George Tenet sealed his fate long ago when he allowed himself to become "part of the team" in the Bush administration. Veteran CIA analyst Ray McGovern says that in working to provide the intelligence the president wanted, Tenet ignored the vital fact that intelligence reporting must be done "without fear or favor."
Ray McGovern was a CIA analyst for 27 years, serving from the administration of John F. Kennedy to that of George H. W. Bush. He is a member of the steering group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
You could see what was in the works for CTA Director George Tenet by the way Bush administration officials promoted Plan of Attack by Bob Woodward. Woodward, playing the role of court historian, portrays the president as dissatisfied after a briefing on weapons of mass destruction in late 2002 by Tenet and his deputy. “This is the best we’ve got?” asks the president.
Tenet reportedly assured the president that it was “a slam-dunk case” that Iraq had such weapons, and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, who was present, has confirmed Woodward’s account. This provides useful yarn for White House spinners attributing the debacle in Iraq to faulty intelligence and absolving the president. The slam-dunker is left hanging on the rim of the basket twisting in the wind, so to speak, until he falls of his own weight.
You would not know from Woodward’s book that the Oct. 1, 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction—used with Congress to hype the threat—was written several months after the administration decided to make war on Iraq. That decision had little to do with such weapons. It had very much to do with the imperative seen by Bush’ s neoconservative advisers to use military force to gain dominant influence over oil-rich Iraq and to eliminate any possible threat to Israel’s security.
Secretary of State Colin Powell has admitted that the target audience for the hyped-up NIE was Congress. That estimate and its various drafts formed the centerpiece of the successful campaign to persuade our elected representatives to relinquish to the executive the war-making power vested solely in them by the framers of the Constitution.
Always eager to please, Tenet put the intelligence community to work in support of his masters’ effort to play fast and loose with the Constitution. Virtually all of the NIE’s conclusions have since been proven wrong. But no matter; it achieved its primary purpose.
Sadly, this is what happens when a CIA director lets himself become “part of the team” in the way the president’s political advisers are part of the team. Such behavior is antithetical to the director’s statutory duty to tell the emperor when he is wearing no clothes. In an unguarded moment a few months ago, former House speaker Newt Gingrich—like Vice President Dick Cheney, a frequent visitor to CIA Headquarters—told the press, “George Tenet is so grateful to the president (presumably for not firing him on Sept. 12, 2001) that he will do anything for him.”
“Anything” now includes taking the fall for the policy and human disaster of Iraq. As things there go from worse to worse, even some Republican leaders are saying that those responsible must be held to account.
The Buck Stops Where?
Tenet is the first sacrificial lamb because—team player that he is—he can be counted upon to set a good example by taking his “superb” performance appraisal and leaving quietly—burning no bridges. And when, in the coming weeks, the Senate Intelligence Committee and the 9/11 Commission issue reports strongly critical of the performance of U.S. intelligence, administration spokespersons will stop the buck at Tenet’s desk, saying, “Yes, it was a bad show, but now he’s gone.”
This will blow convenient smoke over the actual reasons for the war and protect its neoconservative authors. For Tenet, it renders a certain poetic justice, because the unforgivable sin in intelligence analysis is telling policymakers what you think they want to hear—in the case of Iraq, justifying with cooked “intelligence” what they have already decided to do. Sycophancy has no place in intelligence work—and especially not on issues of war and peace.
When Tenet was named director seven years ago, journalists were touting the fact that he had been equally popular on both sides of the aisle when he worked as a Congressional staffer. But seasoned intelligence professionals saw this as the kiss of death. We learned early in our careers that if you tell it like it is, you are sure to make enemies left and right.
Those who enjoy universal popularity are ipso facto suspect of an inclination toward the political art of compromise—shading this, and shaving that—an art that has no place in without-fear-or-favor intelligence reporting. Thus, a history of substantial staff work in Congress—the quintessential example of politicized ambience—should be regarded as a red-flag entry on the resumè of candidates for the job of CIA director.
Character counts. And the country needs the kind of integrity and courage not seen in a CIA director over the past quarter century.
The good news is that there are ways to facilitate the return of fierce honesty and professionalism to the analytic process and to impede efforts to politicize the intelligence product. I deal with these issues and discuss in some detail the qualities I believe are needed in a CIA director, in “A Compromised CIA: What Can Be Done?” in Patriotism, Democracy and Common Sense , to be published next month by the Eisenhower Foundation.
