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Transcript for January 8
MEET THE PRESS NETCAST & PODCAST |
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MR. RISEN: No, I don’t believe so. First of all, this operation in particular took place six years ago, well before—you know, long before 9/11. And the reason that I think it’s important to talk about this is because there are people who believed that it was mishandled, and it’s possible we actually aided the Iranian nuclear program rather than try to stop it; that this operation was conducted so poorly, it reflects the larger issue of one of the issues that I deal with in my book, which is the failure of the CIA to adequately deal with weapons of mass destruction and intelligence related to weapons of mass destruction. They now have a long history of repeated failures and repeated mistakes when you deal with—on WMD issues, as we saw in Iraq. And I think that the agency’s credibility on the issue of weapons of mass destruction has to be in question.
MR. RUSSERT: Aren’t you tipping the Iranians and the North Koreans as to what might be an ongoing operation?
MR. RISEN: I don’t believe so. I think that this—as I said, this operation took place six years ago, and I think Homer first revealed the sources and methods of the Trojan horse a long time ago.
MR. RUSSERT: But you do say it may be used against North Korea.
MR. RISEN: Well, you could use similar kinds of things, not this specific operation.
MR. RUSSERT: You also write about another situation where a CIA agent at Langley sent out an e- mail, which got in the wrong hands, and it created the roll-up, in your words, of CIA agents in Iran and that we went blind there. People in the intelligence community say that is just dead wrong, that there are not any CIA agents in prison, there was no roll-up. How do you respond?
MR. RISEN: Well, I think they now argue—they don’t deny that this huge mistake happened. They -- what they, I believe, say, is that the damage wasn’t as severe as I say it was. That’s possible. It’s possible that they’ve done a damage assessment recently since I first heard about it. But I think that the point of that incident was the complete breakdown of their safeguards in protecting their sources in Iran shows a—to me, just a huge mistake.
MR. RUSSERT: But there may not have been a roll-up and we may not be blind in Iran, as you suggest.
MR. RISEN: It’s—well, I think it raises—what they did was they put their entire network at risk, and so I guess there’s a question of whether all of them were rolled up or not.
MR. RUSSERT: There is another issue that has been brought up and that is the—quoting the president’s conversation with CIA Director George Tenet, about who authorized putting him on pain medication, talking about Abu Zubaydah, the al-Qaeda operative. Are you convinced that that conversation took place, that the president actually said that?
MR. RISEN: Well, I say in the book that there is a dispute about it. And I make it clear in the book that it’s unclear whether it happened, but there were sources who said that they had been told about this. And then I quote other sources saying they’re not sure. The point of that was to show that there were a number of people in the intelligence community who believed that they were getting signals from the White House that the gloves were coming off in the war on al-Qaeda. And the larger point I was trying to make was that the CIA, very quickly after 9/11, was transformed into an agency that became a—had a whole new secret infrastructure to detain prisoners, to interrogate them and to deal with them in ways that the CIA and the United States had never done before.
MR. RUSSERT: But if the president didn’t say that, the link to the White House to torture...
MR. RISEN: Well, there are other more open signals that the White House was sending about taking the gloves off.
MR. RUSSERT: Iran—excuse me, Iraq, weapons of mass destruction, you write that the CIA approached 30 relatives of Iraqi citizens who are now living in Cleveland and...
MR. RISEN: In the United States, and also in—yeah.
MR. RUSSERT: In the United States and some in Cleveland—to go over there and talk to their relatives about the weapons of mass destruction.
MR. RISEN: Right.
MR. RUSSERT: And they found nothing.
MR. RISEN: Right.
MR. RUSSERT: And what happened?
MR. RISEN: Well, the—I had written about this actually first in The New York Times a year or two ago about this program, and what they had was they decided in the—around 2001, 2002, that they needed to find some way to get new information out of Iraq and they didn’t have enough spies of their own in Iraq, and so they began to send relatives to go find their own relatives who are—had been involved in the WMD programs in Iraq in the past. And I wrote about one woman, a doctor from Cleveland, who is an Iraqi-American who was asked by the CIA to go to Baghdad and meet with her brother who was a nuclear—who had been in the nuclear program. She went to Baghdad in 2002. Her brother said, you know, the nuclear program’s been dead for a decade. And she came back to Washington and told the CIA that and they didn’t believe her.
MR. RUSSERT: And we went forward.
MR. RISEN: Yes.
MR. RUSSERT: James Risen, to be continued. “State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration.” We thank you for joining us and sharing your views.
MR. RISEN: Thank you very much.
MR. RUSSERT: And we’ll be right back.
(Announcements)
MR. RUSSERT: Start your day tomorrow on “Today” with Katie and Matt; then the “NBC Nightly News” with Brian Williams. That’s all for today. We’ll be back next week. If it’s Sunday, it’s MEET THE PRESS.
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