CIA Chief Tenet Has Some Explaining to Do

WASHINGTON -- A few months before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks last year, CIA Director George J. Tenet offered some words of wisdom to the graduating class at Langley High School, a short distance from the agency’s headquarters in Virginia.

“Bear down, persevere,” he said. “I never had a plan in life beyond doing the best that I could do in the job that I had. Somehow, by doing that, the future took care of itself.”

More than a year later, the questions are whether the best Tenet could do was good enough, and whether a man with such faith in the future can navigate an increasingly perilous present.

Tenet is due to appear on Capitol Hill today before congressional investigators increasingly convinced that Sept. 11 was a monumental intelligence failure.

He is being whipsawed by the politics of a looming war with Iraq, with some of his agency’s assessments seemingly at odds with the White House’s.

And after more than a year devoted to destroying Al Qaeda, the terrorist network is resurgent, linked to a flurry of deadly new strikes stretching from Yemen to Indonesia.

During his nearly six years on the job, Tenet has survived everything from an administration change to assassination plots, and there is reason to think he will survive these latest troubles.

He remains close to President Bush, popular with agency employees and on firm footing with key lawmakers, thanks to political savvy and a disheveled but direct style that even many of his critics find likable.

To be sure, Tenet and congressional investigators have battled over agency cooperation with the probe, and Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the panel’s final report could contain criticism of Tenet.

But Graham and Rep. Porter Goss (R-Fla.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, both said one thing they won’t do is call for Tenet’s removal. Said Goss, “I think he’s doing a fine job.”

There have been persistent rumors in recent weeks on Capitol Hill and among agency employees that Tenet intends to step down early next year. But a senior CIA official brushed those rumors aside.

“People have been predicting he’s going to be stepping down soon for the last four years,” the official said. “I don’t think he’s going to pass Richard Helms or Allen Dulles, but I’m pretty confident he doesn’t know when he’ll move on.”

That Tenet is even in position to approach the lengthy tenures of such CIA legends as Helms and Dulles--who held the job for seven and nine years, respectively--is a testament to his survival instincts.

It is all the more remarkable given that Tenet was never anyone’s first choice to be CIA director in the first place, and was widely expected to be pushed aside by President Bush after the 2000 election.

But even with a five-year track record, intelligence experts say Tenet’s legacy is very much a work in progress.

“It’s impossible to judge him now,” said Thomas Powers, a frequent writer on intelligence issues. “We don’t know how [the war on terrorism] is going to turn out and we don’t know much about what he’s done until the present.”

Tenet, 49, has had undisputed successes.

Well before Sept. 11, he brought stability and energy to a once-demoralized agency, rebuilding the CIA’s depleted clandestine service and giving the agency renewed purpose after the end of the Cold War.

But Tenet’s tenure has been marred by a series of intelligence breakdowns and seeming helplessness against Osama bin Laden.

The litany includes Al Qaeda’s 1998 bombing of American embassies in Africa and the bombing of the U.S. destroyer Cole in 2000. There was also the failure to predict India’s nuclear tests in 1998, and the accidental U.S. bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999.

To critics, Sept. 11 was not an isolated catastrophe but the culmination of a string of failures for which Tenet should be held accountable.

“When a ship runs aground that many times, the captain should step down,” said Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), vice chairman of the Intelligence Committee.

Tenet declined interview requests. In his few public statements since the attacks, he has stressed that the agency has had successes against Al Qaeda that the public may never know about because of their clandestine nature.

In interviews, dozens of current and former colleagues portrayed Tenet as a gruff, garrulous man who is easy to underestimate and hard not to like.

With little concern for protocol, he will grab senators or foreign dignitaries by the elbow to emphasize a point. And he salts his briefings with swear words.

His easy manner and agile mind have impressed a string of powerful figures, including President Bush. Some see a preoccupation with pleasing his bosses and a reluctance to take uncomfortable stands.

Last week, many thought Tenet was catering to competing audiences on Iraq. First he wrote a letter to lawmakers saying Saddam Hussein was unlikely to attack the United States unless provoked. Then he issued a second statement hours later supporting the White House contention that Iraq poses an immediate threat.

“George is not a visionary, he’s an operator--a skilled, almost hyperactive operator,” said a former high-ranking CIA official who worked closely with Tenet.

“He has lasted as long as he has by meeting the expectations of a very diverse set of interest groups.”

The son of Greek immigrants, Tenet grew up in Queens, N.Y., where he worked at his parents’ diner. After earning degrees in international relations at Georgetown University and Columbia University, he got a job on Capitol Hill as a legislative aide.

In 1985, then-Sen. David Boren (D-Okla.) offered Tenet a job on the Intelligence Committee he is scheduled to appear before today.

“Every time I got in a room with him, I was impressed by his quickness of mind,” Boren said. “I was also impressed with how direct he was. You come to trust someone like that.”

When the job of Intelligence staff director opened in 1988, Boren vaulted Tenet over a line of more experienced staffers. And when Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992, Boren helped Tenet land a position on Clinton’s national security team.

Many longtime CIA officers regard the Clinton era as the bleakest in agency history. Budgets were slashed in the wake of the Cold War and directors seemed to move through a revolving door.

In 1996, John Deutch resigned after little more than a year on the job. Clinton’s next nominee, National Security Advisor Tony Lake, was blocked by Republicans. Tenet, by then deputy director, won the top job by default.

Tenet had never done spy work. But his stints on the Hill and in the White House gave him a perspective on the politics and pitfalls of the job that may have been more useful. Tenet traveled the world with Boren, meeting the agency’s overseas station chiefs and learning how much behind-the-scenes muscle they wielded in Washington.

Tenet courted the spies with symbolic steps, hanging a portrait of Helms in his office suite and coaxing another agency legend--former Moscow station chief Jack Downing--out of retirement to run the clandestine service.

He invited Helms, Downing and other former clandestine service chiefs to regular dinners in the director’s private dining room, a tradition interrupted only briefly by Sept. 11.

Compared to the aloof Deutch, an MIT professor, Tenet related to the rank and file. He chomped on cigars [unlit since a heart attack in the early 1990s], cruised the hallways to say hello to analysts and ate at the employee cafeteria. On Saturdays, he has been known to stroll around the office in shorts and bare feet, bouncing a basketball.

“George is arguably the most popular director we’ve ever had,” Downing, who has since re-retired, said in a recent interview. “As great as Helms is, and I think the world of him, he’s a much more distant, forbidding figure. George is a very approachable guy.”

Many thought Tenet would be pushed out when Bush was elected. But Tenet’s down-to-earth persona made a quick impression on the plain-spoken president-elect.

It didn’t hurt that Tenet had presided over the renaming of the CIA’s sprawling Langley campus as the George Bush Center for Intelligence in 1999. The elder Bush was CIA director in the mid-1970s.

Tenet is not seen as a power broker in the Bush White House, where Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld hold sway.

But CIA directors measure their standing by their access to the president. Tenet, who had infrequent face time with Clinton, briefs Bush in person five or six mornings a week.

In the months leading up to Sept. 11, amid a torrent of intelligence traffic on Al Qaeda, Tenet is said to have behaved like a man possessed.

“He was running around buttonholing all of us, telling us there’s something going to happen,” said Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage.

On the day of the attacks, Tenet was having breakfast in downtown Washington with Boren.

When an aide whispered in Tenet’s ear that the World Trade Center had just been hit, Boren recalled, Tenet declared: “This has Bin Laden’s fingerprints all over it,” and raced back to the agency.

But even if Tenet sounded early alarms on Bin Laden, it is still unclear what he was doing to penetrate Al Qaeda.

In December 1998, Tenet wrote a memo declaring “war” on Al Qaeda. “I want no resources or people spared in this effort,” he told subordinates.

But congressional investigators found the follow-up wanting, asserting that “there was no massive shift in budget or reassignment of personnel to counterterrorism.”

Investigators also concluded that a major CIA blunder allowed two of the Sept. 11 hijackers -- whom the agency had identified as Al Qaeda terrorists in early 2000 -- to enter the United States.

Some former CIA officials wonder whether Tenet ever made penetrating Al Qaeda an overriding objective, the way cracking the Kremlin was during the Cold War.

“If you recruited a Soviet spy, you got a triple promotion and you were made for life,” said Robert Baer, a former CIA case officer. “Did Tenet in 1998 set the same standard for Bin Laden? If after 1998 you still got promoted by being an analyst or a desk officer, that’s a failure.”

Other agency veterans say whatever blame the CIA deserves for Sept. 11, far more should be apportioned to the FBI, aviation officials and an era of frivolous politics in Washington more focused on scandals than national security.

“The problem was not George Tenet,” said R. James Woolsey, Clinton’s first CIA director. “It was that the country was on a beach party from the end of the Cold War until Sept. 11.”