Ex-CIA chief's book to explain Iraq 'slam dunk' 

WASHINGTON - George Tenet, the former CIA director who assured President George W Bush that finding unconventional weapons in Iraq would be a "slam dunk," will give his account of the conversation in a book to be published by HarperCollins.

The News Corp-owned company said it agreed to publish a Tenet memoir that is tentatively entitled, At the Centre of the Storm. The release was expected late this year or early in 2007. There was no immediate word on the value of the deal.

A spokesman for Tenet declined to comment.

HarperCollins said the book would shed light on Tenet's role at the CIA during the agency's campaign against al Qaeda that started in the 1990s, the Sept. 11 attacks, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the rise of the Iraqi insurgency.

The book will also provide "the real context of Tenet's own now-famous slam-dunk comment" about Saddam Hussein's suspected prewar weapon of mass destruction cache, the publisher said. The expression, used originally to describe a basketball move, has come to mean something which can be achieved with complete certainty.

The "slam-dunk" quotation first surfaced in journalist Bob Woodward's book, "Plan of Attack," which portrayed Tenet as assuring Bush that finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq would be a virtual certainty.

The 2003 Iraq invasion was justified largely by intelligence that Saddam Hussein had such weapons. No such weapons were found, and the prewar intelligence effort has since been condemned by a presidential commission as one of the most damaging failures in recent US history.

Tenet, who served under both Bush and former President Bill Clinton, resigned in July 2004 amid widespread criticism over intelligence lapses that also involved the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington.

Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest US civilian award, in December 2004.

Tenet initially had a US$5 million book deal with Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc. But he postponed his publishing plans last March, saying he needed more time for "an undertaking of such historical consequence".

- REUTERS