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Sunday, April 29th, 2007

Philip Sherwell

America’s former spy chief has revealed how he warned the White House that Britain had “exaggerated” reports that Saddam Hussein tried to buy uranium ore in Niger - claims that President George W Bush later made central to his case for war.

George Tenet, who quit as CIA director in 2004, details in a new book how White House hawks were determined to use British intelligence that the Iraqi regime had sought “yellowcake” for a suspected atomic bomb programme.

The President’s reliance on the allegation, which he cited in his key State of the Union speech in January 2003, emerged last week as the focus of newly launched investigations by the Democrat-controlled Congress into the pre-war use of intelligence.

Mr Tenet’s long-awaited book, the first tell-all account from the President’s inner circle in the tumultuous years of the September 11 attacks and the Iraq invasion, is being read avidly by Democrats keen to pursue the Bush administration’s handling of those events.

The ex-CIA chief, who has been invited to testify before Congress this week, is scathing about the roles of Vice-President Dick Cheney and the National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice (now Secretary of State), before the invasion.

In another damning claim, he says he and a senior CIA colleague told Miss Rice in summer 2001 that a significant terrorist strike on the US was in the works, but that their warnings went unheeded until the September 11 attacks.

The White House is playing down the broadside from Mr Tenet, who received a $4 million (£2 million) publishing advance. Officials are privately portraying At the Centre of the Storm as the score-settling exercise of an embittered man, and are emphasising that Mr Tenet believed that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction.

During Mr Tenet’s tenure, relations between the CIA and the Bush administration reached a record low point. The Cheney camp made no secret of its contempt for the agency, which it believed was conducting an anti-administration guerrilla war of media leaks. The book is to be published tomorrow, but The Sunday Telegraph has seen key extracts about the role of British intelligence on “yellowcake”.

In October 2002, Mr Tenet says, he told the White House that a reference to Saddam’s regime being caught trying to buy uranium ore in Africa had to be dropped from a speech by Mr Bush.

In a follow-up memo, a senior CIA analyst added that the evidence backing the British claim was “weak” and “the Africa story is overblown”. Mr Tenet’s executive assistant also outlined his boss’s concern in another memo, noting: “We told Congress that the Brits have exaggerated this issue.”

On the question of how US intelligence differed from British findings, Mr Tenet writes that there were two points of disagreement - over the yellowcake reports, and over how quickly Saddam could make a nuclear bomb.

The White House reluctantly dropped the Niger reference from Mr Bush’s October speech. But in January 2003, two months before the invasion of Iraq, the President told Congress: “The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

The ex-CIA chief also says that his MI6 counterpart, Sir Richard Dearlove, believed the hawks around Mr Cheney were “playing fast and loose with the evidence”. He added: “In his view, it was never about ‘fixing’ the intelligence but rather about the undisciplined manner in which the intelligence was being used”. Sir Richard told Mr Tenet that he had a “polite but significant disagreement” with Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the Vice-President’s closest aide, “who was trying to convince him that there was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda”.

Meanwhile, on Tuesday’s fourth anniversary of Mr Bush’s declaration of “mission accomplished” aboard an aircraft carrier in the Gulf, the Senate will send the White House its bill tying funding for the Iraq war to a US troop withdrawal deadline of next March.

The President has pledged to veto the legislation. Indeed, White House officials said yesterday that they expect the extra troops sent to Iraq under the “surge” strategy will remain there well into next year.

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