As politicos are pouring over what little has been released from former CIA Director George Tenet’s book, which wasn’t released until today mind you, I don’t really care what Tenet’s version of events are even if certain memories had to be completely made up or exist only in a time warp. What is interesting is his assessment of Al Qaida and Al Qaida plots.

According to Tenet, Al Qaida has a plan to “assassinate Vice President Al Gore with anti-tank missiles during a trip to Saudi Arabia, release cyanide in the New York subway system and procure weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons, from Pakistani nuclear scientists.”  It was Tenet’s suggestion though in 2001 “that a small nuclear weapon may have been smuggled into the United States” through the U.S. border with Mexico.

Tenet writes that U.S. intelligence agencies “established that Al Qaeda had clear intent to acquire chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons to cause mass casualties in the United States.”

According to Tenet, intelligence officials learned that Saudi extremist elements were planning to conduct a cyanide gas attack on the New York subway system in fall 2003 using a homemade device. But first, they requested permission from al-Qaida leaders.

“Chillingly, word came back from Ayman al-Zawahiri in early 2003 to cancel the operation and recall the operatives who were already staged in New York ‘because we have something better in mind.’ ”

The terrorist network made two separate efforts to persuade Pakistani scientists to provide it with nuclear weapons from their stockpile of about 50 nuclear weapons, highly enriched uranium and plutonium, and vast weapons infrastructure.

In 1998, Osama bin Laden, al-Qaida’s leader, was rebuffed, for unclear reasons. About two years later, he had better luck when al-Qaida reached out to a charity for Afghan refugees run by Pakistani nuclear scientists. Although some of the details of this effort have been previously reported, the extent of the effort went much further than what was publicly known.

In 2000, Tenet writes, the charity’s founder, Sultan Bashir-ud-Din Mahmood, and others at Pakistan’s nuclear weapons agency agreed to help Mahmood in his effort to share weapons of mass destruction with the Taliban leaders of Afghanistan.

In fact, Tenet said, U.S. intelligence learned that bin Laden and Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban’s leader, had met with Mahmood and an aide in August 2001 in Afghanistan.

Tenet describes the initial Pakistani investigation as “ill-fated” and writes that the Pakistanis treated the charity officials with deference in their interrogations.

So he went to Pakistan and met with Musharraf, warning about the outrage that would explode if it emerged that Pakistan was allowing nuclear scientists to help bin Laden acquire nuclear weapons.

Musharraf pooh-poohed the concerns, arguing that bin Laden and his associates were “men living in caves” who could not possibly take possession of such weapons, Tenet writes. Under interrogation, however, Mahmood subsequently confirmed the details of the August 2001 meeting with bin Laden.

At the same time, in the fall of 2001, Tenet writes, U.S. intelligence began picking up rumors from several reliable sources that a small nuclear device had been smuggled into the United States, for probable use in New York City. The Energy Department sent detection equipment to New York, he adds.

Tenet concludes that a nuclear detonation in a U.S. city is al-Qaida’s ultimate goal.

“I’m concerned this is where UBL and his operatives want to go,” he writes. “If they can arrange to set off a mushroom cloud, they make history. … My deepest fear is that this exactly what they intend.” (source)

Al Qaida did have a chemical weapons program in Afghanistan before it was destroyed and the Al Qaida leader in charge of the program killed in Damadola, but the extent of the program is not known.  Most trackers of the group’s attempts to produce chemical weapons are familiar with the video showing dogs in cages dying from some mysterious gas, or at least that is what is assumed.

While it has been reported before, another interesting excerpt posted above is that Ayman al-Zawahri called off the alleged cyanide attack.  Is that further proof OBL is merely the figurehead and not the leader of Al Qaida as I continually claim?

The CIA overall was woefully inadequate with regard to Al Qaida, and hopefully that has changed.  Tenet had a hand in those failures, however it is interesting to note it wasn’t until President Bush took office before the CIA Director was able to personally brief the president.  This provides hope rather than political positioning in that this newly-found dependence upon intelligence will be carried on through future administrations.  Hopefully the U.S. government has learned from their past failures just as the CIA has.