In My Time - Dick Cheney [219]
As George Tenet and others have noted since, there was a dispute inside the CIA between the terrorism analysts, who looked at the reporting and judged there to be a relationship between Saddam and al Qaeda, and the regional Middle East experts, who didn’t believe there could be a connection between the secular Saddam and the radical Islamist bin Laden. I have long suspected that because of this split, the CIA came up with the phrase “no authority, direction, or control.” The terrorism experts would make their judgments about a connection between Saddam and al Qaeda, but then to satisfy the regional analysts, a higher-up at the agency would intone that Saddam had “no authority, direction, or control.” The phrase turned out to be handy for administration critics, because it seemed to say that Saddam had no responsibility for terrorism while we were asserting he did. We had the facts on our side. He harbored terrorists, and he sponsored them. He didn’t have to be in control of al Qaeda in order to be in violation of United Nations resolutions that forbade Iraq’s giving terrorists safe haven. He didn’t have to have authority over al Qaeda—any more than the Taliban had—to be in violation of the Bush Doctrine, which held, in the president’s words, that “any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.”
WHEN I APPEARED ON Meet the Press on the Sunday after 9/11, Tim Russert asked me whether we had any evidence linking Saddam Hussein or the Iraqis to the 9/11 attacks. “No,” I answered. But shortly afterward, George Tenet brought me information that suggested the possibility: The CIA had a report that Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker of 9/11, had met with a representative of the Iraqi Intelligence Service in Prague prior to the attacks. I was subsequently shown a photograph said to have been taken in Prague and told that there was a high probability that the man in the photo was Mohammed Atta. Thus when I sat down with Tim Russert on December 9, 2001, I mentioned a report, “pretty well confirmed,” that Atta had gone to Prague and met with a senior Iraqi intelligence official. Colin Powell, apparently shown the same information, went even further, telling Wolf Blitzer on CNN’s Late Edition, “Certainly those meetings took place.”
In the summer of 2002, having been told that the case for Mohammed Atta’s Prague meeting was weakening, I began to alter my statements. I said to Tim Russert on September 8 that the meeting was “unconfirmed at this point.” The next year, following along with what the CIA was reporting, I told Tim, “We’ve never been able to develop any more of that yet, either in terms of confirming it or discrediting it. We just don’t know.” I was careful with what I said—and disappointed when Director Tenet later erroneously wrote that I continued to claim the story was “pretty well confirmed” after the CIA began to doubt it.
I was also disappointed on June 2, 2004, when Tenet, citing personal reasons, told the president he would be leaving. The Senate Intelligence Committee was soon to issue a report that many thought would be critical of Tenet, and I suspected that entered into his thinking. The president had kept Tenet on when we came into office, a move I had supported. Throughout the intelligence mistakes of Tenet’s tenure, the president and I had backed him. For him to quit when