The Book Behind the Bombshell

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State of War doesn't follow a clear narrative arc. The action kick-starts midway through the first chapter, in March 2002: days after the arrest of Abu Zubaydah, at the time the highest-ranking al-Qaeda operative in U.S. custody, Bush summoned CIA director George Tenet to the White House to ask what intelligence Abu Zubaydah had provided his captors. According to Risen's source, Tenet told Bush that Abu Zubaydah, badly wounded during his capture, was too groggy from painkillers to talk coherently. In response, Bush asked, "Who authorized putting him on pain medication?" Risen makes the leap that the Bush episode may represent the "most direct link yet between Bush and the harsh treatment of prisoners by both the CIA and the U.S. military"--but deflates that claim by acknowledging that some former senior Tenet lieutenants don't believe the story is true.

Risen writes that with the White House's anything-goes mandate in place, everything went. While the NSA began monitoring communications of some Americans suspected of links to al-Qaeda--snooping on "millions of telephone calls and e-mail messages on American soil" in the process--the CIA set up a network of secret prisons around the world in which interrogators employed techniques that violated established international norms. Meanwhile, Tenet's desire to earn the favor of Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld led him to abandon the agency's traditional role as a nonpartisan arbiter of intelligence. That fostered a climate in which officials were discouraged from sending Bush inconvenient information--such as doubts about the quality of intelligence on Iraq's program for weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Tenet is no stranger to opprobrium (his reputation will never recover from his telling Bush that the evidence on WMD was a "slam dunk"), but the verdict of his subordinates in State of War is particularly withering. "George Tenet liked to talk about how he was a tough Greek from Queens," a former Tenet aide tells Risen before going on to use a vulgar word for wimp to describe him instead. "He just wanted people to like him."

Risen's book provides fresh details about how agency officials ignored warnings from their sources in Iraq about WMD and the potency of the insurgency after the U.S. invasion. Risen devotes a chapter to Sawsan Alhaddad, an Iraqi American recruited by the CIA as part of a "Hail Mary" prewar effort to gain intelligence on Saddam Hussein's weapons program by tapping the relatives of Iraqi scientists. Alhaddad was one of at least 30 Iraqi expatriates who risked their lives to travel to Iraq to ask their relatives about Saddam's arsenal. According to Risen, all of them reported that Iraq had abandoned its WMD program--but the CIA never informed the White House. Among the other intelligence foibles described in the book: the U.S. discovered Western-style ATM cards on Abu Zubaydah after his capture, but "there is little evidence that an aggressive investigation" into the bank accounts was ever made, and a gaffe by a CIA officer in Washington last year blew the cover of spies in Iran and enabled Tehran to "roll up" the CIA's network of agents there. (A CIA representative denies both stories.)