Reaping the Whirlwind: Tenet's book reviewed by Bob Woodward

Bob Woodward reviews in the Washington Post:

"At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA"

By George Tenet with Bill Harlow
HarperCollins. 549 pp. $30

In his remarkable, important and often unintentionally damning memoir, George Tenet, the former CIA chief, describes a meeting with Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser, two months before the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In much more vivid and emotional detail than previously reported, Tenet writes that he had received intelligence that day, July 10, 2001, about the threat from al-Qaeda that "literally made my hair stand on end."

According to At the Center of the Storm, Tenet picked up the phone, insisted on meeting with Rice about the threat from al-Qaeda, and raced to the White House with his counter-terrorism deputy, Cofer Black, and a briefer known only as "Rich B."

"There will be a significant terrorist attack in the coming weeks or months," Rich B. told Rice, and the attack would be "spectacular." Black added, "This country needs to go on a war footing now." He said that President Bush should give the CIA new covert action authorities to go after Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda organization. After the meeting, Tenet's briefer and deputy "congratulated each other," Tenet writes. "At last, they felt, we had gotten the full attention of the administration."

Though Tenet was meeting almost daily with President Bush to give him an intelligence briefing and an update on threat reports -- "extraordinary access," he labels it -- by his own account he did not take the request for action "now" directly to the president.

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