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By Peter Eisner and Knut Royce

Researching and writing our book, The Italian Letter, we made a little mistake. We assumed that President Bush’s top national security aides would know how to read intelligence. Especially those who’ve been around a while, like that very bright woman who toiled in the National Security Council under two administrations, and who took a break between in between by serving as provost of Stanford University. She now runs the State Department.

     Yet the case of Condoleezza Rice illustrates how assumptions make for bad journalism.

She got big play in our book because she was: one of Bush’s top advisers, a member of the President’s war sales team, the White House Iraq Group; and was one of the most forceful voices in insisting Iraq had been seeking uranium from Africa.

But in his generally uncritical book, At the Center of the Storm, George Tenet indicates that Rice simply didn’t know what she was talking about— she didn’t know how to read intelligence, and perhaps didn’t read it at all.

      The startling revelation (pg. 369-70) comes in a passage describing a meeting at the White House just before Christmas 2002.  Attending were Condi and her NSC staff, John McLaughlin, Tenet’s deputy, and Robert Walpole, the national intelligence officer for strategic programs.

Condi seems not to have read the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq’s alleged WMD, a 90-page classified document published that October that was the Intelligence Community’s authoritative (and very wrong) summary of what the U.S. government knew about Saddam Hussein’s bomb arsenal.  Most estimates are loaded with caveats indicating the level of confidence the collective wisdom of the Community has about the information.

Condi asked Walpole to summarize the estimate’s “key judgments” section, or the report’s first few pages, which presents the most solid intelligence.  Here’s Tenet’s account.

He (Walpole) began doing so from memory, citing all the “we assess” and “we judge” language that appears in the document. 

      “Wait a minute,” Condi interrupted.  “Bob, if you’re saying these are assertions, we need to know it now.”  That was the word she used.  “We can’t send troops to war based on assertions.” 

       Walpole calmly said that the NIE was an “assessment” and that these were analytical judgments.  He explained that the (intelligence) agencies attached certain levels of confidence to the various judgments—some matters we had high confidence in, others moderate or low—but there was a reason the document’s title contained the word “estimate.”  

     Condi asked what he meant about confidence levels…

And so on.

There are a couple of other interesting and relevant asides.  Tenet discloses that the still-classified NIE contains the phrase “we don’t know” 30 times, while the assertion “we know” appears only three times.  And he produces some evidence that Condi knew there were problems with the Niger uranium intelligence weeks before he personally sent her a memo telling her to delete a passage containing that claim from a speech Bush delivered in Cincinnati in October 2002.

It seems that Jami Miscik, then the CIA’s deputy director for intelligence, had convinced her to cut out a reference from a planned Sept. 26 Rose Garden appearance by Bush that would have claimed Iraq “has sought large amounts of uranium and uranium oxide…from Africa.”

At least twice reminded that the Niger uranium claim wasn’t holding up, her memory was remarkably short.  We don’t know if she reviewed Bush’s Jan. 28, 2003, State of the Union address, in which he famously asserted that the “British government” had discovered that Saddam had been seeking lots of uranium from Africa. That would be an interesting question to ask her if she finally testifies before Henry Waxman’s House oversight committee.

But she did pen a forceful Op Ed in The New York Times five days before Bush’s SOU complaining that Iraq’s 12,000-page declaration to the UN that it possessed no banned weapons had “fail(ed) to account for or explain Iraq’s efforts to get uranium from abroad.

Had Tenet’s book been published before ours, we might have been gentler with the president's national security adviser, in describing her very active role in the administration’s heavy-handed pitching for an Iraq invasion by invoking the mushroom cloud.  It turns out, she knew not what she was doing.