WASHINGTON — Ending two years of silence on his role in the Iraq war, former CIA Director George J. Tenet is using a new book and a barrage of upcoming television appearances to accuse the White House of making him a scapegoat and of ignoring early CIA warnings that Iraq was sinking into chaos.
In a taped interview scheduled to air Sunday on CBS, Tenet said President Bush had made up his mind to invade Iraq long before the CIA director made his infamous Oval Office remark that it was a "slam-dunk" case that Saddam Hussein's government had banned weapons.
Tenet was even more forceful in his criticism of Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, saying that the two had destroyed his reputation by repeatedly using the "slam-dunk" line to pin blame on him for the decision to go to war.
"It's the most despicable thing that ever happened to me," Tenet said in the "60 Minutes" interview, according to an excerpt CBS released Thursday.
Speaking about the December 2002 meeting in which he sought to assure President Bush that the evidence against Iraq was solid, Tenet said: "I'll never believe that what happened that day informed the president's view or belief of the legitimacy or the timing of this war. Never."
Tenet's comments represent a new and potentially politically damaging source of fire in the ongoing battle among Bush administration officials over blame for the Iraq war. Tenet's entry is remarkable because he previously had been seen even by many of his supporters as excessively loyal to the Bush White House, which awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom when he left the CIA in 2004.
Tenet's book, "At the Center of the Storm," is to be released Monday.
The book's publisher, HarperCollins, has not issued advance copies.
But colleagues of Tenet and former CIA officials who have read all or portions of the 576-page book said it offers a detailed account of the CIA's role -- as well as the agency's increasingly dysfunctional relationship with the White House -- through a tumultuous period including the Sept. 11 attacks and the aftermath of the Iraq invasion.
Former officials said the book makes a compelling case that Cheney and other administration hawks pressured the CIA to find nonexistent links between Iraq and the Al Qaeda terrorist network, and often were hostile to post-invasion assessments that portrayed conditions in Iraq as deteriorating.
