Central Intelligence Agency George J. Tenet Established: 1947 2003 Budget: $5.0 billion* Full-time Employees: 20,000* Rumsfeld's Salary: $154,700 Web Site: www.cia.gov Overall Grade: C+ Back To Overview And Other Cabinet Grades *Estimates from Federation of American Scientists

National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, Jan. 24, 2003

As director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet is the rare top-tier player who has straddled the significant divide between the Clinton and Bush administrations. He is a confidant who meets almost daily with President Bush, receiving more coveted face time with the commander in chief than do members of the Bush Cabinet or did most of Tenet's predecessors. Largely on the strength of his prodigious personal charm and political savvy, Tenet has likewise endeared himself to other influential backers, maintained good relations within Washington's often-competing spheres of power, and earned the fierce loyalty of the rank and file at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va.

Tenet sounded an early alarm in 1998, when he warned that the United States was at war with Al Qaeda. In February 2001, he stated unequivocally that Osama bin Laden and his terrorist organization was the most important national security threat facing the nation. In the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, Tenet has been widely credited with innovative leadership in waging a largely clandestine war, in Afghanistan and against Qaeda operatives around the world.

The CIA director's central role in the war against international terror -- the No. 1 priority of the Bush administration-largely explains why this non-Cabinet position is included in National Journal's assessment of Bush's Cabinet.

That George Tenet's tenure as the director of central intelligence in the Bush administration should be judged as slightly above average says much about the controversy still swirling around September 11 and the subsequent calls for major intelligence reforms. Tenet's grade speaks even more about the burden of responsibility that accrues to those who aspire to the most-powerful positions in the U.S. government.

In many ways, Tenet is the most unlikely member of a Bush national security team that entered office with almost nothing good to say about its predecessors in the Clinton administration. Insiders credit Tenet's longevity partly to the friendly relations he formed with the first President Bush, especially during a 1999 ceremony naming CIA headquarters after George Herbert Walker Bush. As a former CIA director himself, the elder Bush strongly felt that the position should be "apolitical" and not subject to the whims of elections. Bush 41 advised his son to spend as much personal time as possible with his CIA director.

Shortly before he took office, the younger Bush developed a close rapport with Tenet during regular intelligence briefings. Bush's well-known anti-elitist instincts meshed comfortably with the earthy humor and blunt talk of the 49-year-old Tenet, a self-described "short fat guy from Little Neck, N.Y.," who once worked as a busboy in his father's Greek diner.

Even for the experienced national security team that entered office in 2001, Tenet offered an attribute everyone else lacked: an up-to-date institutional memory. As the Bush team has rediscovered halfway through the first term, coping with the myriad global challenges to U.S. interests requires not only an ideological compass and solid expertise, but also a nuanced, up-to-the-minute understanding of shifting geopolitics.

Congressional commissions have been formed, investigations have been launched, and numerous books will be written to try to explain the multiple intelligence failures that conspired to make September 11 our era's "day of infamy." What's already clear is that by midsummer 2001, the CIA was privately warning of "static" in its intelligence channels indicating the possibility that Al Qaeda was planning a spectacular terrorist attack. It's also clear that the CIA and the FBI failed to share critical intelligence that might have allowed analysts to connect the dots on the hijacking plot. Such a lack of cooperation has long bedeviled the two agencies, despite the fervent attempts of Tenet and others to break down the institutional firewalls.

Whether Tenet should reasonably be held accountable for that failure -- as some critics suggest -- is arguable. An important principle is at stake, however. The CIA, as an organization that routinely sends its members into harm's way, asking them to risk death and torture, operates on a creed not unlike that of elite military units.

Whatever the mitigating circumstances, on September 11, the CIA failed in the fundamental mission for which it was created in 1947 in the wake of Pearl Harbor: namely, to avoid future catastrophic surprises. The degree to which George Tenet bears personal responsibility will be debated in other forums, but for the purposes of this assessment, it is essentially beside the point. In simple military parlance, 9/11 happened on his watch. That fact alone has tarnished the luster of what otherwise certainly would have been one of the bright stars of the Bush national security team.

Inside Influence Grade: B
President Bush typically starts his day with an 8 a.m. intelligence briefing, delivered by Tenet in the Oval Office. Also frequently in attendance are Vice President Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. To those in the inner circle, the bond between this unlikely pair -- Bush, the scion of an American political dynasty, and Tenet, the overachieving son of Greek immigrants -- is palpable. By all accounts, the bond has grown significantly stronger since 9/11, and the camaraderie between these two straight-talking Baby Boomers goes a long way toward explaining Tenet's ability to weather the storm of criticism unleashed after September 11.

"I know of the partisanship directed at George Tenet," Card told National Journal, "but I can tell you that he reports to the president and nobody else, and the president has tremendous confidence in George." Tenet has pushed the CIA to collect intelligence and analyze it in a way that enables Bush to make the tough policy calls, says Card, and Tenet is disciplined enough to know that his primary function is to present unvarnished intelligence analysis.

"Tenet is not a policy adviser," Card said. "When the president does ask for his advice, however, he offers candid-very candid-advice. Tenet also has the intellect to challenge analysis, even when it's by his own team. And when the president asks, `What would you do, George?' Tenet will say, `This is what I would do.' So they have a good relationship. It's one of complete trust."

According to former CIA directors, that kind of close bond between the commander in chief and the CIA director greatly increases the cachet of an organization whose power essentially reflects the president's tasking of, and trust in, the agency. To illustrate the point, insiders still joke about the light aircraft that crashed into the White House in September 1994. Piloting the aircraft, the joke goes, was none other than CIA Director James Woolsey, desperate for some rare face time with President Clinton.

"That joke pretty much summarized my problems as CIA director," Woolsey told National Journal. "For better or worse, and despite all the congressional oversight, the CIA views itself primarily as the president's agency. So if that relationship is manifested in one meeting a year with the president, then the CIA director is not very credible. If the relationship is reflected in a meeting almost every day, then it matters a great deal. The closeness Tenet seems to enjoy with President Bush shows everyone at the agency and around town that the president values what he has to say."

Tenet has fared less well, however, in internal battles with Bush Cabinet members. For instance, when Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld recently challenged Tenet's authority by creating the new position of undersecretary of Defense for intelligence -- in effect, strengthening his own independent intelligence shop -- Tenet was largely silent. A number of insiders believe that Tenet's politically cautious and nonconfrontational nature, coupled with his tendency to view his role as being narrowly defined, prevented him from raising the alarm about the threat from Al Qaeda more forcefully within the administration.

Hill Clout Grade: B
As staff director of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in the 1980s under longtime mentor David Boren, D-Okla., Tenet was the consummate Capitol Hill player. He remains quick with a backslap and a ribald tale, and he's a master at offering up tasty tidbits of intelligence tailored to the individual interests of various lawmakers. Tenet is also generally credited with being well prepared and forceful in congressional testimony.

"Despite having a few vocal critics, I think Tenet has the support of most lawmakers. He's very good at hearings, and he speaks with passion," said Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., former vice chairman of the Intelligence Committee. "In terms of the intelligence budget, after it had drifted south during the 1990s, I would say the intelligence community has done very well in the last two to three years."

As a former CIA agent, Rep. Porter J. Goss, R-Fla., chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, also gives Tenet high marks despite the 9/11 terrorist attacks. "In terms of advance warning, to the degree we can be critical of Mr. Tenet for not adequately getting the message out, we have to admit that Congress failed too," he said. "We were unable to convince the White House, or the media, or our constituents that there was a real and present danger, and that the times we lived in had fundamentally changed. So in general, I think Tenet has done a very good job."

The one glaring exception to Tenet's generally amicable Hill relations is Sen. Richard C. Shelby, R-Ala., the former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who has repeatedly called for Tenet's resignation. Theories abound as to the cause of the obvious animosity between the two men, including a supposed snub of Shelby when the senator was not seated on the dais during the ceremony renaming CIA headquarters for Bush 41. Insiders say that Shelby also blamed Tenet for failing to adequately punish former CIA Director John Deutsch, Tenet's predecessor and former boss, after it was revealed that Deutsch had taken a classified CIA computer home and connected it to the Internet, in clear violation of regulations.

Shelby insists that the reason for his criticism is much simpler. "I personally think George Tenet is smart and a man of substance. He's done a good job in some areas, and he's not just a glad-hander," Shelby told National Journal. "Having said that, in evaluating his tenure, I concluded that there have been more major intelligence failures on his watch than for any other CIA director in history. He raised the alarm and declared war on Al Qaeda, for instance, and then apparently forgot to tell anyone else in the intelligence community about it. And despite all these intelligence failures, no one has ever been held accountable. I believe in accountability."

Political Imperatives Grade: C
The primary imperative of any CIA director is to avoid catastrophic strategic surprises, and in this, Tenet clearly failed. That is not to say that the blame rests on his shoulders alone. Rather, it suggests that when the intelligence apparatus fails, the buck inevitably stops on the desk of the director of central intelligence.

"The 9/11 attacks represent a total intelligence failure, and George looks a little silly arguing that they weren't," said a former senior CIA operations officer. "My criticism is not that Tenet didn't know we were at war with Al Qaeda and wasn't pacing the floor of his office late at night wondering what to do. He was. Rather, I think his innate caution and careful reading of the political winds kept him from being more forceful in doing something dramatic about the threat. You have to contrast that, however, with the excellent marks he gets in waging the war post-9/11. Only a quarter of that story has yet been told, and Tenet is being anything but timid in taking the fight to Al Qaeda." When, for instance, an unmanned Predator plane fired the missile that killed a carful of Qaeda operatives last year in Yemen, it was widely reported as a CIA operation.

Once a congressional investigation of 9/11 is completed and major intelligence reform moves onto the political agenda, Tenet's job will likely become significantly more complicated. Most reformers still believe that the director of central intelligence must be given greater authority over the intelligence agencies that are under Pentagon control, including the National Security Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, and the National Imagery and Mapping Agency. These three agencies consume roughly 80 percent of the intelligence budget. Reform proposals also seek to take domestic intelligence-gathering responsibilities away from the FBI and give them to either the CIA or a new domestic intelligence agency.

"Tenet does seem somewhat reluctant to make fundamental changes at the CIA, and his job has been complicated because of a lot of poaching by the Pentagon," Graham said. "George has been fairly quiescent while that has been going on. On the other hand, I admire Tenet's ability to surround himself with very intelligent people. Because of his skills as a `people person,' there's also a high degree of loyalty to Tenet within the CIA."

Running The Agency Grade: B
Stories abound of Tenet using his considerable personal charisma and common touch to win the affection and loyalty of people in the intelligence community. There's Tenet and his wife tirelessly greeting the agency's rank and file-to the extent of remembering most people's first names -- at the annual Christmas party; Tenet attending the funeral of a former Intelligence Committee colleague who committed suicide; Tenet going undercover with the help of the Covert Operations makeup department to attend a party as an old man, much to the host's surprise; Tenet somberly clearing a briefing room of foreign visitors and then laughingly informing a colleague that his zipper was down.

Within an agency where morale was hurt severely in the 1990s by a series of scandals and intelligence lapses (including, most notably, the 1994 Aldrich Ames spying debacle), Tenet's leadership and sense of humor are widely credited with rekindling a much-needed sense of esprit de corps.

"Tenet gets higher marks than any director I've known for improving the internal morale of the agency," said one longtime CIA operative. Said another knowledgeable source: "Tenet instinctively understands the little touches that endear leaders to their people. He's very well liked personally at Langley."

Despite generally excellent marks for managing the CIA, Tenet suffers somewhat from a grade of Incomplete in one of the key initiatives undertaken during his tenure: breaking down the institutional firewalls that have stymied intelligence cooperation between the CIA and FBI, particularly in the fields of counterespionage and counter-terrorism. Partly as a result of the post-Aldrich Ames reforms, for instance, both the FBI and CIA began cross-trading senior personnel to serve in each other's counter-terrorism units.

In a prescient interview with National Journal in 2000, Tenet referred to those reforms. "I think the Ames case was the jumping-off point in taking cooperation between the FBI and CIA seriously, because it proved that we could no longer tolerate petty bureaucratic jealousy and turf wars in dealing with threats to American security," said Tenet. "We also wanted our people to understand that, when it came to dealing with these transnational threats, the fortunes and efforts of both agencies would rise and fall together."

Yet in the months leading up to the September 11 attacks, CIA counter-terrorism experts failed to share with the FBI the names of Qaeda terrorists that they knew to be in the country, including two involved in the fateful hijackings. Likewise, the FBI somehow failed to share with the CIA a field agent's worried observation that Qaeda operatives were training at U.S. flight schools.

As George Tenet correctly foretold, in the war on international terror, the fortunes of agencies, their leaders, and the nation they serve can rise or fall on such details.

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