State Department officials acknowledged late Monday that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was at a 2001 meeting where she was reportedly warned of the need to act on an impending terrorist threat to the United States.
They said she met with then-CIA Director George J. Tenet on or around July 10. A new book by Bob Woodward says she brushed off Tenet's warning at that session.
Earlier on Monday, Rice rejected the book's suggestion as "incomprehensible."
Speaking to reporters on her plane en route to the Middle East, Rice insisted she did not recall. Tenet and his counterterrorism chief seeking a special meeting with her to try to mobilize more vigorous anti-terror action, as Woodward writes in "State of Denial."
"The idea that I would have ignored that, I find incomprehensible," Rice told reporters late Sunday during the flight. "I am quite certain that it was not a meeting in which I was told that there was an impending attack, and refused to respond."
The State Department said Monday that a meeting around the time described by Woodward had in fact taken place, based on government records, but that no new information was given to Rice, who then was President Bush's national security advisor.
In his book, Woodward writes that Tenet and J. Cofer Black, then director of the CIA's counterterrorism center, decided on July 10, 2001, that they had to request a dramatic, "out-of-cycle" meeting with Rice to describe their anxiety over the chance of an attack against American interests, possibly within the United States.
Rice agreed to see them and acknowledged their warnings, but Tenet and Black felt she did not appreciate the gravity of the situation, which Woodward writes was the "starkest warning" yet given to the White House. "She was polite, but they felt the brush-off," Woodward writes.
Rice's reaction to the description of the meeting underscores administration attempts to counter claims, in Woodward's book and elsewhere, that question whether officials heeded internal warnings and reports on terrorism and the Iraq war.
Rice did not deny that any meeting took place, noting she met frequently with Tenet and other intelligence officials and counterterrorism experts during 2001, when she said the administration was developing a comprehensive strategy. But she said the idea of an emergency meeting designed to "shock" her did not make sense.
