Remember the Times article I posted earlier today on Tenet's position. Here's the Washington Post variation of that same story. Much thicker. Comes to basically the same conclusion but you know much more about his dilemmas after reading this one.
The Post is really pushing this story. Look at the bylines here. Two of their best reporters on this portion of the story.
The Focus On Tenet Sharpens After Leak
Criticism of CIA and Director Intensifies
By Walter Pincus and Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, October 5, 2003; Page A01
washingtonpost.com
CIA Director George J. Tenet is under fire as never before. With efforts unsuccessful so far to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, some conservative lawmakers and pundits are blaming the agency for inadequate intelligence on Saddam Hussein. Democrats are accusing Tenet of bending the intelligence to support President Bush's policy of preemption in Iraq.
The focus on Tenet has sharpened in the past week with the revelation that the Justice Department has opened an investigation into the unauthorized leak of the name of a CIA operative -- part of an apparent effort to discredit a former diplomat who raised questions about the Bush administration's case against Iraq.
Sources close to Tenet say the director himself was not responsible for initiating the leak investigation. They say lawyers in the agency's general counsel's office referred the matter to the Justice Department in July -- without consulting the CIA director -- as part of the routine way of responding to the disclosure of classified information.
Still, the controversy comes as Tenet's CIA finds itself increasingly on the defensive over the intelligence used by the administration to make its case for invading Iraq. Senior administration officials, some of whom were never fans of the CIA's work on Iraq, have begun to blame the intelligence community for the mismatch between prewar claims and postwar findings. Last week, even some Republicans traditionally supportive of the intelligence community began to question the CIA's Iraq effort.
"There are a lot of people sitting on pins and needles about WMD and who's going to get blamed for that," said an attorney in the intelligence field.
Some close to the agency see an emerging rift between the CIA and the White House. "I can feel among the seniors angst with the White House now," said a former high-ranking CIA officer who maintains contacts in the building. "It went from a year ago when they thought [the White House was] great, to things I haven't heard before, criticisms. It's quite understandable you're going to have this tension."
Another former intelligence official said the grumbling "comes because the president and others exaggerated the intelligence, and Tenet did not or could not control that."
But as those close to Tenet tell it, the CIA director is not spoiling for a fight -- or to leave anytime soon.
Tenet feels he has "gotten to be the meat in the sandwich," said a source close to the director. "But he plans to keep going with his head down because he feels there are much bigger dangers, with a lot on the line in other parts of the world."
Above all, officials close to Tenet and Bush say the CIA director continues to enjoy a close working relationship with the president, the key ingredient in a successful six-year bureaucratic run in which Tenet is just months short of passing the legendary Richard M. Helms to become the second-longest-serving director after Allen Dulles.
When controversy arose last summer about questionable claims in Bush's State of the Union address, officials noted, Tenet initially took the blame for the administration.
National security adviser Condoleezza Rice said yesterday that the president continues to believe Tenet "is doing an excellent job." In a statement, she said he has "upheld the best traditions of the U.S. intelligence community while leading the transformation of our intelligence services to meet the most grave challenges . . . fighting the war on global terrorism and the spread of weapons of mass destruction."
People close to Tenet say he does not see a bureaucratic war as much as sniping at lower levels magnified in importance by outsiders and the media. But other national security officials say he has been dismayed at what he sees as exaggerations of Iraq's link to al Qaeda and its nuclear weapons program offered by Vice President Cheney's office. Tenet's regular access to the president remains, and he continues to "tell him what he thinks," one senior official said.
Tenet's spokesman, Bill Harlow, said he would not be interviewed for this article, but some of his subordinates and friends agreed to talk if given anonymity.
Tenet took over the CIA from John Deutch, whose deep cutbacks and large personality demoralized the spy agency. But on Sept. 12, 2001, the CIA went from being a risk-averse, second-tier agency to the brains behind the unconventional war against al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and the leader of what the Bush administration has described as a global war on terrorism. The agency's budgets soared, as did its morale, working as it has with an unprecedented number of foreign intelligence services to detain and interrogate suspected terrorists.
But the failure so far to find chemical, biological and nuclear weapons in Iraq has prompted renewed criticism of the CIA and Tenet. Last week, the Republican leaders of both the House and Senate intelligence committees expressed disappointment in the CIA's analysis of the Iraqi threat.
In a letter to Tenet, House intelligence committee Chairman Porter J. Goss (Fla.) questioned whether the agency had rigorously vetted the largely circumstantial information it had acquired after 1998, when U.N. inspectors left Iraq. Goss, a former CIA case officer, identified "serious deficiencies" in the intelligence community's ability to recruit informants in Iraq to provide credible, fresh intelligence.
Senate intelligence committee Chairman Pat Roberts (Kan.) told reporters he was "not pleased" by the interim report of David Kay, who is heading the U.S. effort to find weapons of mass destruction in U.S.-occupied Iraq. Kay reported last week he has yet to find such weapons.
One veteran CIA officer said some CIA analysts "are realizing their intelligence wasn't adequate, and in the DO [Directorate of Operations] they have to come face to face with the fact that there weren't any spies in Iraq, that the product wasn't satisfactory."
Intelligence officials said Tenet believes strongly that, despite the limited findings in Iraq to date, "the analysts believe what they wrote" in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate. In that report, analysts judged that Iraq still had chemical and biological weapons and had reconstituted its nuclear program.
Other intelligence experts said going to war is ultimately the president's call. "The case for going to war was a political case, not an intelligence case," said Winston Wiley, former chief of the CIA's counterterrorism center and deputy director of intelligence.
Guessing how long Tenet remains on the job has become a Washington parlor game. To beat the Dulles record of 81/2 years, he would have to stay on through July 2005, "and that probably won't happen," said one close associate, indicating that Tenet, like Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, would leave sometime after the 2004 election.
Ten days ago, however, some officials in the national security establishment were speculating that Tenet had decided to go by the end of this year and join the New York private investment banking firm of Allen & Co., which is headed by Herbert A. Allen, a longtime Tenet friend. One retired senior CIA official said he had learned about it directly from an Allen & Co. executive, and the word was passed around within senior intelligence levels at the agency and the State Department.
One reason the rumor may have started was that Tenet, for the second year in a row, appeared at Allen's prestigious summer seminar for media moguls and gave an off-the-record briefing on world trends. CIA officials say the rumor is not true, as did Allen in a telephone interview last week.
The feeling inside the agency, summed up by one veteran officer, is that Tenet "became bulletproof [from being fired by the president] after taking the spear for the State of the Union speech this year, and he is not going anywhere until maybe after the election." |
