rice proposed simply removing the bracketed text. Jami concurred.

I don't believe that this earliest attempt to get the yellowcake information in the president's mouth has ever been publicly mentioned before. Why do so here? What's the significance of this nonevent? Either people overwhelmed with data and meetings had simply forgotten, or, for the White House speechwriters, the third time was the charm.

On the afternoon of July 22, the same day I gave Andy Card copies of the memos regarding the Cincinnati speech, Steve Hadley and Dan Bartlett were again in the White House press room. This time they were "on the record." The single-subject briefing lasted for one hour and twenty-three minutes. Hadley admitted having been reminded just that morning of our two October memos, which described weakness in the Niger uranium evidence and the fact that Iraq's effort to procure the yellowcake was not particularly significant to its nuclear ambitions because the Iraqis already had in inventory a large stock, 550 tons, of uranium oxide. Hadley said that "the memorandum also stated that the CIA had been telling Congress that the Africa story was one of two issues where we differed with the British intelligence." He said that the memo was received by the Situation Room and sent to both Dr. Rice and himself. One reporter asked Bartlett if they were saying that the mess was not George Tenet's fault as had been said the week before. Bartlett ducked the question. That, I suppose, is what the White House meant when it promised to "share" the blame.

Only sixteen days had elapsed since Joe Wilson's Op-Ed piece about the sixteen words appeared in the New York Times New York Times. In that brief period, my relationship with the administration was forever changed.

CHAPTER 25

Going

At some point in a job like mine, you just give out. You've been going on adrenaline for so long. The relentless pressure and middle-of-the-night phone calls take their toll. The work matters enormously, and it's never over. But the family time lost, the high school lacrosse games missed, the vacations cut short or not taken-they all add up. And then something comes along, some essential trigger, and that's it. You know you've hit the wall.

I had just about reached that point when the sixteen-words flap broke out. Internecine warfare and finger-pointing are inside-the-Beltway intramural sports, but this time the pushing, shoving, and back-biting seemed to have been taken to an Olympic level.

A few months earlier, in May 2003, Senator David Boren had asked me to come to the University of Oklahoma to deliver the commencement address. That afternoon, following the graduation, David and his wife, Molly, took Stephanie and me out to the site of the new house they were preparing to build. There, on a hill in the middle of a field, David once again argued vehemently that it was time for me to resign. I had put in my time, served under two presidents, and weathered 9/11, David said. No one could ask for more from a DCI. It was best to go out on a high note. I know of no more astute observer of the ebb and flow of politics than David, and I listened carefully to him. Back in Washington after that trip, I told Andy Card that I was considering stepping down, but I hadn't fully made up my mind.

During this time, I learned that the administration was talking with Jim Langdon, chairman of the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, about taking my job. Whether that was as a result of my conversation with Andy Card or an independent initiative, I have no idea. But beyond that, I heard very little until that September, when the president asked me to come in early one morning in advance of the daily briefing.

Alone in the Oval Office, George Bush looked at me and said, "I really need you to stay." It wasn't a long conversation, and under the circ.u.mstances, with a war still going on in Iraq and the fight against terrorism still raging in Afghanistan and around the world, it would have been hard to say no to the president.

At a personal level, yes, I was probably ready to go. The most important reason to leave was my son, then a soph.o.m.ore in high school. The job was toughest on him, and the public pounding I was taking did not help. I was worn out, but the CIA had men and women committed on many fronts. Leaving them or the rest of the Agency workforce in the middle of that would have been difficult. We'd worked too hard together, put in too many long hours, and accomplished too much. I felt an enormous obligation to them; they had become family to me. n.o.body is indispensable, yet I also knew there was so much more to be done. And in truth, while catching Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had been big, I wanted to be at the helm when Usama bin Ladin was brought to justice.

Almost as important in my mind were the 9/11 Commission hearings looming on the horizon. You didn't need a pitch-perfect ear to know that they would be contentious and politically charged. I was going to be called to testify whether I was still DCI or not, but the Agency was sure to be thrown into turmoil by the hearings. I couldn't in good conscience leave that mess waiting for whoever my successor might be.

So I settled back into the DCI's chair, continued to put in the long hours, and did everything I could to keep morale high at an Agency that was being stretched perilously thin by Afghanistan, Iraq, and the global war on terror. As I had been doing for years, I also worried day and night about what al-Qa'ida and other like-minded groups might next have in store for us.