THE career of America’s chief intelligence officer appeared destroyed last night after he was forced by the White House to take the blame for a false claim about Iraq’s weapons programme in President Bush’s State of the Union address in January.

George Tenet, the CIA Director, took full responsibility for the false claim after Mr Bush and Condoleezza Rice, his National Security Adviser, blamed him for its inclusion in the speech.

Mr Tenet’s position had already appeared untenable after an extraordinary day in which the White House launched a ruthless counter-attack over claims that Mr Bush may have knowingly lied to the American public when he said in the speech that Iraq had tried to buy uranium from Africa.

After being effectively thrown to the wolves by Mr Bush and Dr Rice, Mr Tenet issued a statement in which he said that the CIA approved the bogus claim in the address.

“I am responsible for the approval process in my agency. The President had every reason to believe that the text presented to him was sound,” Mr Tenet said.

Mr Tenet said that CIA officials had reviewed portions of the draft speech and raised concerns with national security aides at the White House that prompted changes in language concerning allegations that Iraq sought to buy uranium from Niger. But he said that the CIA officials had failed to stop the remark from being uttered.

Mr Tenet said despite conerns over the intelligence, “agency officials in the end concurred that the text in the speech was factually correct, i.e. that the British government report said that Iraq sought uranium from Africa. This should not have been the test for clearing a presidential address.”

The furore over the speech was triggered by last week’s White House admission that the claim should never have been included in the address.

On Capitol Hill, where the day’s events caused a sensation and brought calls from Democrats for a congressional inquiry, congressmen had demanded to know why the claim made its way into the speech.

In anonymous briefings to the US media on Thursday, CIA officials insisted that the agency explicitly told the White House that the claim was false before the speech.

Mr Bush, taking time out from his Africa tour, told reporters: “I gave a speech to the nation that was cleared by the intelligence services”.

Dr Rice appeared to seal Mr Tenet’s fate by saying: “The CIA cleared the speech in its entirety. If the CIA, the Director of Central Intelligence, had said: ‘Take this out of the speech’, it would have been gone.”

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