The Book Behind the Bombshell

By Romesh Ratnesar

In the abstruse world of espionage, it's not always easy to know when you are in on a secret. So when intelligence sources approached New York Times reporter James Risen in late 2004 with evidence that the Bush Administration was running a covert domestic-spying program, Risen says he "wasn't sure what to believe." As Risen and Times colleague Eric Lichtblau looked into the story, more whistle-blowers came forward, convincing the reporters that the eavesdropping claims were credible. At that point Risen asked a few "very senior" government officials what they knew about the spying program. "They would look at me with these blank expressions, and say, 'No--that can't be going on,'" Risen told TIME. That's when Risen knew he was sitting on a major scoop.

But it took Risen more than a year to get the story into print--and not before President Bush personally implored Times editors not to publish Risen and Lichtblau's account of how Bush authorized the National Security Agency to wiretap telephone and e-mail communications inside the U.S. without court-sanctioned warrants. The Times ran the article on Dec. 16, touching off a blogospheric scrum: conservatives accuse the Times of aiding terrorists by revealing secrets of U.S. spycraft while liberals say the paper caved to White House pressure by not dropping the bombshell sooner. At the center of the article's backstory is Risen, who unsuccessfully pushed to publish the wiretap report last year, then took a leave to write a book, State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration. It now appears he may pay a price for the disclosure: last Friday the Justice Department opened an investigation into who leaked the existence of the NSA program to the Times, raising the prospect of Risen's being compelled to reveal the identities of the "nearly dozen" current and former officials who spoke to him about the program or face jail time for contempt of court.

In an interview, Risen said the Times' choice to run the wiretap story when it did was "not my decision and had nothing to do with me." But he said the paper "has performed a great public service by printing it, because this policy is something the nation should debate." State of War provides an account of the origins and scope of the wiretap program that basically repeats the revelations contained in Risen and Lichtblau's stories in the Times. But the book also argues that the NSA's eavesdropping policy shows the extent to which the war on terrorism has spurred the intelligence community to flout legal conventions at home and abroad. Risen's chief target is the CIA, where, he argues, institutional dysfunction and feckless leadership after 9/11 led to intelligence breakdowns that continue to haunt the U.S. Though much of State of War covers ground that is broadly familiar, the book is punctuated with a wealth of previously unreported tidbits about covert meetings, aborted CIA operations and Oval Office outbursts. The result is a brisk, if dispiriting, chronicle of how, since 9/11, the "most covert tools of national-security policy have been misused."

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.)

Risen's reporting isn't bulletproof. Like most intelligence reporters, he relies heavily on anonymous sources, and several anecdotes in State of War are attributed to a lone leaker. That makes some of the book's claims difficult to verify, while leaving Risen open to charges that he is being used by partisan ax grinders. Risen, who is contesting a court order to reveal the identities of sources he quoted in a series of disputed articles about the nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee, admits that the book requires readers to make a "leap of faith" and accept the credibility of his sources. But the number of intelligence officials willing to risk their careers and come forward convinced Risen that their critiques have merit. "I got to these people at a good time," he says. "The frustration over the way things have been going in the Bush Administration had built up within the government. There were a lot of people who were increasingly uncomfortable with what was going on."

What State of War lacks is a prescription for what to do about it. Despite the intelligence failures documented in the book, Risen concludes that as a result of the U.S.'s counterterrorist efforts, "al-Qaeda now seems to lack the power to conduct another 9/11." The question facing policymakers is how to balance that apparent gain in security with its attendant costs--to the military in Iraq, to civil liberties at home and to the U.S.'s standing in the world. State of War ends too hastily to tackle such dilemmas. The book sheds welcome light on the conduct of the war on terrorism so far, but it leaves readers in the dark about where we go from here.