Former CIA Director George Tenet skewers a number of administration war planners in his best-selling memoir, but he gives President Bush an unexpected boost by praising his decision-making.
A spate of prepublication news stories speculated that Tenet would target Bush in “At the Center of the Storm,” which focuses on his seven years as CIA director.
But Tenet stayed loyal to the man who kept him on as CIA chief after the 2000 election. Bush stuck with Tenet after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the face of withering criticism from three bipartisan panels. When Tenet resigned in 2004, the president honored him with the Medal of Freedom.
“Mr. Tenet calls it as he saw it in the book,” said Bill Harlow, Tenet’s spokesman at the CIA and his co-author. “He cites several areas in ‘At the Center of the Storm’ where administration officials did not serve the president or the country well.”
Tenet’s book is dotted with favorable comments about the president. He describes Bush as highly attentive during his top-secret briefings at the White House in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks.
“The president never became the action officer, but there was no doubt the leader was in the trenches with us. If you told him about an imminent operation on Monday, you could be certain after a few days he would ask about it, if we had not provided the necessary follow-up,” Tenet wrote.
Of the war-planning days immediately after the attacks, Tenet wrote, “George Bush was going [a hundred] miles an hour by then, completely engaged. If you couldn’t keep up, he wasn’t interested in you.”
Of the deteriorating situation in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, Tenet wrote, “The president was not served well, because the [National Security Council] became too deferential to a postwar strategy that was not working.”
This is not to say the White House likes the book.
Tenet wrote unfavorable profiles of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (failed to heed his terrorism warnings), Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld (on the sidelines during the Afghanistan war and disruptive at meetings) and Pentagon Policy Chief Douglas Feith (pushed unconfirmed intelligence on Saddam-al Qaeda links).
