LESS THAN TWO WEEKS after what many consider the worst intelligence failure in U.S. history, George W. Bush went to CIA headquarters to give George Tenet a hug. In case anyone missed the message of the trip, the president was explicit. “George and I have been spending a lot of quality time together,” he said at the photo-op. “There’s a reason. I’ve got a lot of confidence in him, and I’ve got a lot of confidence in the CIA.” Though Bush’s opinion matters more than anyone else’s, it is not unique. Florida Republican Porter Goss, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and his Senate counterpart Bob Graham, a Democrat also from Florida, have both publicly supported Tenet. This may seem strange. Many Americans who have never given more than five minutes’ thought to the CIA and its mission are wondering what is going on. After all, the agency, established in 1947, exists largely to prevent national security disasters. The nature of the threat has changed–from communism to terrorism–and the post-Cold War years have brought something of an identity crisis to the CIA, but its mission is still to provide intelligence and strengthen national security. And it failed. So why does George Tenet get praised by the president and still have a job? There are several reasons, notable among them Tenet’s good relations with Congress, the difficulty in assigning blame for the multiple failures that permitted the September 11 attacks, and Tenet’s relationship with Bush’s father. All of them relate to Tenet’s career in intelligence. President Clinton nominated Tenet to run the CIA and the intelligence community in the spring of 1997. Clinton’s first choice, National Security Adviser Anthony Lake, had sparked a fierce battle in the Senate and eventually had withdrawn from consideration. Tenet presented no such problems. He had worked in the Senate for nearly a decade before taking a top intelligence position at the White House in Clinton’s first term. And at the time he was nominated, Tenet had been serving as acting director since the departure of John Deutch at the end of 1996. When Deutch left, the agency had been through four directors in five years. Deutch never wanted to run the CIA, and many inside and outside the agency viewed him as aloof and ineffective. Morale was at an all-time low. Tenet went to the CIA intent on changing that, and by most accounts he did. “George was probably the right person at that time,” says Vincent Cannistraro, former counterterrorism chief at the CIA. “He knew how to get the best out of people.” He made a point of being accessible and approachable. He talked to people walking the halls. He remembered names. He showed up at retirement parties for even mid-level CIA employees. “He’d just walk into the cafeteria and say, ‘Hey, do you mind if I join you for lunch?'” says a CIA analyst. “Is that important? I’d say it is.” CIA sources describe Tenet as generally conservative, a manager who listens to his subordinates. “Let me give you an example,” says a current CIA official, emphasizing that it is only hypothetical. “Let’s say we want to put some bugs in computers headed to a weapons facility in North Korea. The computers are coming from the Germans, and getting parts from the Italians, and we say to the Italians, let us put in these devices that in six months will screw up arms production at this North Korean facility. The Italians say okay, but the Office of General Counsel [at the CIA] says, ‘Wait a minute. How can you be sure these computers are going to a weapons plant and not an airport? How do you know they’re not going to cause planes to crash rather than screw up arms production?’ The lawyers say, ‘I don’t think we can do this.’ Tenet’s attitude is usually, ‘Let’s not take the chance.'” Tenet’s critics say this risk-aversion and morale-boosting may have come at a cost, or at least outlived their usefulness. “When he came in and tried to restore morale, he embraced the bureaucracy,” says Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA analyst specializing in the Middle East (and a frequent contributor to this magazine). “And when a bureaucracy runs away, often the least competent officers rise to the top.” Often, too, inertia takes over. Cannistraro, the former CIA counterterrorism chief, faults the agency “for not penetrating al Qaeda–for not even trying.” He calls its response to the terrorist challenge “very passive.” “The job is to deter terrorism,” he says, “not make arrests after the action.” But Tenet’s first three years running the agency were satisfactory enough to George W. Bush to make Tenet the only Clinton cabinet member to retain his position in the new administration. THE GOOD RELATIONSHIP WITH CONGRESS that helped Tenet win his position four years ago is helping protect it now. With a few notable exceptions–Senate Intelligence Committee vice chairman Richard Shelby chief among them–members of Congress continue to express their support for the CIA director. This doesn’t happen by accident. Tenet has been “tremendously effective [at] feeding and caring on Capitol Hill,” says Patrick Eddington, a former CIA analyst who works in government relations. Eddington adds, “His congressional affairs shop is very slick, and I admire them for that.” But friendly relations with the Hill wouldn’t be enough to save Tenet if all the blame for the recent intelligence failure were properly his. Instead, accountability must be spread among several agencies. “It’s the collective responsibility of the government, and maybe even society,” says Porter Goss. “It’s the border piece, it’s the air-safety piece, it’s the visa piece, it’s the law enforcement piece. Everyone shares that blame.” The FBI, after all, is responsible for domestic counterterrorism measures, and many of the hijackers had lived in the United States for years. The Immigration and Naturalization Service had trouble just putting together a list of the hijackers and their visa dates–and that was after the attacks. Those are big problems that have little to do with the CIA. Several CIA sources believe another reason Bush still backs his intelligence chief derives from the warm relationship between Tenet and the first President Bush. George H.W. Bush–who was director of central intelligence in Gerald Ford’s last year in office–got to know Tenet at the CIA briefings every director holds for all living former CIA heads. The two men hit it off. In 1998, early in Tenet’s tenure, CIA headquarters was renamed the George Bush Center for Intelligence. The senior Bush, who had been bitterly disappointed not to retain the intelligence job under Jimmy Carter, has argued for years that continuity is crucial in CIA leadership. One further factor that now favors Tenet–but could turn against him–is timing: Nearly everyone who has spoken out in favor of Tenet has made this argument. “When you’ve just taken a torpedo in your ship is not the time to be changing the captain of the ship,” said Sen. Graham. This is not the time to second-guess. Even Goss, who has repeatedly spoken strong words of support for Tenet, offers a telling qualifier. “He’s the right person, in the right place, at the right moment,” he says. “I’m not speaking to the job he’s doing, but the agency needs continuity and he enjoys the president’s confidence.” At some point, though, attention will turn to the job Tenet–and the CIA–are doing. And if there aren’t then some visible successes, George Tenet’s tenure could finally come to an end. Stephen F. Hayes is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard. October 29, 2001 – Volume 7, Number 7
