Former CIA chief Tenet rebounds against White House on Iraq war

"The administration is not going to be happy," said Mark Lowenthal, a former senior aide to Tenet at the CIA who said he reviewed portions of the book. "But the administration is not happy with George anyway. This administration and the intelligence community became estranged in 2004 to the point where the administration was convinced the CIA was actively working to elect John Kerry."

A spokesman for the White House National Security Council said administration officials had not seen the book or Tenet's interview, but he defended the decision to invade Iraq.

"The president made the decision to remove Saddam Hussein for a number of reasons, mainly the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq and Saddam's own actions," the spokesman, Gordon Johndroe, said.

Lowenthal declined to discuss details of the book, saying he had promised to keep its contents under wraps until its release. Other officials discussed aspects of the book on the condition that they not be identified because they were not authorized to disclose its contents.

Cheney has continued to suggest there was an IraqAl Qaeda connection in interviews and speeches, despite congressional findings and other investigations that have concluded that Hussein and Al Qaeda did not collaborate and were wary of each other.

"George is going to talk not so much about Cheney the person but about what Cheney's actions caused," a former CIA official said. "We spent thousands of man-hours trying to prove this case."

As it became clear after the invasion that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction or close ties to Al Qaeda, Tenet initially defended the Bush administration, saying the CIA was not pressured into reaching conclusions before the war. But a former senior CIA colleague of Tenet said there was a difference in how the White House approached the two issues.

"We've always drawn a distinction between the way the administration dealt with us on WMD and the way the administration dealt with us on the issue of Saddam's potential or possible links to 9/11," said the former colleague. "On WMD, they asked a lot of questions and they pushed the evidence as far as they could.... On the other issue, we developed the belief early on there was not a close connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda that could be called operational. It's not really much of a secret that the administration kept looking for one."