US Secretary of State Colin Powell on Monday flatly rejected the assertion in a new book that the Saudi ambassador to the United States learned of the Iraq war plan before him last year.

"The suggestion that somehow a plan was presented to Prince Bandar that I was not familiar with is just flat wrong," Powell told reporters after meeting with Jordanian Foreign Minister Marwan Jamil Al-Muasher.

Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward sparked the controversy in his book "Plan of Attack," saying Powell had been "semi-despondent" in the run-up to the Iraq war because of his misgivings about going to war.

Woodward said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney told Bandar of the White House decision to go to war in a meeting on Jan. 11, 2003. Powell learned of the decision after the Saudi prince was informed, the book said.

"It was wrong. And I was aware that he was going to be briefed on the plan because I knew what we were going to be asking of him," Powell said.

Powell said the plan of which the Saudi ambassador was informed "had to do with our deployment and what we might need from the Kingdom with respect to our deployment," not a decision to go to war.

"I was intimately familiar with those deployment plans. I worked on them, I was consulted on them," Powell said.

Woodward insisted on CNN's "Larry King Live" program Monday night that Powell was not told of the decision to implement the plan until after the Jan. 11 meeting with Bandar. Bandar called the CNN program to dispute with Woodward, saying the author left out one important sentence that Rumsfeld and Cheney also said Bush had not made a decision yet.

"As he said last night...no decision was communicated to PrinceBandar of a decision on the part of the president to go to war," Powell said.  

Source: Xinhua