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Tavis: Tyler Drumheller spent more than twenty-five years in the CIA before retiring in 2005 with a rank equivalent to a four-star general. He's also the recipient of the agency's highest career award, the Distinguished Career Intelligence Medal. His new book about pre-war United States intelligence is called "On the Brink: An Insider's Account of How the White House Compromised American Intelligence." Mr. Drumheller, nice to have you on the program.

Tyler Drumheller: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Tavis: Every time I get a chance to talk to someone like you, that is to say, someone who has been on the inside of a particular operation knowing that the work that they were doing was being bastardized, being misused, being misappropriated, I often wonder how it is that you stay on the inside when you know that that's what's happening.

Drumheller: That's a very good question. I've been asked that before. You know, I was roughly thirty years in the CIA and, during that time, there were many things like this and you always think that it's going to get better and, before, it always had even with the Reagan administration or the similar things and others, part of the Clinton administration. This got worse and worse and, frankly, I had given myself up to the 2004 election. I said, if President Bush was re-elected, then I was going to retire, which is what I did.

Tavis: When you say it got worse and worse and worse, give me some texture to that.

Drumheller: Well, in the beginning, they turned the intelligence process on its head. They came with the idea of what they wanted to look for rather than the active. It's the classic example of the Cuban Missile Crisis where you get a story that comes in, it's very important, and then the White House reacts to it and goes forward.

In this case, they had their idea of what they were going to do set in the beginning. They came and looked through all the different intelligence that was available and picked - they called it cherry-picking; you hear that all the time - what they wanted to use. Even when we found out that the one particular source was a bad source and some of the others were all bad sources, they continued to hold on to that and to fight for that source.

At the same time, we developed another source that was, I think, a good source. It's been proven out over time and it was ignored. So in the end, I decided I wasn't having any effect anymore, it was time to go and pursued someplace else.

Tavis: Your answer to that question raises two questions that I want to follow up on. The first is, when you say they came looking to find the evidence to support their thesis or at least what they wanted to do - I don't want to make assumptions here. I think I know what you are talking about. But what were they looking for to under-gird?

Drumheller: At the end of the 1990s when the Clinton administration moved resources from Iraq to Iran and terrorism, and rightly so, I think, there was a group of people - neocons, for want of a better word - who later on ended up in various senior positions in the Bush administration who developed this idea that there was a level of unrest inside of Iraq below Saddam.

People were ready to rise up and would support the eventual growth for a liberal democracy there that could be spread through the Middle East. Well, most of that reporting was based on hypocritical information from Iraqi émigré groups in the states who had their axes to grind on this. There wasn't any real hard intelligence on it until they got this one particular source which really fed what they were doing.

But in the end, I think they didn't believe the American people would support a war to spread liberal democracy in the Middle East. That's too obscure and too vague. So that's where they began to focus on the idea of the weapons of mass destruction and that could be passed on to terrorist groups.

Tavis: What happens when they come looking for stuff that you guys inside the agency know is not credible, but they decide to use it anyway? As a guy on the inside, what do you do at that point? What can you do?

Drumheller: Well, what you do - I don't believe in leaking information in my whole career. That goes against everything because you don't know where you leak. I've had other retired agency people say to me that I should have leaked this to the press. You don't know what the effect is going to be to that, that you're going to put someone's life in jeopardy somewhere because you don't know all the hidden aspects of it.

But what you do is try and go as far up the chain as you can and assume that the people above you are going to do the right thing. John McLaughlin, Deputy Director of the agency, I briefed him on this a week before the Powell speech and he said, "You know, this guy is probably a fabricator. We can't use this information." And George Bennett, the night before the speech. Now at that point, he turned and said, "George, it was probably too late."

But still, if you had someone that's a senior officer call you and tell you something that you've already been told there's a question about, you know you shouldn't use this information and make sure it's not in there. I assumed that it had been taken out. I mean, I was naïve enough right up until I was watching Powell give the speech on television that it was being taken out. Then when that comes, as my executive assistant told me, I said, "Did we send them the wrong speech back? We didn't edit the speech?" They said, "No, they just didn't pay any attention to you." Then I realized that it was time for me to go.

Tavis: What are you thinking - I'm curious inside your head here - what are you thinking when you're watching your president say stuff to the American people and the world that you know is not credible? What are you thinking when you're watching the Secretary of State go to the U.N., to the world body, to make a case with evidence that you know isn't credible? What goes through your mind when you're watching this?

Drumheller: Well, it's extremely frustrating just on a personal level. It's just really angry. Then it's an idea that you feel like - and this is one of the other reasons that I didn't leave right away - because there's a lot of young officers, people out in the field.

That's one thing the American people can have confidence in is that, outside of the Washington political team, there are young people really doing the hard work out in the field. They risk their lives, put their families under stress and everything to collect this information and then they're not using it properly. That's another whole set of frustrations.

Then in the end, you just think, "What happened?" Because I am a great admirer of Colin Powell. I wanted him to run for president in 1996. It's one of the great tragedies. I believe this is going to be one of the great blunders of all times in America, maybe the greatest blunder of the twentieth century.

Tavis: I'll come back to that thought in just a second. Hold that. To your point, though, right quick before I lose it about Mr. Powell. I appreciate your candor about how you felt about Colin Powell and wanting him to run. Inside of an agency where you are a career officer, how do you separate your work and how that work is used from your own personal politics?

Drumheller: You have to. That's a key point. That's one of the things that's been compromised, one of the things that's been lost. Everything in Washington is so highly archly politicized right now that you're either with the administration or you're against them. If you're against them, you're stupid or you're disloyal, you know, that sort of thing. You have to get away from that.

Even in the Reagan administration, as politicized as the Reagan administration was and a lot of issues, Iran Contra and all that, they did manage. Even Casey, who was an arch politician, did keep the service away from the political level and you can't have the politicians directly involved with the officers.

What's happened is, over the last few years, you have - I think it was done so they could show off a little bit. Well, not show off, but show the good side of the agency to the Congressmen. But they now have Congressmen talk directly to case officers and directly to analysts and that way buys disaster.

Tavis: How do you feel when you're on the team responsible for delivering good intel when all of a sudden you guys become the bad guys and it was bad intel?

Drumheller: Well, failure was at my level and that's what I really felt. I think it was at the level of the policymaking level on up. You know, the intelligence process is collection, analysis and policies. The collection part of this was very good. It wasn't as much. We didn't have as much as we should have had, but we did have enough reporting that would have told them over time - and there are other things that I can't go into because they took them out, and rightly so probably - that there was enough time.

Saddam was a big geopolitical threat if they really wanted to build that case, to build up a force that could have - sort of a Gulf War type coalition. There's a lot of evidence that the Europeans and the French and others would have contributed large parts of this. But then the policy part of it broke down. So, yeah, the intelligence didn't fail. The part that failed was the part that the policymakers were involved in. You feel it's a real betrayal, like I say, again of the people who are really doing the work.

Tavis: You made a passing reference a moment ago, Tyler, to the things that they took out. You even said perhaps rightly so. They would be who?

Drumheller: This book was vetted over a year and a half. It took a year and a half to write it and to finish it with the involvement of the agency. They weren't particularly happy that I did it, but on the other hand, they were very professional about the way they took out anything that affected an ongoing operation now.

There were a couple of instances where they took out things that were my opinions. I went back and addressed it with them and they put them in. There were some areas that I disagreed with them on. There's one particular story, which I wish I could tell you, but I can't (laughter).

Tavis: (Laughter) So do I, but I'll ask a question about it, not knowing what it was or is. The subtitle suggests how the White House compromised American intelligence. As convinced as a reader might be about how we dropped the ball on intel around this war, how much more convinced would he be if the stuff that they took out had been left in?

Drumheller: Oh, he'd be a lot angrier.

Tavis: A lot angrier.

Drumheller: It has to do with the - there were some things that were done - I have to be careful. There were some things that were ignored. Intelligence said that the administration didn't even question whether it was right or not. They just ignored it, which had to do with the deployment of troops in certain areas. I won't say any more than that.

Tavis: I don't want to get you in trouble.

Drumheller: Don't get me in trouble.

Tavis: And I don't want my phone tapped. It probably already is with some of the guests I've had on this program (laughter), but I digress on that. Let me ask you, finally. Tell me two things. One, how bad it really is in retrospect and, going forward, could something like this happen again on Iran or North Korea where bad intel gets us into a drama and, God forbid, another war?

Drumheller: Well, I think the last election was a real Civics lesson, so I think the country is watching. I think it's less likely. But I was very concerned and I still am. There are a lot of parallels between Iran and Iraq and now it's the same thing. There's a lot of reporting coming in again from émigré groups that are saying, you know, there's all these people in Iran that want to rise up and, if we just bomb their nuclear sites, then they'll rise up against the Mullahs.

What happens is, it's very dangerous to depend on émigré reporting. It's also very dangerous to view war as an academic exercise. There are still a lot of people - I saw people on a talk show Sunday morning still viewing this as sort of an abstract academic thing when there are young kids getting their legs blown off or getting killed for it.

I think it is dangerous. I think the hope is that eventually - I don't think it's going to happen in this administration because I think it's just too hard for them to do - they're going to have to go back and start over again and basically go back to 1947 and rebuild it.

Tavis: Well, a new president might give a chance for a new and fresh start, at least on the intel front. The new best-selling book by Tyler Drumheller is "On the Brink: An Insider's Account of How the White House Compromised American Intelligence." He ought to know. He was on the inside for about thirty years. Mr. Drumheller, nice to have you on the program.

Drumheller: Thanks for having me.

Tavis: My pleasure. Up next on this program, actress Laura Dern. Stay with us.