Steve Inskeep: We've been talking to one of the reporters who revealed eavesdropping with warrants by the National Security Agency. Now you can eavesdrop on a conversation with him! James Risen of the New York Times wrote a book called "State of War." He's not saying much about the leak of classified information which led to an investigation. Risen does say it started with officials who were deeply concerned.
James Risen: It was people who.. It's not one source, it's several sources -- people who were deeply disturbed by what was happening. Eric Lichtblau, my colleague who's been reporting on this, and I both started hearing about it separately and about the same time from different sources. Then we began to compare notes and move forward.
SI: How did you decide when to publish what you published? Because you had it in your hands for about a year, you said, before you decided to go forward.
JR: Well, that was up to the paper and I can't discuss the deliberations about that. All I can say is that it wasn't my decision. It was the paper's decision and I supported the decision.
SI: Can I get you to explain your best understanding of the nuts and bolts of what NSA has been doing? Who's calling from where? Who's listening? And how are they doing that -- as best you've been able to determine?
JR: Well, what the government says they've been doing is eavesdropping on telephone and email communications into and out of the US without search warrants.
SI: General Michael Hayden, who was the head of the NSA when this program began and is still a very senior intelligence official has told reporters that there is always one party to a conversation who is identified as being Al Qaeda or linked to Al Qaeda. Do you believe that?
JR: I don't know. That's what they say. One of the things that we learned that was of concern to some of the people who knew about this program was that the NSA was able to decide on its own who to listen to. So there were no outside approvals required even within the Bush administration of who the NSA was listening to. So it's really difficult to know who they really did listen to at this point.
SI: Does the eavesdropping, in your mind, fit a broader pattern of the way the Bush administration has pursued the war on terror?
JR: Yes, I think so. One of the themes in my book that I try to talk about is the kind of... After 9/11, I think, there was a breakdown of the normal checks and balances in the US foreign policy community. Principals in the Bush administration -- the top people -- kept meeting every single day and they kept setting policy in these meetings so rapidly that the career professionals and the inter-agency reviews that tended to moderate things couldn't catch up. Now, some people would say that's good -- you had to respond rapidly, you had to move quickly, you had to get rid of the risk aversion that we've seen before 9/11. That's all true, but the question is how far from one side to the other do you swing.
SI: You also write of the intelligence that the Central Intelligence Agency gathered before the war in Iraq -- it's been widely known there was no intelligence good enough to show that there were weapons of mass destruction. But you seem to go a little bit further, writing that there was actually intelligence gathered that seemed to fairly conclusively say through source after source after source that there was no nuclear program, at least, in Iraq.
JR: What I write about is an interesting program in which the CIA asked a series of relatives of Iraqi scientists to find ways to talk to their relatives. And I focused on one woman from Cleveland. Her brother had been in the Iraqi nuclear weapons program in the '80's and early '90s. She went back to Iraq at the request of the CIA and talked to her brother. He just said we haven't had a nuclear program since the end of the Gulf War when it was abandoned. And she went back to America and told the CIA that. They didn't really believe her. They thought she was just getting fed disinformation by the brother. They kind of ignored her and other relatives who said the same thing.
SI: Did White House officials in the Bush administration send signals to the CIA about the kind of intelligence they wanted to get?
JR: Oh yeah! I mean, I think it's difficult to say whether anybody ever said specifically you've got to find this stuff for us. But the message became very clear -- that they have WMD. And so it became very easy to dismiss reports that there isn't WMD by saying, that's just disinformation from Saddam.
SI: You write about some of the ways the Administration and its people in the intelligence community working on Iraq worked to get the rest of the CIA on board with the idea of the invasion of Iraq. What were the steps that were taken?
JR: I write about a couple of meetings. One in Rome, I think, in 2002, in which one CIA officer who participated in the meeting called it kind of a secret pep rally where people from headquarters came out and told them it was time to get on board and that they should go out and start to try and gin up support within the foreign intelligence services of the countries they were serving in. The problem was that the CIA professionals in the Middle East were unenthusiastic about the war.
SI: Given the skepticism within the CIA in particular towards this war, who was it that ultimately pushed the agency to provide the intelligence to back up the assertions that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? and to generally support the program? Was it Vice President Cheney? Was it President Bush? Was it George Tenet who was the director at the time?
JR: It's difficult to tell. I think it's hard to quantify. It's always difficult to tell who said what to whom in these cases. But I think there was kind of a "go" fever.
SI: Here's what I'm wondering. A lot of people have asked if Vice President Cheney, in particular, went over to the CIA and pressured intelligence analysts -- or leaned on them in some way. You seem to write of a situation where Cheney hardly had to because George Tenet, Director of the CIA, was at least as enthusiastic about gathering whatever evidence the Administration wanted.
JR: Well, he seems to have created an atmosphere where material could go right to the White House.
SI: I want to end where your book begins, if that's all right! George W. Bush and his father have been seen as two very different presidents. What have you found out about the relationship between those two men?
JR: Well, I was told by some very good sources that there was friction between them over the President's willingness to listen to neo-conservatives and to shut out some of the more moderate voices. One is where they argued over the telephone and President Bush hung up on his father and then called back and apologized. It was kind of symbolic of a split between the very conservative administration and the more moderate wing of the Republican professional foreign policy people who have been upset over the past few years about the Bush administration.
