Secrets and lies.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration - Book review

State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration By James Risen Free Press. 240 Pages. $26.

I'm grateful to James Risen. He's one of the two New York Times .reporters who broke the scandal about Bush's warrantless domestic wiretapping. And the impending publication of this book earlier in the year may have finally persuaded the Times editors to print the urgent and vital story about the National Security Agency (NSA) spying. The details are all here, but they amount to only one chapter of this fascinating, damning book that serves as an indictment of George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, George Tenet, and Condoleezza Rice. It belongs on the shelf with the volumes of evidence produced by Richard Clarke, Paul O'Neill, Seymour Hersh, and other chroniclers of the Bush age.

Risen tells some amazing stories. So let's get to the juicy parts first.

In the lead-up to the war, Risen reports that the CIA's assistant director for the collection of intelligence wanted to gather information about Iraqi scientists who had at one time worked on weapons of mass destruction. So he sent thirty relatives living abroad to Iraq to talk with them. "They all reported back to the CIA that the scientists had said that Iraq's programs to develop nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons had long since been abandoned." (The italics are Risen's.) But so eager were the higher-ups at the CIA to go along with Bush's war plans that "CIA officials ignored the evidence and refused to even disseminate the reports from the family members to senior policymakers in the Bush Administration," Risen says.

While the manhunt was on for Saddam Hussein, the United States captured his secretary (in puerile Bush parlance, "The Ace of Diamonds"), who told his interrogators that "Saddam fled Baghdad by driving through a U.S. military checkpoint without being recognized."

In his chapter about Iran, Risen reveals two disastrous CIA blunders. The first happened in 2004, when an officer at Langley mistakenly e-mailed a document with data on the entire U.S. spy network in that country to an Iranian on the CIA payroll, who happened to be a double agent. "Several of the Iranian agents were arrested and jailed, while the fate of some of the others is still unknown," he writes.

Even more shocking, the CIA back in 2000 actually delivered nuclear blueprints to the Iranians. The cockamamie idea, code-named "Operation Merlin," was to have a former Soviet nuclear scientist deliver the blueprints, which intentionally had a defect in them, so as to send the Iranians down the wrong trail and to let U.S. officials see how far along they were. The Russian, with some difficulty, made the delivery, but he kindly alerted the Iranians that there was a defect in there somewhere, which he had readily discovered himself. Iranian scientists conceivably would have been able to figure that out, too, and now they had the specs on a nuclear warhead.

The CIA is not the only Keystone Cop that comes in for criticism. As Seymour Hersh has reported, Donald Rumsfeld created his own covert action paramilitary squads that were off the books--and unaccountable. Risen takes it from there. "The new cowboys at the...