Reaping the Whirlwind

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."