Reaping the Whirlwind
AT THE CENTER OF THE
STORM,
My Years at the CIA
By George Tenet with
Bill Harlow, from the Web, May 6, 2007
In his remarkable, important and
often unintentionally damning memoir, George Tenet, the former CIA chief,
describes a meeting with Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser, two
months before the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In much more vivid and emotional
detail than previously reported, Tenet writes that he had received intelligence
that day, July 10, 2001, about the threat from al-Qaeda that "literally made my
hair stand on end."
According to At the Center of the Storm, Tenet picked up the phone, insisted on
meeting with Rice about the threat from al-Qaeda, and raced to the White House
with his counter-terrorism deputy, Cofer Black, and a briefer known only as
"Rich B."
"There will be a significant terrorist attack in the coming weeks or months,"
Rich B. told Rice, and the attack would be "spectacular." Black added,
"This country needs to go on a war footing now." He said that President
Bush should give the CIA new covert action authorities to go after Osama bin
Laden and his al-Qaeda organization. After the meeting, Tenet's briefer
and deputy "congratulated each other," Tenet writes. "At last, they felt,
we had gotten the full attention of the administration."
Though Tenet was meeting almost daily with President Bush to give him an
intelligence briefing and an update on threat reports -- "extraordinary access,"
he labels it -- by his own account he did not take the request for action "now"
directly to the president.
During a CBS "60 Minutes" television interview that aired April 29,
correspondent Scott Pelley nailed the crucial question that Tenet leaves
unanswered in his book "Why aren't you telling the president, 'Mr. President,
this is terrifying. We have to do this now'? " Pelley asked Tenet.
"Because the United States government doesn't work that way," Tenet replied.
"The president is not the action officer. You bring the action to the
national security adviser and people who set the table for the president to
decide on policies they're going to implement."
Whoa! That's a startling admission. I'm pretty certain that
President Bush or any president, for that matter, would consider himself or
herself the action officer when it comes to protecting the country from
terrorism. I can already see the 2008 presidential candidates promising,
"I will be your action officer on terrorism and security."
To be fair to Tenet and the CIA, they had been working their tails off for
years, often successfully, to thwart terrorists around the globe. But
Tenet should have been the instant messenger to the Oval Office in the summer of
2001. His lapse and apparent decision not to carry the request for action
to the president himself doesn't mean that the 9/11 attacks might have been
averted. But the failure does reveal Tenet's limitations. He was the
president's intelligence officer, the top man responsible not only for providing
information, but also for devising possible solutions to threats.
A dedicated, often innovative and strong leader beloved by many at the CIA,
Tenet nevertheless was hampered by a bureaucrat's view of the world, hobbled by
the traditional chain of command, convinced that the CIA director's "most
important relationship with any administration official is generally with the
national security adviser."
No. Your most important relationship is with the president.
How he rose to his position is telling. The staff director of the Senate
Intelligence Committee, then the Clinton White House NSC intelligence director
and then deputy CIA director, he became CIA Director in 1997 basically because
President Clinton's first choices could not be confirmed. A strong people
person, Tenet did much to improve CIA morale and lay out a rebuilding program,
but in this memoir of his seven-year tenure as CIA director, he wonders whether
he was up to the job. "No previous experience had prepared me to run a large
organization," he writes. "I was no Jack Welch and I knew it."
Nonetheless, Tenet oversaw significant successes, most notably planning and
executing the paramilitary assault to dislodge al-Qaeda from its Afghanistan
sanctuary in the weeks and months after 9/11 -- essentially the action he had
proposed to Rice in the meeting of July 10, 2001.
Full disclosure: In discussions with Tenet as a reporter for this paper, I many
times urged him to write his memoir, and, after he resigned from the CIA, I even
spent a day with him and his co-writer, Bill Harlow, in late 2005 to suggest
questions he should try to address. Foremost, I hoped that he would provide
intimate portraits of the two presidents he had served as CIA director -- George
W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Instead, he has adhered to the rule of CIA directors:
protect the president at all costs.
That said, several chapters by themselves are worth the price of the book:
Chapter 14, "They Want to Change History," lays out al-Qaeda's and other
terrorist groups' persistent efforts to obtain strategic weapons of mass
destruction, including nuclear devices. Reading it is scary, and Tenet makes a
compelling case that terrorism inside the United States is not over. Chapter 15,
"The Merchant of Death and the Colonel," is an insider's chilling summary of the
dismantling of the secret nuclear proliferation network run by A.Q. Khan, the
father of the Pakistani nuclear program.
Tenet is candid about how the CIA regularly dispensed money to assist in the
capture of al-Qaeda figures. "We would show up in someone's office, offer our
thanks, and we would leave behind a briefcase full of crisp one-hundred-dollar
bills, sometimes totaling more than a million in a single transaction."
He also provides further documentation that the Bush national security team was
dysfunctional and members didn't communicate among themselves very well or at
all. This lack of communication becomes apparent in his own understanding of
crucial decisions: "One of the great mysteries to me is exactly when the war in
Iraq became inevitable," he writes. He doesn't know when Bush decided to go to
war. But he writes that in September 2002, "there was no decision to go to war
yet" and that by December 2002 the war "decision had already been made." He
provides no evidence or statements to support these claims, and I think he is
wrong about the latter date. (From my reporting and interviews with Bush and the
other key players, I believe Bush finally decided to go to war in early January
2003.)
On Aug. 26, 2002, seven months before the invasion of Iraq, Tenet says he was
totally surprised when Vice President Cheney said during a speech to the
Veterans of Foreign Wars that "there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has
weapons of mass destruction." Cheney was effectively issuing his own National
Intelligence Estimate -- he was treading on Tenet's territory. "The speech also
went well beyond what our analysis could support," Tenet writes, and he
acknowledges that he should have privately told Cheney so.
In truth, Tenet should have raised hell on such a critical issue -- privately
and publicly. He writes that his silence implied agreement. But five weeks later
Tenet issued the famous 90-page National Intelligence Estimate that essentially
reached the same wrong conclusion: "Baghdad has chemical and biological
weapons."
One of Tenet's most baffling fixations has to do with his assertion to the
president and the administration's war cabinet on Saturday, Dec. 21, 2002 (three
months before war), that Iraq's WMDs were "a slam dunk case." This was first
reported in my 2004 book, Plan of Attack.
Tenet disputes the version I reported, acknowledging now that he said "slam
dunk," but denying that he rose from the couch in the Oval Office and threw his
arms in the air. The gathering was "essentially a marketing meeting," he writes,
to decide what intelligence could be made public to prove Iraq had WMDs. He says
my recounting "ignited a media bonfire, and I was the guy being burned at the
stake."
Over the years, Tenet has been all over the lot on this "slam dunk" comment,
first denying he ever said it, then later saying he did not recall it but would
not dispute that it happened. In 2005, I participated in a public forum in Los
Angeles with Tenet before an audience of 5,000 people. Asked about "slam dunk,"
he replied, "Those are the two dumbest words I ever said." He does not include
that in his book.
Instead, he recounts how he called Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff,
and complained that the leak of the "slam dunk" story "made me look stupid, and
I just want to tell you how furious I am about it. For someone in the
administration to now hang this around my neck is about the most despicable
thing I have ever seen in my life."
Tenet incorrectly suggests that I had one source for this report. There were at
least four firsthand sources. When I interviewed President Bush in December
2003, he quoted the "slam dunk" phrase four times, and then in a fifth citation
the president said, "And Tenet said, 'Don't worry, it's a slam dunk.' And that
was very important." I provided this portion of the transcript to Tenet.
"I truly doubt President Bush had any better recollection of the comment than I
did," Tenet writes in At the Center of the Storm, "Nor will I ever believe it
shaped his view about either the legitimacy or timing of waging war." Tenet
could be right about that, but he keeps trying to get himself off the hook for
that comment. "In a way President Bush and I are much alike," he writes. "We
sometimes say things from our gut, whether it's his 'bring 'em on' or my 'slam
dunk.' I think he gets that about me, just as I get that about him."
But 10 weeks after the "slam dunk" comment, Tenet and the CIA provided Secretary
of State Colin Powell with the intelligence he used in his famous Feb. 5, 2003,
presentation to the United Nations and the world, arguing that Saddam had WMD.
Tenet writes that he believed it was a "solid product." That, of course, is a
less memorable and less colorful way of saying "slam dunk."
Of Powell's U.N. speech, Tenet writes, "It was a great presentation, but
unfortunately the substance didn't hold up. One by one, the various pillars of
the speech, particularly on Iraq's biological and chemical weapons programs,
began to buckle. The secretary of state was subsequently hung out to dry in
front of the world, and our nation's credibility plummeted."
In truth, Powell blames Tenet for hanging him out to dry. Though Tenet takes
some responsibility for his and his agency's mistakes, he often dodges it in his
book. "Maybe it's just the way Washington works," he laments when he gets blamed
for intelligence failures. Or maybe it's just accountability.
He spends nine pages dissecting how a senior CIA officer, Tyler Drumheller, and
the German intelligence service didn't alert him to the fabrications of a source
(code-named, appropriately enough, Curve Ball) who alleged that Iraq had mobile
biological labs. This was a centerpiece of Powell's U.N. presentation, yet Tenet
offers no apology to Powell.
But the other critical intelligence assessment he didn't carry to the Oval
Office -- surely the most critical of his career -- was his misgivings about
invading Iraq. As I reported in my third book on Bush, State of Denial, in the
months before the invasion in the fall of 2002, Tenet confided to one of his top
aides, John O. Brennan, that he thought it was not the right thing to do. "This
is a mistake," Tenet told Brennan.
But he never said as much to the commander in chief. And he doesn't say it to
readers of his memoir.
Bob Woodward
Washington Post Assistant Managing
Editor, Investigations
Tuesday, May 8, 2007; 3:00 PM
"To be fair to Tenet and the CIA,
they had been working their tails off for years, often successfully, to thwart
terrorists around the globe. But Tenet should have been the instant messenger to
the Oval Office in the summer of 2001. His lapse and apparent decision not to
carry the request for action to the president himself doesn't mean that the 9/11
attacks might have been averted. But the failure does reveal Tenet's
limitations. He was the president's intelligence officer, the top man
responsible not only for providing information, but also for devising possible
solutions to threats." -- Bob Woodward
Washington Post Assistant Managing Editor of Investigations Bob Woodward, will
be online Tuesday, May 8, at 3 p.m. ET to discuss former CIA Director George
Tenet's book, "At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA." HarperCollins.
549 pp. $30
Bob Woodward, an assistant managing editor of The Washington
Post, has coauthored or authored 14 books.
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