Accounting for Tenet

David Aikman

David Aikman looks at the actions and explanations of former US Director of National Intelligence George Tenet.

Washington insiders have seen it happen so often that they roll their eyes every time it takes place. A national policy is deemed to have been a failure and an individual deeply involved with it resigns or is fired by the administration in office at the time. Then he attempts to redeem his reputation (and finances) by accepting a huge advance from a publisher for a tell-all book and by appearing on TV shows defending his reputation.

By saying this is what has happened with former CIA director George Tenet in the case of the publication of his book, At the Center of the Storm (advance $4 million), is not intended to depict the man as a scoundrel. 

I met George Tenet a few years ago, ever so briefly, outside his office in the CIA headquarters, when I was in the building to provide a briefing on a book I had written on China. He was, indeed, on the basis of that entirely superficial impression, everything that his book and various reviews suggest: a decent, convivial man, intelligent and alert, and pleasantly lacking in arrogance. The fact is, however, that he will go down in history as having been the Director of National Intelligence at the time of the worst intelligence failure in American history since Pearl Harbor. That intelligence failure consisted in not foreseeing, and of course not preventing, 9/11 terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center in September 2001.

Tenet in his book goes far to indicate that he warned the administration in July 2001 that al-Qaeda was planning something momentous and imminent in the U.S. The warning, he said, was delivered in a meeting with then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice in the White House. Why then, many have asked, didn’t he tell the President himself, with whom he met regularly on a daily basis? Because, Tenet declares in a remarkable instance of bureaucratic thinking eclipsing common sense, the President was not “the action officer.” Huh? And when “action officer” Condoleezza Rice failed to take action that might have forestalled 9/11, what did Tenet do? Nothing.

In reviews of his book, however, and in subsequent TV appearances to discuss it, Tenet has actually been pilloried less for the CIA’s intelligence failure over 9/11 than for his infamous “slam dunk” quotation. Tenet is alleged, in one of Washington Post editor Bob Woodward’s books on the Iraq war, to have said in a meeting with the President, prior to the Iraq invasion, that it was a “slam dunk” that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. In his book, and in an interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes, he claimed that the “slam dunk” comment was intended to refer to the President’s ability to “sell” the WMD allegations to the American people. The distinction will be lost on most people; if the WMD “evidence” couldn’t be sold to the American people—and to the world, for that matter—it was probably because the evidence wasn’t credible in the first place. But Tenet makes it clear that Vice President Cheney insured that “slam dunk” would forever be an albatross hanging around Tenet’s neck, because the administration allegedly needed a scapegoat for the failure of the Iraq WMD intelligence.

In the years since the war in Iraq evolved from an exercise in regime-changing to a dishearteningly unsuccessful effort to prevent Shia and Sunni sectarian militants from murdering each other by the hundreds every week, there are probably even more serious American intelligence failures to point to. Couldn’t anyone in the governmental brain-center of the world’s most powerful nation in history have predicted that governing Iraq after overthrowing its brutal dictator ought to be planned very, very carefully? Once again, Tenet suggests in his book that the CIA knew that Saddam Hussein, once overthrown in a conventional invasion, would unleash his supporters in the country on a ferocious urban guerrilla war against the American invaders. Was anybody in the U.S. government listening? Apparently not, at least within the Defense Department. A very senior Iraqi official who was in exile before the invasion of March 2003 insisted to me that he warned the Pentagon in advance of the need to protect Baghdad’s national treasures from looting immediately after the city had been captured by American forces. As everyone now knows, the national archeological museum was looted—and priceless treasures were stolen—in the hours and days after Saddam was overthrown.

Tenet, of course, cannot be blamed for this. It has become evident in the painful past four years of war in Iraq that the State Department was far more prescient than the Department of Defense over likely internal events in Iraq in the post-invasion era, but was consistently overruled by DOD which, under Donald Rumsfeld, seemed always to have the presidential nod more than State.

But Tenet needs to be held accountable for not standing up for his own convictions. The Director of National Intelligence of the U.S. is expected to thump tables and raise his voice at meetings if he believes that information of critical importance to the security of the U.S. is not being paid adequate attention. The ultimate bureaucratic weapon is to resign. Honorable American government servants in the past have done just this when they have felt the nation was in peril or on a dangerously mistaken policy course. Sometimes, the Director of National Intelligence has been fired, as happened with CIA Director Allen Dulles after the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in April 1961. Should Tenet have resigned after his dire warning to Condoleezza Rice in July 2001 was not really attended to? Perhaps.

Intelligence is always a nasty business. It requires ruthlessly honest analysis and often tough-minded behavior toward non-performing subordinates and ruthless action in the field against adversaries. Under Tenet, the CIA did one thing especially well, namely the infiltration of its agents into Afghanistan just prior to the overthrow of the Taliban. The American overthrow of that despicable Islamofascist regime was handled well—except for letting Osama bin Laden escape. But intelligence that is absolutely vital to the security of the nation needs to be handled with cold-blooded dedication that never permits bureaucratic considerations (“action officer” considerations) or personal chumminess among administration colleagues to get in the way of its deployment. Tenet was a decent and honest man at the head of a government agency that is probably most effective when it is intellectually honest, but also ruthless. At a time when the U.S. was being targeted by al-Qaeda, one of the most evil political forces since the Nazis ruled Germany, Tenet may simply have been, well, “too nice.”

It has always been a challenge for people of Christian faith to reconcile a job in intelligence with the requirements of gentleness and truthfulness that the Christian walk requires. On the other hand, does that mean that intelligence officers who are Christian must confirm to the stereotypes of brush-cut cynics that we often associate with intelligence professionals? Perhaps not. At Patrick Henry College, an evangelical Christian college where I teach, there are students with a major called “Strategic Intelligence.” They are all very nice kids. But some of them do indeed want to be spies.  

Dr. Aikman, a Senior Fellow of the Trinity Forum, was for many years senior correspondent for Time.

2 Responses (comments are closed) • Columns, David Aikman, War and Peace, Wed 20 Jun 2007