Last week, George Tenet’s memoir was ranked No. 5 on Amazon’s best-seller list, wedged between “Your Destiny Switch: Master Your Key Emotions and Attract the Life of Your Dreams,” and “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.”

Some company. He’ll probably make a killing.

That wasn’t Tenet’s plan, of course. The former CIA chief wants redemption more than profits.

But judging from the initial responses to “At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA,” it looks like he’ll have to settle for the cash.

His book has provoked a collective national retch, with cartoons showing him making money on the backs of dead U.S. soldiers and people asking why he didn’t speak out sooner about the administration’s misuse of intelligence — when it might have counted.

So far, he’s shrugged off the arrows.

“People are always going to think what they’re going to think,” the wonky jock told PBS’ Jim Lehrer last Thursday night, May 3. “The only people I care about are the men and women I led. I think I know what they think.”

Maybe not.

Lehrer asked about the half dozen former CIA officials who signed a joint letter deploring Tenet’s book, as well as Michael Scheuer, former head of the agency’s Osama bin Laden unit, who wrote in The Washington Post that, “We shouldn’t buy his attempts to let himself off the hook.”

“Well, Jim, none of them were — none of those six worked with me,” Tenet said.

But one who did has now come forward to call Tenet — more in sorrow than anger — a liar.

Tyler Drumheller, head of the Clandestine Service’s Europe Division when he retired in 2004, says Tenet’s assertion that he didn’t know that a key intelligence source for the attack on Iraq was bogus is “a lie.”

“This is a defense that he and Harlow cooked up,” Drumheller said in an interview last week, referring to Tenet and his writing assistant, former CIA spokesman Bill Harlow.

Their point of contention pivots on the now notorious episode involving “Curveball,” code name for an Iraqi refugee in the hands of German intelligence, who claimed that Saddam Hussein had a fleet of secret mobile germ warfare laboratories.

A number of CIA analysts believed in the information from Curveball, relayed by the Germans, because his description of germ-war equipment matched what was available in open scientific literature — as if the “agent” couldn’t have looked it up himself and regurgitated it to credulous listeners.

More importantly, CIA officers hadn’t been able to grill Curveball on their own. The BND, Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, wasn’t allowing the agency access.

“There were several reasons,” Drumheller recalled. “One, it was operational pride. Their answer was, you know, ‘If we asked to see one of your operational sources, would you?’ And the answer would be no. So there was a little of that.

“But two, the main reason, was embarrassment.”

In the fall of 2002, Drumheller had plumbed his German counterpart about Curveball over lunch in Washington.

Up went a red flag.

“Well, just between us,” the German said, according to Drumheller’s account, “and I’ll deny it if it ever comes out, we have a lot of doubts about this guy. He’s a very erratic character. We’ve had to move him a number of times. And it’s a single source whose reporting can’t be validated, and I personalty think he’s a fabricator.”

The BND honchos back in Germany won’t let you talk to him, the German added, but “it’s not really worth” trying anyway.

Unknown to Drumheller then, and to the public until right now, the Germans had actually fired Curveball.

They didn’t know where he was, and they didn’t really care. He was baggage. If the Americans thought he was credible, that was their problem.

In George Tenet’s telling, he hardly heard about Curveball.

“I’ve since learned that there were debates between our analysts and our intelligence collectors about the case,” he writes, nearly yawning.

He says he heard that some on the clandestine side “had a gut feeling” that Curveball wasn’t straight, but that was it.

That doesn’t pass the horse-bray test.

What is credible is that Drumheller, a senior intelligence official with 30 years in the spy business, says he immediately told headquarters about his lunch with his German counterpart.

And that soon, “all hell broke loose, or as loose as it can be in the sober headquarters of CIA headquarters.”

“I can’t emphasize enough the violent nature of the debate [over Curveball] inside the agency” that ensued, Drumheller says.

The e-mails were flying — between the CIA’s Berlin station and Washington, between the Clandestine Division’s doubters and the Intelligence Division’s believers, between Drumheller and the top aide to Tenet’s deputy John McLaughlin, between Drumheller and Tenet’s chief of staff — all through the fall.

“And if George wasn’t aware of it at that point,” in December 2002, Drumheller says — two months before Secretary of State Colin Powell’s fateful presentation of the (internally) discredited information to the United Nations — “then he’s derelict. Because his chief of staff is aware of it, the woman who was his special assistant is aware of it,” and others. “And there were all these e-mails about it,” cited by the Robb-Silverman Commission, which investigated U.S. intelligence failures relating to Iraq’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction.

“These documents show that they and their staffers were well aware of the problems with Curveball,” Drumheller says. “In fact they knew before I got involved in September 2002.”

A CIA spy had slipped into a German doctor’s examination of a very hungover Curveball back in 2000, and came away with deep reservations about the young man’s stability.

In the face of all this, Tenet maintains in his book that he never heard serious doubts about Curveball, either before Jan 28, 2003, when President Bush alleged Iraq had biological weapons labs, or a week later, when he took his seat, at Powell’s insistence, directly behind him for the U.N presentation.

“No such report was disseminated, nor was the issue ever brought to my attention,” Tenet writes.

“That’s just a lie,” Drumheller responds, exasperated, reliving the nightmare. He vividly remembers making last-minute pleas, first to Tenet’s deputy, John McLaughlin, then to Tenet himself.

“To my astonishment,” Drumheller remembers, McLaughlin “appeared to have no idea that there were any problems with Curveball.”

In retrospect, he was faking it, Drumheller thinks. “They had already decided to leave the Curveball material in the speech.”

(Last week McLaughlin joined a half dozen other former CIA officials in a public letter that called the attacks on Tenet’s book “bitter, inaccurate and misleading.”)

Tenet, on the other hand, did seem cognizant of problems with Curveball.

Late on the eve of Powell’s U.N. presentation, the phone rang at Drumheller’s house in suburban Virginia.

It was Tenet, asking for the telephone number of the chief of British intelligence, Drumheller recalled in his own memoir (written with CQ’s Elaine Monaghan), “On the Brink.”

Before they rang off, Drumheller made one last stab at Curveball.

“Look, as long as I’ve got you,” he recalls telling Tenet, “and I’m sorry to have to spring this on you, but make sure you look at the final version of the speech because, you know, there are some problems with the German reporting.”

He knew Tenet had been wrestling for days with the White House over what would be in the speeches making the case for war.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah , don’t worry about it,” Tenet said. “We’re exhausted. I have to go.”

Drumheller sighs.

“The real issue,” he says, “is that they couldn’t go back to the president and tell him they were wrong.”

Four years later, Tenet may have reopened a can of worms with his denials, creating problems that are potentially much more difficult for him than living with the public’s disgust over his book.

Congressional Democrats, for example, may well want to put Tenet under oath for his side of the Curveball story, as they are attempting to do with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on another matter of pre-war intelligence, the phony claim that Iraq was buying uranium from Niger.

All of which leaves Drumheller struggling to understand why Tenet and McLaughlin just don’t come clean now, make a break with the past.

“They could just say we made a mistake,” he says: They could simply say, “we believed the analysts over the operators, and we made a mistake.”

So why, I asked the veteran operator, who spent a lifetime in the shadows, didn’t they just do that?

“They can’t,” he rued. “They’re too far in now.”

Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.