At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA
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ISRAELIS
Ami Ayalon, chief of Shin Bet, the Israeli domestic intelligence service (1996–2000).
Ehud Barak, prime minister of Israel (1999–2001).
Meir Dagan, Netanyahu’s counterterrorism advisor, director of the Mossad, the Israeli foreign intelligence service (2002–).
Avi Dichter, chief of Shin Bet, the Israeli domestic intelligence service (2000–2005).
Efraim Halevy, director of the Mossad, the Israeli foreign intelligence service (2000–2002).
Yitzhak Mordechai, defense minister (1996–1999).
Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel (1996–1999).
Shimon Peres, prime minister of Israel (1984–1986, 1995–1996).
Yitzhak Rabin, prime minister of Israel (1974–1977, 1992–1995).
Ariel Sharon, prime minister of Israel (2001–2006).
PALESTINIANS
Yasser Arafat, Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organizaton (PLO) (1969–2004), president of the Palestinian National Authority (1993–2004).
Mohammed Dahlan, chief of security for Gaza.
Amin al-Hindi, chief of the Palestinian external security service.
Jabril Rajoub, chief of security for the West Bank.
LIBYANS
Col. Muammar al-Gadhafi, Libyan leader (1969–).
Saif al-Islam Gadhafi, Colonel Gadhafi’s son.
Musa Kusa, head of the Libyan intelligence service.
Fouad Siltni, Libyan diplomat.
IRAQIS
Dr. Iyad Allawi, head of Iraqi National Accord.
Al-Asaaf, Iraqi defector, a former Iraqi major.
Curve Ball, Iraqi defector, a former Iraqi chemical engineer.
Ahmed Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress.
Saddam Hussein, president of Iraq (1979–2003).
Husayn Kamil, Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law.
Gen. Mohammed Abdullah Shawani, chief of Iraqi Special Forces during the Iran-Iraq war.
PAKISTANIS
Gen. Mahmood Ahmed, head of ISI, the Pakistan Inter-Service Intelligence agency (1999–2001).
Aimal Kasi, Pakistani terrorist, killed two CIA employees outside CIA headquarters in 1993; executed in 2002.
Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan (aka A. Q. Khan), father of the Pakistani nuclear weapons program.
Sultan Bashirrudan Mahmood, former director for nuclear power at Pakistan’s Atomic Energy Commission, and founder of Umma Tameer-e-Nau (UTN), an organization of Pakistani nuclear scientists supporting al-Qa’ida.
Gen. Pervez Musharraf, president of Pakistan (1999–).
FAMILY AND FRIENDS
Stephanie Glakas-Tenet, my wife.
John Michael Tenet, our son.
Evangelia Tenet, my mother.
John Tenet, my father.
Bill Tenet, my brother.
Tommy Glakas, my brother-in-law.
Nick Glakas, my brother-in-law.
Ken Levit, my old friend, who goes back years with me in the Senate.
OTHERS
Manucher Ghorbanifar, Iranian arms dealer, involved in the Iran-Contra affair.
Dr. August Hanning, head of the German intelligence agency, BND (1998–2005).
Jonathan Pollard, U.S. naval intelligence analyst, convicted in 1986 of passing classified information to Israel; currently serving a life sentence.
B. S. A. Tahir, A. Q. Khan’s deputy and the Pakistani nuclear weapons network’s chief financial officer and money launderer.
PREFACE
Wednesday, September 12, 2001, dawned as the first full day of a world gone mad. Nothing would ever be the same. Early that morning, operating on only a few hours’ sleep, I headed out my front door to the armored Ford Expedition that was waiting to carry me to see the president of the United States.
The security outside my home in Washington’s Maryland suburbs was tighter than ever before. Arriving at the White House, I saw Secret Service personnel stationed every few feet, all of them brandishing weapons. Clearly visible overhead were fighter aircraft patrolling the skies above the nation’s capital. Less than twenty-four hours earlier, America had been attacked by a stateless foreign army. Thousands perished in New York City, at the Pentagon, and in a field in Pennsylvania. At CIA, we had good reason to believe that more attacks might be coming in the hours or days ahead and that 9/11 was just the opening salvo of a multipronged assault on the American mainland.
All this weighed heavily on my mind as I walked beneath the awning that leads to the West Wing and saw Richard Perle exiting the building just as I was about to enter. Perle is one of the godfathers of the neoconservative movement and, at the time, was head of the Defense Policy Board, an independent advisory group to the secretary of defense. Ours was little more than a passing acquaintance. As the doors closed behind him, we made eye contact and nodded. I had just reached the door myself when Perle turned to me and said, “Iraq has to pay a price for what happened yesterday. They bear responsibility.”
I was stunned but said nothing. Eighteen hours earlier, I had scanned passenger manifests from the four hijacked airplanes that showed beyond a doubt that al-Qa’ida was behind the attacks. Over the months and years to follow, we would carefully examine the potential of a collaborative role for state sponsors. The intelligence then and now, however, showed no evidence of Iraqi complicity.
At the Secret Service security checkpoint, I looked back at Perle and thought: What the hell is he talking about? Moments later, a second thought came to me: Who has Richard Perle been meeting with in the White House so early in the morning on today of all days? I never learned the answer to that question.
For better and for worse, the twin topics of terrorism and Iraq would come to define my seven years as Director of Central Intelligence. By the time I stepped down from the job in July 2004, those issues seemed to eclipse all the other work American intelligence had done, and all the other issues we had faced during my tenure. Although I didn’t realize it that day, I’ve since come to think of that brief encounter with Richard Perle as the moment when these two dominant themes in my professional life first intersected.
Growing up in the New York City borough of Queens, the son of working-class immigrants, I never would have imagined I would find myself in such a position. I aspired to a career in government but never gave a moment’s thought to a life in the hidden world of intelligence. Yet somehow, through a series of unexpected occupational twists and turns, I found myself in the wilderness of mirrors.
As a career path, intelligence is equal parts thrilling and frustrating, because, by definition, it deals with the unclear, the unknown, and the deliberately hidden. What the enemies of the United States work hard to conceal, the men and women of American intelligence work hard to reveal. Throughout my working life, following the ethos of intelligence, I tried to maintain a low profile—to be little seen or heard among the general public.
When I left government, I felt a need to step back for a little while, to think before I wrote or spoke. Having benefited from time and perspective, I have come to believe that I have an obligation to share some of the things I learned during my years at the helm of American intelligence. I felt I owed it to my family, to my former colleagues, and to history to say what I could about the events I have observed.
This memoir relies on my recollections of a tumultuous period in our nation’s life. No such undertaking is completely objective, but it is as honest and as unvarnished as I can make it. There are many things about my tenure as DCI that I am proud of and more than a few things I wish I could do over. Where I, or the organization I led, made mistakes, I say so in these pages. Readers will find no shortage of such admissions. When I point out occasions where our performance was strong, I hope these assertions, too, are given fair consideration. This book reflects how things appeared to me as I found myself literally at the center of the storm.
Where you stand on issues is normally determined by where you sit. And from where I sat, I saw the tidal wave of
terrorism building. From where I sat, I also saw a small group of underfunded and lonely warriors swimming against this tide—out there all alone, warning, deterring, disrupting, and attempting to destroy a worldwide movement operating in nearly seventy countries and bent on our destruction.
This is the story of how we saw the threat, what we did about it, what was proposed and not done, how our thinking evolved, and why the men and women of the Central Intelligence Agency were ready with a plan of action to respond forcefully to the loss of three thousand American and foreign lives. This is also a story about how we helped disarm a rogue nation of its weapons of mass destruction without firing a shot and how we brought to justice the most dangerous nuclear weapons proliferator the world has ever known. It is a recounting of efforts to bridge historic differences between Israelis and Palestinians and give to diplomats a chance to seek a political solution to an age-old crisis. It also is a cautionary tale of threats still uncountered that would make the attacks of September 11 pale in comparison.
Senior-level people in both the administrations in which I served, Clinton and Bush, tried to do what they saw as best for America. Their results and methods can and should be debated—but not their motives. And when it comes to the U.S. government’s handling of Iraq, there are few heroes in Washington, but plenty on the ground in that troubled country. When it comes to the war on terror, though, there are plenty of heroes, in Washington and elsewhere around the world. The same administration that later lost its way on the road to Baghdad performed brilliantly when it came to running down al-Qa’ida in the aftermath of 9/11. CIA undertook an enormous task with great courage and unbelievable dedication. We read too little about these heroes.
With all its burdens and all its pressures, as Director of Central Intelligence, I believe I had the best job in government. The greatest joy for me was the daily interaction with men and women who dared to risk it all every day to protect our nation. I had an opportunity to serve my country and to try to keep it safe in a time of peril. I was not always successful, but I take comfort in knowing that I was in the arena, striving to do what was right. Only in the United States of America can the son of immigrants be given such a privilege. I will always be grateful that John and Evangelia Tenet left their villages in Greece to give me that chance.
PART I
CHAPTER 1
The Towpath
It was like something out of a spy movie.
The date was March 16, 1997, a Sunday. I was at home, on a rare day off, when the phone rang. “Meet me by the C&O Canal, near the Old Angler’s Inn in an hour,” a voice said, almost in a whisper. “Come alone.” That was all. He didn’t have to identify himself; he knew I would be there.
The voice belonged to Anthony Lake, who had stepped down as national security advisor two months earlier, when Bill Clinton nominated him to be director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Back in 1992, at the start of the Clinton administration, Tony had made me part of his National Security Council staff. Prior to that I had served as a Senate staffer, and for the previous four years had been staff director of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Over the course of three years on the NSC staff, I had formed a warm personal and professional relationship with Lake and his deputy, Sandy Berger. Then, in May 1995, John Deutch, who was about to become CIA director, tapped me to be his second in command. We had gotten to know each other when Deutch was deputy secretary of defense and had even traveled together once overseas to deal with a sensitive intelligence matter. But now, after only a year and a half in the job, Deutch was leaving CIA, and my friend and former boss Tony Lake had been picked to replace him.
Tony had all the right tools for the job: intelligence, acumen, the confidence of the president, and strength of character. Outsiders who observed Tony when he was national security advisor assumed from his quiet comportment that he was some misplaced mild-mannered professor. Not so. Amid many large egos, Tony was the unchallenged boss at the NSC, a master at process and bureaucratic intrigue. He had observed up close the dysfunctional backbiting that crippled the Carter administration and had worked hard to prevent a repeat performance under Bill Clinton. A rarity in Washington, Tony had no desire to have a high profile, and he emphasized to his staff that we would succeed or fail together as a team. None of us, he stressed, had been elected to the offices we held.
All those attributes made Tony an ideal choice, I thought, to lead CIA. Selfishly, I also knew that his arrival at Langley meant that I would be able to stay on in the deputy’s job—a position I was learning to love.
John Deutch—a brilliant, eccentric, and largely misunderstood figure—had an ability to translate his technical expertise into policy in a way few people could. A gregarious bear of a man, he wanted to be respected by the Agency’s workforce. But shortly after he arrived at CIA, the Agency’s inspector general issued a report criticizing the professionalism of some CIA officers in Guatemala in the 1980s, and John disciplined some of those named. That got him off to a rough start with the workforce. And then things got worse.
His downfall came when he told a reporter for the New York Times Magazine that he did not find many first-class intellects at the Agency. “Compared to uniformed officers,” the Times quoted John as saying, “they certainly are not as competent, or as understanding of what their relative role is and what their responsibilities are.” The Central Intelligence Agency is a very emotional place, and after that, John’s chances of winning hearts and minds there were pretty much shot. I know he regretted his remarks. It was a valuable lesson that I would put to use later: You have to earn your employees’ trust, keep your own counsel, be optimistic, and, as I always said, lead from “the perspective of the glass being always half-full.”
John’s tumultuous tenure at CIA ended in December 1996 when he abruptly resigned. The conventional wisdom around Washington was that he really wanted to be secretary of defense and that when it became clear that post was not to be his, he left government for good. Whatever the actual reason, after he cleaned out his desk, I became acting director.
I thought I would have to handle the two jobs for only a short while until Lake was confirmed. But four months later, the nomination was still tied up in the Senate. I figured that the delay in Tony’s confirmation was behind his request to meet with me, but I had no idea why he had insisted on such an unusual location. His instructions to come alone were especially puzzling. He knew that deputy CIA directors don’t go anywhere alone. Since I’d taken the job at the Agency, a heavily armed security detail had been my constant companion. Everywhere I went, I was driven around in a big, black armored SUV with a second follow car full of guys with guns. Threats against senior CIA officials by terrorists and nutcases were very real. In the four months since I had become acting DCI, the security had been ratcheted up even tighter.
Nonetheless, I tried to comply with Tony’s request for discretion. I called in the chief of my security detail, Dan O’Connor, and told him that he and I needed to go for a little ride—alone. Dan, known around the Agency as “Doc,” for his initials, is a big, genial New York Irishman. He would take a bullet to save my life without hesitation, but he hated the notion of our venturing out without the usual retinue of backups. His duty was to minimize the risk to me, not maximize it. Nonetheless, he drove over to my home, and the two of us headed south toward the Potomac River.
We pulled into the gravel parking lot across from the Old Angler’s Inn. From there, with Doc keeping a discreet distance, I set off down a dirt path to the century-and-a-half-old canal that once carried coal from the West to heat Washington’s homes. Although it was only mid-March, the parking lot and towpath were crowded with bikers, joggers, walkers, and hikers scrambling along the rocky Billy Goat Trail. Farther downhill, kayakers were pushing off into the churning waters of the Potomac not far from where it comes crashing out of Great Falls.
Memory tells me that a mist was still over the canal that day. Tony was waiting for me, dressed casually in a w
indbreaker and hiking boots. I was the one who stood out—still in the suit pants and good shirt I had worn to church that morning. I simply hadn’t thought to change. We shook hands, and Tony said, “Let’s take a walk.” I’d been with Tony Lake in tough times, but on this day he had a grim countenance that I had never seen. After a half mile or so, we sat on a bench overlooking the canal.
“I want you to know that I plan to tell the president tomorrow that I am withdrawing my name from consideration as DCI,” he said in a measured, flat tone. “It’s too hard. They want too much. It’s not worth it.”
He didn’t have to say who “they” were. Tony had been around Washington for a long time. He’d played hardball with the best of them. Now that they had him in their crosshairs, a number of senators were determined to make his confirmation process as difficult as possible. Just how difficult had been driven home to me shortly after he was nominated. I had gone to Capitol Hill to deliver a briefing to members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. After the session, I was pulled aside by Richard C. Shelby, the Alabama Republican who was about to become chairman of the committee.