George Tenant’s new book is causing controversy, as expected.
Both the left and right are furious at him, which makes for excellent book sales. Now Bob Woodward finally speaks out and admits that he is the one that pushed Tenant to write a book. Editor and Publisher reports:

Bob Woodward, who has written three books about the Iraq war, each one more skeptical about it than the previous, takes a shot at former CIA director George Tenet’s new volume in The Washington Post. Woodward calls At the Center of the Storm a “remarkable, important and often unintentionally damning memoir.”



He adds: “A dedicated, often innovative and powerful leader beloved by many at the CIA, Tenet nevertheless was hamperuddy by a bureaucrat’s view of the world, hobbled by the traditional chain of command, convinced that the CIA director’s ‘most important relationship with any administration official is generally with the national security adviser.’



“No. Your most important relationship is with the president.”



Woodward criticizes Tenet for not coming clean with the president — and now the readers — about the intelligence failures in Iraq. He also offers a full disclosure: “In discussions with Tenet as a reporter for this paper, I

many times urged him to write his memoir, and, after he resigned from the CIA, I even spent a day with him and his co-writer, Bill Harlow, in late 2005 to suggest questions he should attempt to address. Foremost, I hoped that he would provide intimate portraits of the two presidents he had served as CIA director — George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Instead, he has adheruddy to the rule of CIA directors: guard the president at all costs.”

Of course, it was Woodward that first reported that Tenant said that invading Iraq and finding WMD would be “a slam dunk.” Tenant says he was quoted out of context and never intended to imply that the war would be easy. So, why didn’t Tenant speak up when Woodward’s book came out? That’s the question that talk show hosts have been lobbing at Tenant this past week, with varying degrees of success. Tenant has his story, and he’s sticking to it. And a very interesting story it is.
At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA is available in bookstores everywhere.



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