Rumsfeld to tell all about Iraq in January memoir

Donald Rumsfeld is to release his memoirs in January next year, his publisher says. And the book's title, Known and Unknown: A Memoir, a play on his famous remark about whether Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, suggests it will not shy away from Iraq.

Publisher Adrian Zackheim said yesterday: "Like Donald Rumsfeld himself, this memoir pulls no punches." As the ultra-hawkish defence secretary under George W Bush, Rumsfeld was one of the prime agitators for the 2003 invasion.

Rumsfeld's is a long political career. He was both the youngest and oldest defence secretary in US history: youngest, at 43, when he served under Gerald Ford; oldest when he joined the Bush administration.

As Ronald Reagan's special envoy to the Middle East in 1983, Rumsfeld was filmed shaking Saddam Hussein's hand in Baghdad. The US supplied arms to Saddam that year as Iraq fought Iran.

According to Ben Smith of Politico.com, Known and Unknown starts with that infamous handshake, which would come back to haunt Rumsfeld years later.

The memoir will apparently be accompanied by a website of supporting material. Keith Urbahn, a close aide of Rumsfeld, told Smith: "This remarkable story will be supported and amplified by the release of thousands of pages of never before seen memos and previously classified documents that put the reader in the moment.

"The availability of the documents on a website will let sceptics make their own judgments based on the contemporary information Rumsfeld had at his disposal."

It is thought the January release ­ which will mean the former defence secretary misses out on the Christmas sales ­ is a deferential nod to his old boss¹s own memoir. George W Bush¹s Decision Points is due out this November.

Rumsfeld, now 78, looks fit and relaxed on the cover of Known and Unknown, where he poses in jeans and fleece at his mountain ranch. The book's title, meanwhile, refers to apparently off-the-cuff remarks he made at a 2002 press conference on Iraq.

Asked about reports that the country did not possess weapons of mass destruction, Rumsfeld told reporters: "There are known knowns: there are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns - that is to say, there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns; there are things we do not know we don't know."

It seems this gnostic remark will be Rumsfeld's epitaph. It caused so much amusement at the time that one magazine even laid it out as poetry, with strategic line-breaks. ·