WASHINGTON: George Tenet, the former CIA director who assured President George W. Bush that finding unconventional weapons in Iraq would be a “slam dunk” will give his account of the conversation in a book to be published by HarperCollins, the publisher said on Wednesday.

The News Corp.-owned company said it agreed to publish a Tenet memoir that is tentatively entitled, At the Centre of the Storm. The release was expected late this year or early in 2007. There was no immediate word on the value of the deal.

A spokesman for Tenet declined to comment.

HarperCollins said the book would shed light on Tenet’s role at the CIA during the agency’s campaign against Al Qaeda that started in the 1990s, the Sept. 11 attacks, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the rise of the Iraqi resistance.

The book will also provide “the real context of Tenet’s own now-famous slam-dunk comment” about Saddam Hussein’s suspected prewar weapon of mass destruction cache, the publisher said.—Reuters