Book: W.H. Knew Iraq Had No WMDs

"Bush wanted to go to war in Iraq from the very first days he was in office. Nothing was going to stop that," Richer is quoted saying in the book.

The book also quotes Dearlove as saying about the march to war, that "the Cheney crowd was in too much of a hurry, really. Bush never resisted them quite strongly enough."

The White House today also denied the charge it ignored any warnings that Saddam Hussein possessed no weapons of mass destruction.

"As every report and commission on pre-war intelligence has concluded, the Saddam Hussein wanted his neighbors to believe he had weapons of mass destruction. In fact, he had previously used WMD to murder hundreds of thousands of his own people. Our intelligence estimates at the time and intelligence estimates from other nations believed that he still harbored such weapons. We know now that those estimates were wrong, but they were the estimates we all relied on," Fratto said.

Suskind writes that the CIA paid Habbush $5 million in "hush money" to not appear in public and disclose his pre-war warnings that Iraq had no WMD. The intel chief was a wanted man and was laying low in Jordan.

However, by the time Habbush was paid in October 2003, Suskind writes, "the White House had finally thought of a way to use Habbush."

"The White House had concocted a fake letter from Habbush to Saddam, backdated to July 1, 2001. It said that 9/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta had actually trained for his mission in Iraq -- thus showing, finally that there was an operational link between Saddam and al Qaeda, something the Vice President's Office had been pressing CIA to prove since 9/11 as a justification to invade Iraq," Suskind writes.

"This was creating a deception," Richer is quoted saying in the book.

According to the book, the letter was strategically leaked to the British newspaper The Sunday Telegraph which first reported it on December 14, 2003.

In a statement today, Tenet denied his agency fabricated the letter.

"There was no such order from the White House to me nor, to the best of my knowledge, was anyone from CIA ever involved in any such effort," he said.