C.I.A. Chief Is Caught in Middle by Leak Inquiry
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
Published: October 5, 2003
WASHINGTON, Oct. 4 — At a few minutes before eight on Thursday morning, George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, was parked in his usual chair just outside the Oval Office waiting to brief his chief patron, the president of the United States.
The morning newspapers were full of developments in what amounted to a war between the Central Intelligence Agency and the White House, and a Justice Department investigation that was barely 48 hours old into whether administration officials had illegally disclosed the name of an undercover C.I.A. officer.
Angry agency officials suspected that someone in the White House had exposed the officer, Valerie Plame, as a way to punish her husband, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, for his criticism of the administration's use of intelligence to justify the war in Iraq.
But after President Bush told his chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., that he was ready to see Mr. Tenet — "O.K., George, let's go," Mr. Card called out to the intelligence chief — Mr. Tenet, a rare holdover from the Clinton administration and a politically savvy survivor, did not even bring up the issue that was roiling his agency, Mr. Card said in an interview.
Instead, Mr. Tenet briefed the president on the latest intelligence reports, as he always does, and left it to the White House to make the first move about Mr. Wilson and Ms. Plame.
"I think I was the one who initiated it," Mr. Card recalled. The subsequent conversation between the president and Mr. Tenet about the investigation, he added, did not consume "any significant amount of time or discussion or angst. It was basically, `We're cooperating, you're cooperating, I'm glad to see the process is moving forward the way it should.' " In conclusion, Mr. Card said, "it certainly didn't reflect a strain in any relationship."
And yet, six years into running the nation's primary spy organization, Mr. Tenet finds himself at one of the most difficult points in his tenure, caught between his loyalty to the president and defending an agency enraged at the White House. Although the leak investigation that is consuming Washington's political class has not, by all accounts, affected the chummy personal ties between the president and the director, it has still taken its toll on Mr. Tenet.
Even before this latest blowup, Mr. Tenet told friends that he was worn out from the relentlessness of his job since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and that he felt he had served long enough. (Only Allen W. Dulles and Richard Helms held the job longer.) Mr. Tenet, who has directed an extensive overhaul and expansion of the C.I.A. since the attacks, had talked about stepping down by late summer or early fall, people close to him said.
"It's a lot harder job than it was in the Dulles era, and he's been doing it for a long while," an agency official said. "But I think he's for the moment happily engaged."
Friends of Mr. Tenet's said that the leak investigation might now keep him in place longer than he wanted, if only to prove that he was not a casualty of the latest furor — or of the political fallout from the failure so far to find chemical or biological weapons in Iraq.
"He wants to leave on his own terms, but he doesn't want to leave when it looks like he's being chased out of town," a former C.I.A. official said. David Kay, the government's chief weapons inspector, who was chosen and supervised by Mr. Tenet, told Congress on Thursday that his team had failed to find illicit weapons after a three-month search in Iraq, a major setback for the White House.
The latest fight has turned out to be a particularly angry one in an intelligence tug of war that began before the invasion of Iraq. Some C.I.A. officers have long said that they believe the White House and the Pentagon exaggerated intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs to justify the war, while White House and Pentagon officials have long said that the C.I.A. had been too cautious in its findings.
In the summer, the conflict broke into the open when Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, said that Mr. Tenet had been primarily responsible for not stripping from the president's State of the Union address an insupportable claim that Iraq had sought to buy uranium from Niger. Mr. Tenet and his allies were enraged, and Stephen J. Hadley, Ms. Rice's deputy, eventually took the blame.
But within the C.I.A., the exposure of Ms. Plame is now considered an even greater instance of treachery. Ms. Plame, a specialist in nonconventional weapons who worked overseas, had "nonofficial cover," and was what in C.I.A. parlance is called a Noc, the most difficult kind of false identity for the agency to create. While most undercover agency officers disguise their real profession by pretending to be American embassy diplomats or other United States government employees, Ms. Plame passed herself off as a private energy expert. Intelligence experts said that Nocs have especially dangerous jobs.
"Nocs are the holiest of holies," said Kenneth M. Pollack, a former agency officer who is now director of research at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. "This is real James Bond stuff. You're going overseas posing as a businessman, and if the other government finds out about you, they're probably going to shoot you. The United States has basically no way to protect you."
Mr. Tenet's latest battle with the White House began on July 6, when Mr. Wilson, in an article on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times, wrote of a mission the C.I.A. sent him on in 2002 to investigate whether Iraq had tried to buy uranium for its nuclear weapons program from Niger. Mr. Wilson concluded that Iraq had not, and that the administration had twisted evidence to make the case for war in Iraq.
Eight days later, the syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak wrote that it was Mr. Wilson's wife who had suggested sending him on the mission, implying that Mr. Wilson's trip was of limited importance. Mr. Novak identified Ms. Plame, and attributed the information to "two senior administration officials." Mr. Wilson subsequently accused Karl Rove, the president's chief political aide, of involvement in leaking the information to Mr. Novak to intimidate Mr. Wilson into silence and to keep others from coming forward. But he has since backed off and said that Mr. Rove at least condoned the leak.
But Mr. Tenet was aware of the Novak column, and was not pleased, the C.I.A. official said. As required by law, the agency notified the Justice Department in late July that there had been a release of classified information; it is a felony for any official with access to such information to disclose the identity of a covert American officer. It is unclear when Mr. Tenet became aware of the referral, but when he did, he supported it, the C.I.A. official said, even though it was clearly going to cause problems for the White House. "I don't think he lost any sleep over it," the official said.
The important thing, the official said, was that "the agency was standing up for itself."
Friends of Mr. Tenet's say that he knows how important it is that he be seen as defending the agency from political attacks, and that one reason he has stayed so long is to demonstrate that the directorship of central intelligence is not a partisan job. The other reason for his longevity, friends and detractors alike say, is that this son of a Greek restaurant owner from Queens has been brilliant at cultivating the Yale-educated son of the only president, George H. W. Bush, to have been director of central intelligence.
Last week, Mr. Card said, the director took time out from the grimness of the intelligence reports to talk about a subject dear to the president. "Baseball," Mr. Card said.
As the former C.I.A. official summed up Mr. Tenet: "He's not liked by everybody in the administration, but the president loves him."
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