George Tenet's Machiavellian Moment

George Tenet's tenure at the Central Intelligence Agency, which spanned the years 1995 until 2004 as deputy director and then director, was controversial even prior to the recent publication of his memoir, At the Center of the Storm. Tenet, gregarious and affable, blessed with a gift of gab and well able to mix smoothly with Washington politicians of both parties, was an enthusiastic director but had little knowledge of actual CIA operations at the working level. He had never actually served as an intelligence officer, instead starting his career as a congressional staffer and later moving on to the National Security Council and eventually the CIA. He was also well known to be averse to confrontation, an accommodator, rarely willing to challenge those in power, and he surrounded himself with like-minded subordinates. He did not, for example, take aggressive action when it was learned that his predecessor as director of central intelligence (DCI), John Deutch, had mishandled extremely sensitive information, and instead permitted Deutch to retain his security clearances and chair the Commission on the Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction that had been set up by the Clinton administration. Nor did he openly challenge the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans (OSP) headed by Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, which was producing and disseminating extremely questionable information in 2002 that helped make the case for war against Iraq. Tenet's silence regarding Feith was particularly troubling in that OSP's critique was based on the contention that the CIA was failing in its responsibilities and was not paying enough attention to information linking Saddam Hussein with al Qaeda, a hypothesis that Tenet surely knew was completely untrue.

Tenet had essentially two roles, one as the head of the CIA and the other as the face and voice of the intelligence community's sixteen separate components, of which the CIA was one. As the most senior manager at the CIA itself, Tenet had both successes and failures. His greatest success was the CIA-led invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001. On the minus side, he presided over the Clinton-era cost cuttings and politically correct restrictions on recruitment of agents that brought about the weakening of the Deputy Directorate of Operations, a process that led to the termination of nearly half of the agency's human reporting assets and resulted in many overseas stations being shut down or downsized. This reduction in overseas capabilities bore bitter fruit when al Qaeda struck the Khobar Towers in 1996 and two US embassies in Africa in 1998. The decline in overseas intelligence capabilities might also have contributed to the failure to learn in advance about India's 1998 nuclear test, the inability to disrupt the Pakistani A.Q. Khan nuclear-smuggling operation in its early stages, the faulty intelligence that led to the bombing of the pharmaceutical plant in Sudan in 1998, and the apparently mistaken bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999. But Tenet also deserves credit for beginning the rebuilding of the clandestine services after the al Qaeda attacks in 1996 and 1998 and against the USS Cole in 2000. One might reasonably argue that Tenet's greatest damage to the CIA has come with his book. His revelation of confidential conversations with policy makers, including the president, quite likely will mean that future administrations will not trust CIA directors to protect deliberations that should, by their very nature, remain secret.

Prior to 9/11, Tenet's performance against international terrorism was inconsistent. In 1998, he unilaterally "declared war" on al Qaeda, but sources at the CIA indicate that he did not, in fact, allocate any significant new resources to counterterrorism efforts. In summer 2001, he became aware of the urgency of the al Qaeda threat against the United States and briefed National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice that a major attack was imminent. She was not interested enough in the information to take any action, and Tenet, always a team player who was careful not to rock the boat, did not feel the need to brief President George W. Bush independently. Tenet has [End...