Hardball

James Woolsey was the CIA director from 1993 to 1995 under President Clinton. He’s now vice president of Booz Allen, the consulting firm.

Let me ask you this. Is this a loss for the country, losing Tenet, or not?

JAMES WOOLSEY, FORMER CIA DIRECTOR: It depends on who follows him. John McLaughlin is a very able deputy, and he’ll do a fine job. George, I think, was a great DCI.

MATTHEWS: Rate him, ABC, how good a director was he?

WOOLSEY: I’d say A. Maybe a minus in there on one or two…

MATTHEWS: How do you — How do you square that very high rating of the just about to be former CIA director with the slam-dunk comment that we have definitely have enough evidence on weapons of mass destruction to go into war with Iraq?

WOOLSEY: Well, the answer to that is a little complex. But he may have been right when he said it. Because his material, if you look at the stocks of agent as distinct from loaded up weapons, which may well not have existed, it’s really quite small, could have fit in a truck or two or three for the…

MATTHEWS: You could have abducted the stuff from the time he said it’s a slam-dunk to when we went in?

WOOLSEY: Sure. I think things could have been moved out to Syria. There are several indications that that occurred.

What he said might have been right or a lot closer to right at the time than it looks now from what’s been found out.

MATTHEWS: What about his failure to read those critical 16 words in the president’s State of the Union address a couple of years ago, regarding the uranium coming from Africa? And admitting afterwards, “I never read them”?

WOOLSEY: Well, I think…

MATTHEWS: Isn’t that his job to clear the president’s speeches for intel?

WOOLSEY: Chris, I think that issue is very strange. Because there’s nothing inconsistent between Ambassador Wilson having found in February that Saddam had not succeeded in obtaining yellow cake from Niger, and in October, the British report saying that Saddam was trying to obtain it.

I don’t know why they didn’t just…

MATTHEWS: If there isn’t a problem with consistency, why did Ari Fleischer, the president’s spokesman at the time, his press secretary, say the president shouldn’t have said that?

WOOLSEY: I have never understood that. I don’t know why the administration got itself so wrapped around the axle on that issue.

MATTHEWS: Let me ask you about — You are very much in support of the war in Iraq?

WOOLSEY: Yes.

MATTHEWS: You remain so?

WOOLSEY: Yes.

MATTHEWS: Are you in support of Ahmed Chalabi as a man of trustworthy reliance with regard to intel, with regard to general information and helpfulness with regard to our effort to try to stabilize that country?

WOOLSEY: My involvement with Chalabi was over a three-year period when, pro bono, I represented as a lawyer five of his people and three others that were imprisoned by the immigration service. And he was extremely helpful and my experience with him there was extremely positive.

I think I have thought that he is committed to democracy in Iraq. I was very surprised by the allegations that he leaked any material about…

MATTHEWS: Do you think the CIA is responsible, and George Tenet in particular, for smearing of Ahmed Chalabi?

WOOLSEY: I don’t know what the situation with that is, Chris. I don’t know whether it’s true that he did it. I wonder how in the world he got hold of the information if he did do it. And I can’t understand how the Iranians would talk about it.

MATTHEWS: How he would have told — how he would have been told that the United States had tapped into the Iranian intelligence?

WOOLSEY: This is important. I can’t understand how, if the Iranians had been told that by him or anybody else, they would talk about it over the link that was allegedly broken. I’m mystified, I confess, by this whole thing.

MATTHEWS: Are you a Chalabi man right now? Do you trust him?

WOOLSEY: I think that Ahmed Chalabi has done a lot to try to help bring democracy to Iraq. I don’t understand the current situation. I need more information.

MATTHEWS: But the CIA is notoriously antagonistic toward Chalabi. They don’t like him.

WOOLSEY: Well, historically, they have been since the mid-’90s, at least a number of people have.

MATTHEWS: Welcome back. We’ll talk more with Jim Woolsey, the former CIA director. He’s now with Booz Allen.

Back with Jim Woolsey in just a moment.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK) MATTHEWS: This half-hour on HARDBALL, former CIA Director James Woolsey on George Tenet’s resignation today, plus the political fallout and the intrigue with “Newsweek”‘s Howard Fineman and Lally Weymouth.

But, first, the latest headlines right now.

(NEWS BREAK)

MATTHEWS: Welcome back to HARDBALL.

We’re back with former CIA James Woolsey talking about now former CIA Director George Tenet.

Let me ask you. There’s a big story that you met with Condi Rice to talk about the Chalabi situation, to talk about the CIA’s role in that. Is that correct?

WOOLSEY: There are a group people who met with her and Steve Hadley on a number of issues. But if the government wants to talk about it, they can. I don’t talk about advice I give the government.

MATTHEWS: OK.

Let me ask you about the 9/11 role that George Tenet played. Was he good at protecting us against what was coming?

WOOLSEY: I think the 9/11 failure was not principally a CIA failure. They made a big mistake in not tracking al-Midhar and al-Hamzi, these two

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: Two al Qaeda guys who got in the country.

WOOLSEY: Two al Qaeda guys were in 2000, in January 2000 in Malaysia and they forgot to…

MATTHEWS: They were at the big summit meeting over there.

WOOLSEY: Right. And the CIA did not give their names to the FBI or the State Department, so they could have been kept out of the country.

But most of what went wrong with respect to 9/11 in terms of coordination within the U.S. government, much of it was FBI, because a lot of it was going on in this country, Or say the German police. CIA doesn’t really run spy operations and Germany. The terrorists knew what they were doing. They were operating in two places, Germany and the United States, where the CIA doesn’t operate.

And after all, look at — the FAA had flimsy cockpit doors. The Air Force didn’t have interceptors anywhere near Washington or New York.

MATTHEWS: Nobody was watching flight training either.

(CROSSTALK)

WOOLSEY: The country was asleep. It wasn’t really — I don’t put this at George Tenet’s feet.

MATTHEWS: You’re one of the few people in the country who is alive today who knows what it is like to be a CIA director and to recognize the role of the CIA director. You’re the president’s chief spoof, his chief spy. When he gets up in the morning, and you get up in the morning, whatever time you get up, 5:00, you have got to tell him everything you know by 7:30, right?

(CROSSTALK)

WOOLSEY: Well, that’s the way it works with some directors. I did not have that kind of access.

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: Well, the president — your president wasn’t so curious perhaps to hear from you.

But you also have the job of being his — of helping to carry out policy. In this case, we had a war.

WOOLSEY: In a very limited sense.

MATTHEWS: Well, let me ask you this, because the war in Iraq required evidence to present to the world. So, therefore, the CIA director had a job not just to tell the president everything he could tell him, but help him make a legitimate case for his policies. How does a guy square those two roles?

WOOLSEY: He has a requirement to report intelligence to the president. He’s not a brief writer. That really ought to be left to the policy people. The only policy…

MATTHEWS: But didn’t he write Colin Powell’s brief for war at the U.N.? Didn’t he have that job?

WOOLSEY: I don’t think that they wrote it. I think they probably provided the material for it. And they may have cooperated with State Department people in drafting the speech.

MATTHEWS: But that was the purpose of it. The president wanted to make the case for war. He sent Colin Powell to do it. Colin Powell needed the ammo. They gave him the ammo.

WOOLSEY: The CIA’s job is to call it like they see it. And if there’s material in there that doesn’t help, they still call it like they see it. If policy-makers want to neglect some part of it or emphasize other parts, that’s up to them.

But the only part of policy, I think, the CIA director of central intelligence is really involved in helping make and helping manage is covert action. His role with that is a little bit like the chairman of the joint chiefs role with respect to military force. But, of course, both are advisers to the National Security Council. They’re not members.

MATTHEWS: Yes.

WOOLSEY: And there’s a reason. Neither one is fully really a policy person.

MATTHEWS: Let me ask you about George Tenet and his role as the president’s chief advisers on facts. Do you think he gave president the facts he’s needed to make policy?

WOOLSEY: I think he’s done the very best he can with the whole intelligence community’s help to provide the president with the best the intelligence community can come up with. And sometimes, that’s not good enough.

MATTHEWS: But why have there been so many people, particularly in the Defense Department, the civilians over there, who have made such an effort to try to get additional intel, additional analysis of intel to the vice president and the president if they’re confident of the CIA director?

WOOLSEY: That’s fair game. Look, I see no reason why the…

MATTHEWS: But it’s B-track stuff, backup.

WOOLSEY: I see no reason why there shouldn’t an policy shop looking at intelligence in the Pentagon, just the way there is in the State Department. The Bureau of Intelligence and Research in the State Department has been there for decades. And they do very much…

MATTHEWS: In addition to the DIA?

WOOLSEY: Sure, in State. They’ve been in State.

But DIA doesn’t really do what the Bureau of Intelligence and Research does at State. DIA has collection responsibilities, very special specialized responsibilities in the Defense Department. I see no reason why Don Rumsfeld or any other secretary of defense shouldn’t have a policy analysis operation relying on intelligence and looking at intelligence, very much like the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the State Department.

MATTHEWS: Why do you think, when the DIA, the DCI, who has just retired, George Tenet, went to Georgetown University several months ago and he was asked by a student who had an interesting sort of Middle Eastern accent — and asked him the question. He said, why do we need a special intel operation over at the Defense Department? And he called it the Office of Special Plans, but I’m not sure he’s right about that.

And the answer from the DCI, from George Tenet, wasn’t that there’s no such organization. He said I’m the only person that gives the president his intelligence. He didn’t deny that there was another wing of intelligence flowing into the executive office of the president through the vice president’s office or anywhere else. He said, I’m the guy that briefs the president.

WOOLSEY: His job is to pull it all together and call it straight, call it like he sees it.

MATTHEWS: But he wasn’t getting it all, was he?

WOOLSEY: I see no evidence that he was not getting the material that the Defense Department was relying on. Much of what they were relying on came from the CIA.

MATTHEWS: But their analysis wasn’t going back through him, was it?

WOOLSEY: I think a lot was briefed to him. I don’t know absolutely if it all was, but not absolutely everything that the Bureau of Intelligence and Research in the State Department does is briefed to the DCI.

MATTHEWS: OK.

The hottest issue today I think in the country is not whether there’s WMD in that country or they were, because we’re past that. We’re in the war. We’re in that country. The connection between al Qaeda and Iraq before the war, that’s still a measure of dispute there. That’s the dispute, isn’t it, whether there was a connection between international terrorism in Iraq or not before we went to war with Iraq?

WOOLSEY: I think there’s a reasonable argument as to whether or not there was control. I doubt that there really was control by Iraq over al Qaeda or sponsorship.

But connections, there were plenty. Tenet said twice on the record that there was training by the Iraqis of al Qaeda in conventional explosives.

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: In the north.

WOOLSEY: Not just in the north.

In conventional explosives, gases and poisons.

MATTHEWS: Right.

WOOLSEY: And he said there were, there was help with false documentation of sort of rest and recreation.

MATTHEWS: Right.

WOOLSEY: Going back a decade in these connections.

So connections are different than control. And a lot of people who deny that there was control by Iraq, I think, are probably right. But connections, talking, sharing information here and there, some training, that went on for a decade.

(CROSSTALK)

WOOLSEY: And there shouldn’t be a dispute about that.

MATTHEWS: OK, thank you very much, former Director of Central Intelligence James Woolsey, now with Booz Allen.

Up next, the political fallout from George Tenet’s resignation today with “Newsweek”‘s Lally Weymouth and Howard Fineman.

You’re watching HARDBALL on MSNBC.