C.I.A. Chief Warned Rice on Al Qaeda

The New York Times
C.I.A. Chief Warned Rice on Al Qaeda
By PHILIP SHENON and MARK MAZZETTI


President Bush, Condoleezza Rice and George J. Tenet met after the Sept. 11 attacks. An earlier meeting by Ms. Rice and Mr. Tenet, who have long had a contentious relationship, is now the subject of dispute.

JIDDA, Saudi Arabia, Oct. 2 — A review of White House records has determined that George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, did brief Condoleezza Rice and other top officials on July 10, 2001, about the looming threat from Al Qaeda, a State Department spokesman said Monday.

The account by the spokesman, Sean McCormack, came hours after Ms. Rice, the secretary of state, told reporters aboard her airplane that she did not recall the specific meeting on July 10, noting that she had met repeatedly with Mr. Tenet that summer about terrorist threats. Ms. Rice, the national security adviser at the time, said it was “incomprehensible” to suggest she had ignored dire terrorist threats two months before the Sept. 11 attacks.

Mr. McCormack also said records showed that the Sept. 11 commission had been informed about the meeting, a fact that former intelligence officials and members of the commission confirmed on Monday.

When details of the meeting emerged last week in a new book by Bob Woodward of The Washington Post, Bush administration officials questioned Mr. Woodward’s reporting.

Now, after several days, both current and former Bush administration officials have confirmed parts of Mr. Woodward’s account.

Officials now agree that on July 10, 2001, Mr. Tenet and his counterterrorism deputy, J. Cofer Black, were so alarmed about intelligence pointing to an impending attack by Al Qaeda that they demanded an emergency meeting at the White House with Ms. Rice and her National Security Council staff.

According to two former intelligence officials, Mr. Tenet told those assembled at the White House about the growing body of intelligence the C.I.A. had collected suggesting an attack was in the works.

But both current and former officials, including allies of Mr. Tenet, took issue with Mr. Woodward’s account that he and his aides had left the meeting feeling that Ms. Rice had ignored them.

Earlier this week, some members of the Sept. 11 commission said they could not recall being told about a meeting like the one described by Mr. Woodward.

On Monday, officials said Mr. Tenet had told members of the commission about the July 10 meeting when they interviewed him in early 2004, but committee members said he never indicated he had left the White House with the impression that he had been ignored.

“Tenet never told us that he was brushed off,” said Richard Ben-Veniste, a Democratic member of the commission. “We certainly would have followed that up.”

Mr. McCormack said the records showed that far from ignoring Mr. Tenet’s warnings, Ms. Rice acted on the intelligence and requested that Mr. Tenet make the same presentation to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and John Ashcroft, then the attorney general.

But Mr. Ashcroft said by telephone on Monday evening that he never received a briefing that summer from Mr. Tenet.

“Frankly, I’m disappointed that I didn’t get that kind of briefing,” he said. “I’m surprised he didn’t think it was important enough to come by and tell me.”

Government investigations have shown that Mr. Ashcroft was briefed by other C.I.A. officials in the weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks.

The dispute that has played out in recent days gives further evidence of an escalating battle between the White House and Mr. Tenet over who should take the blame for the failure to stop the Sept. 11 attacks and assertions by Bush administration officials that Saddam Hussein was stockpiling chemical and biological weapons and cultivating ties to Al Qaeda.

Mr. Tenet resigned as director of central intelligence in the summer of 2004 and was honored that December with a Presidential Medal of Freedom at a White House ceremony. Since leaving the C.I.A., Mr. Tenet has stayed out of the public eye, largely declining to defend his record even after several government investigations assailed the faulty intelligence that helped build the case for the Iraq war.

Mr. Tenet is now completing work on a memoir that is scheduled to be published early next year. It is unclear how much he will use the book to settle old scores, although recent books have portrayed him both as dubious about the need to invade Iraq and angry that the White House has made the C.I.A. the primary scapegoat for the war.

In his book “The One Percent Doctrine,” the journalist and author Ron Suskind quotes Mr. Tenet’s former deputy at the C.I.A., John McLaughlin, as saying Mr. Tenet “wishes he could give that damn medal back.”

In his own book, Mr. Woodward wrote that over time Mr. Tenet developed a particular dislike for Ms. Rice, and that the former C.I.A. director was furious when she publicly blamed the agency for allowing President Bush to make the false claim in the 2003 State of the Union address that Mr. Hussein was pursuing nuclear materials in Niger.

“If the C.I.A., the director of central intelligence, had said, ‘Take this out of the speech,’ it would have been gone, without question,” Ms. Rice told reporters in July 2003.

In fact, the C.I.A. had told the White House months before that the intelligence about Niger was dubious, and had managed to keep the claim out of an October 2002 speech that Mr. Bush gave in Cincinnati.

More recently, Mr. Tenet has told friends he was particularly angry when, appearing recently on Sunday talk shows, both Ms. Rice and Vice President Dick Cheney cited Mr. Tenet as the reason that Bush administration officials asserted that Mr. Hussein had stockpiles of banned weapons and ties to Al Qaeda.

Mr. Cheney recalled in an appearance on “Meet the Press” on Sept. 10: “George Tenet sat in the Oval Office and the president of the United States asked him directly, he said, ‘George, how good is the case against Saddam on weapons of mass destruction?’ The director of the C.I.A. said, ‘It’s a slam dunk, Mr. President, it’s a slam dunk,’ ”

Philip Shenon reported from Jidda, and Mark Mazzetti from Washington.