Former CIA Chief Denies Accusations He Misled Powell Before Iraq Invasion

April 30, 2007 — -- Former CIA director George Tenet told Charles Gibson he feels "great regret" when he looks back at the photos of Colin Powell at the United Nations, which were taken as the former secretary of state made the case for an Iraq invasion in 2003 and claimed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

"The secretary of state of the United States is in front of the world, and ultimately, you know, his credibility's undermined because the data that he based his speech on, doesn't hang together. It's a low moment," Tenet said. "We pride ourselves our whole lives on being accurate and being right … You don't look back on it fondly."

Tenet left his post with the CIA in 2004 before the presidential election. He writes about his years there in the book "At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA," which is drawing criticism by some in the Bush administration.

Powell's Feb. 6, 2003, U.N. speech, which led to the Iraq invasion, was based on what turned out to be false information from a fraudulent source regarding the existence of WMDs in Saddam Hussein's arsenal. Tenet refutes accusations that he knew the data was false.

"That's just repugnant to me, I would never let the secretary of state … someone who I was very close to, who represented the United States of America, in front of the eyes of the world, go out there and make a false statement. Never," Tenet said.

But in an interview with ABC News earlier this year, Powell's former Chief of Staff Col. Lawrence Wilkerson stated that the former secretary of state was intentionally misled about WMDS in Iraq.

Tenet said it's not true: "It's really serious for someone to say the director and the deputy director, essentially, cooked the books to go make the case for war and didn't tell the secretary of state. There's no way on this God's green Earth that that would ever happen, none."

The false intelligence came from a CIA source in Germany known as Curveball, who, ABC's Brian Ross reported, is currently being protected by German intelligence.

Tenet said he trusted the CIA source at the time, but would later learn the German intelligence community had tried to warn him about Curveball's credibility.