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I was contemplating a new section called “Sunday Tenet Blogging” where I patiently comb through Tenet’s memoir, picking our interesting chapters or stories for scrutiny.

Yesterday was supposed to deal with his account of the disarmament of Libya … at least until I ran into another, incredibly stupid error in Tenet’s book.

At the end of his chapter on the AQ Khan network and Libya, entitled “The Merchant of Death and the Colonel,” Tenet tells this amusing little vignette:

By mid-December [2003] enough progress had been made that the deal [with Libya] would soon become public. Even that was a carefully orchestrated dance; Gadhafi would first announce to his own people that he had decided to renounce hs WMD programs. Then Prime Minister Blair was to make public comments welcoming the news, to be followed by remarks from President Bush. The timing was tightly negotiated for December 19. And then, at the last minute, word came from Libya that the colonel wanted to delay. Uh oh, we thought. He is about to pull the rug out from under this deal. But the explanation turned out to be a simple one. The Libyan national soccer team was playing on television that night, and Gadhafi didn’t want to annoy the fans by breaking into coverage of an important game with an announcement about something most Libyans didn’t care about, weapons of mass destruction.

You see where this is going. Nope, the Libyan national soccer team did not play on December 19. Go look it up in the FIFA Database yourself (something that Tenet’s co-author and staff might have done).

Sigh.

A version of the soccer story first appeared in the British press, in a story by Andy McSmith in The Independent entitled, “Thinking the Unthinkable: How Libya Returned to the Fold”:

In Whitehall, meanwhile, they were just as anxiously monitoring the Libyan media, waiting to hear that the Foreign Minister had spoken. They were expecting the announcement early in the evening, but it appears that there was a vital football match in progress in Libya, and Mr Shalqam waited until after the final whistle before releasing his announcement at about 9pm British time. Then the translators had to get to work, and senior staff at the Foreign Office had to check that the statement was exactly as agreed. At last, at about 9.55pm, Mr [David] Hill [Tony Blair’s Director of Communications] received the call he had awaiting – just five minutes before the start of the BBC’s main news bulletin.

That version of events is more or less plausible. Libya did have soccer games taking place on December 19th (Round 10 of 26 in the Libyan Premier League). So, it seems, that the announcement was broadcast after the game.

Anyway, you can listen the announcement in Arabic on the BBC website, as well as read the Libyan, British and American statements.

Bush made his announcement 5:32 EST—a few hours after the Libyan announcement.

So, I am reading my copy of George Tenet’s At the Center of the Storm.

I turn to the account of the strike on Dora Farm first. Tenet offers the standard account—embellished by an odd new detail here, an occasional defense of his own role there—when Tenet says that “targets were being passed to B-2s …”

Wait a minute.

Then a couple of sentences later, “a number of bombs from the B-2s …”

The strike at Dora Farm—according to every other source including Plan of Attack, Cobra II, The Iraq War, and American Soldier—was conducted with F-117s.

Adam Hebert in Air Force Magazine profiled the strike and the pilots— Lt. Col. David F. Toomey III and Maj. Mark J. Hoehn—complete with pictures of the planes landing after the mission.

The F-117 isn’t just a passing detail, either, in most accounts. Air Force personnel had developed a novel way to drop a pair of bunker busters from a single plane, had already loaded one aircraft when the intelligence came in, dramatically reduced mission planning time and executed a very daring strike. The Air Force performed superbly, and in all the accounts of that performance the aircraft were F-117s.

So, I guess what I am saying is, this looks an awful lot like a careless error in a book that is supposed to form the basis of Tenet’s defense of himself.

Not a good start.

I guess I am just feeling defensive of the F-117 because I’ve been reading Ben Rich’s memoir, Skunk Works, about the development of the stealth fighter.

AP Special Correspondent Charles J. Hanley has a readable, accessible summary of the Iraq WMD debacle in the Guardian.

Hanley opens with an anecdote that I haven’t seen before:

Beneath the giant dome of a Baghdad palace, facing his team of scientists and engineers, George Tenet sounded more like a football coach than a spymaster, a coach who didn’t know the game was over.

“Are we 85 percent done?’’ the CIA boss demanded. The arms hunters knew what he wanted to hear. “No!’’ they shouted back. “Let me hear it again!’’ They shouted again.

The weapons are out there, Tenet insisted. Go find them.

Veteran inspector Rod Barton couldn’t believe his ears. “It was nonsense,’’ the Australian biologist said of that February evening last year, when the then-chief of U.S. intelligence secretly flew to Baghdad and dropped in on the lakeside Perfume Palace, chandelier-hung home of the Iraq Survey Group.