I just picked up Patrick Tyler's forthcoming book, A World of Trouble, about America's tortured relations with the Middle East, and the prologue contains this whopper of a scene, one that is quite devastating, if true: An enraged George Tenet, drunk on scotch, flailing about Prince Bandar's Riyadh pool, screaming about the Bush Administration officials who were just then trying to pin the Iraq WMD fiasco on him:
A servant appeared with a bottle. Tenet knocked back some of the scotch. Then some more. They watched with concern. He drained half the bottle in a few minutes. "They're setting me up. The bastards are setting me up," Tenet said, but "I am not going to take the hit."
And then this:
"According to one witness, he mocked the neoconservatives in the Bush administration and their alignment with the rlght wing of Israel's political establishment, referring to them with exaxperation as, "the Jews."
Tyler reports in a footnote that, when asked, Tenet initially denied staying at Prince
Bandar's palace, then denied that he had said anything in the pool. "He disputed the
remarks attributed to him and denied that his memory might have been affected by the
amount of alcohol he was reported to have consumed on top of a sleeping pill," Tyler
reports.
I'll ask around about this and post any responses I get. (theatlantic,
Jeffrey Goldbrg,12.16.2008) http://jeffreygoldberg.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/12/george_tenet_drunk_in_bandars.php