A review of White House records has determined that George Tenet, then director of the Central Intelligence Agency, did brief Condoleezza Rice and other top officials on July 10, 2001, about the looming threat from Al Qaeda, a State Department spokesman said Monday.
The account by spokesman Sean McCormack came hours after Rice, the secretary of state, told reporters aboard her airplane that she didn’t recall the specific meeting on July 10, noting that she had met repeatedly with Tenet in the summer of 2001 about terrorist threats. Rice, then the national security adviser, said it was “incomprehensible” to suggest she had ignored terrorist threats two months before the Sept. 11 attacks.
McCormack also said records showed that the Sept. 11 commission had been informed about the meeting, a fact that former intelligence officials and members of the commission confirmed Monday.
When details of the meeting emerged last week in “State of Denial,” a new book by journalist and author Bob Woodward, administration officials questioned Woodward’s reporting.
Now, after several days, both current and former Bush administration officials have confirmed parts of Woodward’s account.
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Officials now agree that on July 10, 2001, Tenet and his counterterrorism deputy, J. Cofer Black, were so alarmed about an impending attack by Al Qaeda that they demanded an emergency meeting at the White House with Rice and her National Security Council staff.
According to two former intelligence officials, Tenet told those assembled at the White House about the growing body of intelligence the CIA had collected pointing to an attack. But both current and former officials took issue with Woodward’s account that Tenet and his aides had left the meeting in frustration and feeling that Rice had ignored them.
Tenet told members of the Sept. 11 commission about the July 10 meeting when they interviewed him in early 2004, but committee members said he never indicated he had left the White House with the impression that he had been ignored.
Rice, speaking late Sunday to reporters traveling with her to the Middle East, said she did not remember the emergency meeting with Tenet on July 10.
“What I can be quite certain of is that I would remember if I was told, as this account apparently says, that there was about to be an attack in the United States,” she said. “The idea that I would have somehow ignored that, I find incomprehensible.”
McCormack said the records showed that far from ignoring Tenet’s warnings, Rice acted on the intelligence and requested that Tenet make the same presentation to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and John Ashcroft, then the attorney general. Ashcroft said Monday that he never received the briefing.