George Tenet: Portrait of a clawing careerist

Have you ever had a job you liked so much that you would let the United States launch an unnecessary pre-emptive war rather than risk losing it?

Me, neither.

But if former CIA director George Tenet has made anything clear in his latest round of book-promoting interviews, it's that he really liked his job. Really. A lot.

He liked it so much that he was careful, so careful, to make sure the boss was happy. He didn't want the boss to feel uncomfortable. Or pressured. Or challenged.

Maybe that's why, during the summer of 2001, when Mr. Tenet says he became so alarmed at intelligence suggesting an al-Qaeda plan for "multiple, spectacular attacks" on the United States, he never mentioned it to the president.

Mr. Tenet told CBS' Scott Pelley that he took his concerns to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, indicating, with visible contempt, that she dropped the ball by delegating this immensely pressing life-and-death matter to lower level officials.

Why, Mr. Pelley asked, didn't the director mention this alarming intelligence to the president of the United States during one of his daily face-to-face intelligence briefings in the Oval Office?

"That's not the way the government works," Mr. Tenet answered. "The president is not the action officer."

Is that right.

The director of the CIA wanted authorization to conduct military-style raids in Afghanistan, and it's nothing the president needs to know about?

Here's another interpretation of the same facts. Mr. Tenet covered himself by including all kinds of alarms in his written materials, but when the principals looked him in the eye and asked him for an executive summary, he minimized, downplayed, or neglected to mention the material he now says, rolling his eyes and raising his voice, was so obviously urgent.

If Mr. Tenet was so alarmed about al-Qaeda's plans for multiple, spectacular attacks on the United States, you would think he might have sent a memo to his people--his hard-working, dedicated, patriotic people, about whom he cannot say enough--reminding them to be on the lookout for known al-Qaeda members who manage to get into the United States. Then perhaps two of the 9/11 hijackers would have been tracked by the FBI instead of being filed away in the secret, inaccessible files of the CIA, where no one in law enforcement could know about them.

It was a mistake, Mr. Tenet said.

Well, he's not wrong about that. But not being wrong about that doesn't count as being right about something.

Neither does the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, which described the CIA's "high-confidence judgment" that Saddam Hussein had vast stockpiles of deadly chemical and biological weapons.

"We were wrong," Mr. Tenet said, "And we have to live with that."

How brave of him.

Much braver than he was in the Oval Office, when President Bush reviewed the case the CIA proposed to take to the public to convince the American people and the Congress that the invasion of Iraq was necessary to U.S. national security. "It's a slam dunk," Mr. Tenet said.

Now Mr. Tenet has explained that remark. He did not mean it was a slam dunk that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, he says. He meant it was possible to construct a slam-dunk case to persuade the public that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

That's his defense.

He desperately wants everyone to understand that he did not persuade the president there was slam-dunk evidence to justify the invasion of Iraq. He was only telling the president that he could assemble a case to make it look that way.

I think we understand.

He was perfectly willing to help the president of the United States mislead the country into a war by cobbling together bits of secret intelligence to create a false impression of an imminent threat.

He went to the United Nations with Secretary of State Colin Powell and sat behind him as Powell read a list of deadly weapons that Saddam Hussein was thought to possess. He did not tell the country what he told Scott Pelley on Sunday night, that Saddam Hussein had no operational relationship with al-Qaeda, that Iraq was not a state sponsor of terrorism, and that Saddam Hussein was not a threat to the United States no matter how many chemistry sets he had in his garage.

Did he tell the president?

We may never know the truth about that, but we do know this: he didn't resign.

The director of the Central Intelligence Agency watched as the president cited secret intelligence to justify a war against a country that the CIA believed to be no threat to the United States, and he didn't resign.

The evidence accumulates that Mr. Tenet looked the other way when the administration told its tales to the country. The infamous reference to Saddam Hussein's attempt to buy uranium in Africa made it into President Bush's State of the Union address after Mr. Tenet declined to read the president's speech before he gave it. "I delegated it to my executive assistant," he told Mr. Pelley. "I said, 'You guys handle the speech.' So I have to take my share of the responsibility for that."

He must have really liked that job. A lot.


Copyright 2007

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