At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA

by George Tenet;Bill Harlow

  “George,” he drawled, “if you have any dirt on Tony Lake, I sure would like to have it.” This brazen remark left me speechless—not a common condition for me. Doesn’t this guy know that Tony is my friend and former boss? I thought. What makes him think I would do something like that?

  Others apparently didn’t share my reluctance. Soon, issues involving Tony’s management of the NSC staff and baseless rumors about personal improprieties arose. The confirmation was clearly in trouble. Still, I believed that, eventually, good sense would prevail.

  That day along the towpath, though, Tony told me his heart was no longer in the fight. He had suffered through three days of brutal public hearings and had been forced to endure the worst kind of demagoguery from some of the committee members. Prior to the hearings, Senator Shelby had insisted on, and finally got, administration agreement to allow him to look through the FBI’s raw files on Lake. “Raw” means just that—these files contain any allegation ever made against you, no matter how groundless. During the public hearings, Shelby and several of his colleagues took turns attacking the nominee. Democratic senators called it a “trial by ordeal” and a form of “malicious wounding.” Even Republican senator John McCain asked Shelby to reconsider his approach—but to no effect.

  I’m still convinced that once Shelby had tired of bludgeoning Tony, the votes would have been there, but Tony said that he had heard that Shelby was threatening to ask the FBI for yet another investigation as a delaying tactic. National Security Agency officials told us that Shelby staffers had been asking whether there was derogatory information in their communications intercepts on Lake. NSA rebuffed that fishing expedition, but Tony had had it. Enough was enough. What he told me next stunned me more.

  “When I tell the president that I am dropping out, I am going to tell him that he must nominate you to become DCI,” he said. To be sure, I was acting DCI, but the prospect of replacing Tony as the nominee had not occurred to me in my wildest imagination. After all, I was just forty-four years old, a relative unknown except within certain bureaucratic intelligence circles. That was one strike against me. Strike two was my health: I had suffered a heart attack fewer than four years earlier.

  I can’t remember if I replied at all, but my face must have registered the surprise I felt. Tony filled in my silence. “Look, you know the place, you’ve got the skills, the president likes you, and the Senate will confirm you. Tell me anybody else that can be said about. You’d love the job,” he added.

  “Yes, but not this way,” I answered.

  Tears were welling up in my eyes while I processed the mixed emotions I was feeling—shock, uncertainty, sadness, and trepidation. I was like a Broadway understudy who’d just found out that his best pal, the star of the show, had been hit by a bus.

  I thought about trying to talk Tony out of withdrawing his nomination, but it was clear that his mind was made up. Then I began expressing doubts about whether I was the right person for the job. Tony was sure that I was, and he didn’t want to debate the matter. “Look,” he said in his patrician New England tone, “I didn’t bring you out here to ask you what you think about my plans. I asked you to come so that I could tell you what I am going to do. I am going to withdraw, and I am going to tell them that they must nominate you. It is as simple as that.” Tony was worried that President Clinton’s instinct would be to go to the mat with Shelby. “He’ll want to fight to every last drop of my blood,” is how he put it. “But that would be terrible for the Agency. CIA needs a director now.”

  After talking for about a half hour we found our way back to our starting point, shook hands, and headed our separate ways. Back home, I went to the family room, in our basement, to think about what had just transpired. Then, as I always do on tough matters, I asked my wife, Stephanie, for advice. Could I do this job? Should I try? What would it mean for our family? Our child, John Michael, was just finishing up elementary school, a time when a boy needs his dad nearby. As acting DCI, I had had enough of a taste of the job to know that it would eat up my hours. Stephanie has always been my strongest supporter. Over the previous two years, she had come to love the men and women of CIA. Like me, she’s also Greek, ready to take virtual strangers under her wing at a moment’s notice. The Agency employees and their families had quickly become part of her extended family.

  “George, you can do this,” she told me. “You have to do this, because the Agency needs you. Don’t worry about me and John Michael; we will be fine and so will you.”

  The next afternoon, Monday, March 17, Tony issued a stinging 1,100-word statement about his withdrawal. He said that Washington had gone “haywire,” he decried the politicization of CIA, and he said that he hoped for a return to the day when priority would be given “to policy over partisanship” and “to governing over ‘gotcha.’” (Nearly a decade later, I’m afraid his wish has not come true.)

  On Wednesday morning, I got a call from John Podesta, the deputy chief of staff, telling me that the president would likely nominate me for the DCI job. Like Tony, Podesta didn’t seem to be asking me what I thought about the idea. I was invited to come down to the White House to meet with the president.

  At the White House, I was led upstairs to the president’s personal quarters. There I met with President Clinton, with Lake’s successor as national security advisor, Sandy Berger, and with Podesta. The president stayed seated throughout, having recently torn up his knee in a fall at golfer Greg Norman’s house in Florida, but there would have barely been time for him to struggle to his feet. We talked briefly, observed the niceties, and then almost before I knew what was happening, presidential staffers were asking that my wife and son be rushed to the White House as soon as possible.

  Before long, a pool of White House reporters was called in to hear of the president’s intention to nominate me. With my wife and son at my side, I made a brief statement noting my “bittersweet” feelings, since my rise followed the fall of someone I deeply admired, Tony Lake. I promised the president my best efforts and then went back to the job I was already performing.

  Thinking back, I find it odd now that there was no job interview. They knew me and what I stood for, of course, but no one asked me what I would do with the intelligence community should I get the job, what changes I might make, or how I intended to repair morale at a place that had experienced four DCIs in the past five years—not to mention two others whose nominations had been withdrawn.

  The story of my nomination got big play in the tabloid papers of New York, where I grew up. The headline in one paper called me “The Spy Who Came in from Queens.” Enterprising reporters found people from my old neighborhood who had known me for most of my forty-four years. Some explained how surprised they were at my nomination, since, as one person noted, as a child I had a “big mouth” and wasn’t known for keeping secrets. Others said they sensed something special about me based on the way I had played stickball thirty-five years earlier. (I was once the Public School 94 doubles stickball champion.)

  My favorite quote came from my mom, Evangelia Tenet. Although she had been in this country for forty-five years by that time, the embrace of the Greek American community was so strong that she still got along speaking only broken English. “I have one son in the CIA and one son who is a heart doctor. Not bad, eh?” she told the Daily News. Not bad at all, but the real story is my parents, not my brother or me. It is impossible to overstate their influence. Even though I have met scores of presidents, kings, queens, emirs, and potentates, the two people I still admire the most are my mom and dad.

  My dad, John Tenet, was his own man since the day he was thrown out of his house at age eleven by an abusive father in Greece. He first traveled to France and found work in a coal mine. There he quickly decided that the mines were not where his future should be, and he made his way to the United States—arriving at Ellis Island just before the Great Depression. He didn’t have a nickel in his pocket or a friend in sight. All he knew was that he wanted to be his own b
oss and take care of his family, and that in America hard work would let him achieve what was unimaginable elsewhere. On that abiding faith alone, he managed to do what so many Greek immigrants did: he opened a diner.

  Eventually Dad would become thoroughly American, but his European roots stayed with him. His hero was Charles de Gaulle. I vividly remember April 27, 1960, when my dad took me and my twin brother, Bill, from Queens to Manhattan to see de Gaulle riding in a ticker-tape parade in an open-air limousine. To this day, I can hear Dad shouting, “Vive la France!” and see de Gaulle casting his eyes in our direction. I knew I was in the presence of greatness—but, then, I always felt that way when I was around my father.

  Dad was a gentle, honest man. He had no formal education, yet he devoured newspapers and was fascinated with world affairs. Our dinner table was the scene of lively debates about politics and news of the old country and of his adopted home. The conversations flowed freely from Greek to English. When Mom and Dad didn’t want my brother and me to know what they were saying, they would switch to Albanian.

  Dad was the spitting image of Barry Goldwater, so much so that during the 1964 presidential campaign he was often stopped at the Long Island Rail Road platform and asked for his autograph. That says a lot about how times have changed. It seems odd now that New Yorkers would, even for a moment, believe that a presidential candidate might be standing alone waiting for the train from Little Neck to Flushing. Although twenty-three years have passed since his death, I feel Dad’s loss as if it happened yesterday.

  As arduous as my father’s journey to the New World was, my mother’s route to America was even more remarkable. She fled what is today southern Albania. Her two brothers were killed by the Communists, and her father, devastated by their murders, died of a heart attack. Alone, Mom somehow managed to make it to the Adriatic coast and board a British submarine after World War II, just as the borders were closing.

  Mom made her way first to Rome and then to Athens, and there she might have spent the rest of her life had it not been for one of her uncles, who was in the restaurant business in New York. Uncle Lambros bragged to my dad about his young niece, who was not only beautiful but had recently escaped from a village near where my father was born. Dad must have been enchanted by the tale because in 1952 he flew to Greece, courted Mom for two weeks, and married her. A week later, she arrived in New York to join him in the restaurant business at a place he called the Twentieth Century Diner. She was the baker and he was the chef. It was there, in Queens, with its large Greek American community, that she proudly raised her family.

  For an arranged marriage, theirs worked out very well. In another era, with resources and a family behind her, Mom might have gone to college and on to law school. She would have been formidable in a courtroom. My mother has an uncanny ability to read people—private citizens and public figures alike. Mom can spot a liar a mile away. Had I been able to put her to work at CIA, we could have scrapped all our polygraph machines. She is a woman of few words, but her temper is on a hair trigger, especially when anyone tries to make life difficult for her two boys. I tell people—only half kidding—that after dealing with my mom, Yasser Arafat was a piece of cake.

  In many ways, I am my father’s son. He was a very trusting man, loath to say anything bad about anyone. Many times when I was director of CIA, I would find myself longing for a chance to get Dad’s advice on some thorny problem, though he had passed away in 1983. When things got tough, brother Bill would always say, “Just think about what the old man would do.” Dad believed in inclusiveness. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Sometimes, though, I wish I were more like my mom, who firmly believes that constant confrontation can be cathartic. They were an extraordinary couple. I am thankful every day that their courage and determination brought them to this country.

  I thought about my parents’ remarkable journey that March Sunday in 1997—a journey that had brought me to that towpath and to this turning point in my life.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Burning Platform

  In a perfect world, I would have been fully prepared for my new job, and the Agency would have had the resources to tackle the growing terrorism menace head-on and across a global frontier. From the lethal 1983 attack on the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut to the 1988 bombing of Pam Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing to the 1996 attack on another U.S. military barracks, Khobar Towers in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, we had seen Hezbollah, Hamas, al-Qa’ida, and others at work, and we knew how state sponsors from Libya to Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan used these killers and suicide bombers in a proxy war against Americans and our friends and interests abroad.

  Believe me, there was never any doubt who the enemies were, but in the world we lived in and at the CIA I had inherited, things were never that easy. The CIA of 1997 was not a well-oiled machine with an abundance of resources or an organization that ran with crisp precision. If it had been, plenty of other people would have been vying to lead it. In reality, the job probably fell my way more by default than anything else. One newspaper at the time described me as an “unconventional” choice to run the place. The New York Times quoted an anonymous official as saying, “I can’t give you a better name” than Tenet or, given the challenges facing the Agency, “even a name at all.” At least the Times had my name right. Fifteen months earlier my face had been on the cover of Parade magazine, along with that of John Deutch. Amusingly, Parade identified me for its thirty million plus readers as “David Cohen,” who was actually our director of operations at the time.

  Perhaps the most critical problem the Agency faced was the lack of continuity in leadership. I was the fifth director in seven years. No company can succeed with that kind of turnover. The view of much of the workforce about edicts from the seventh floor, where the most-senior officials work, was that if you didn’t like an order, just wait awhile—the person who gave it would soon be gone.

  The problems ran deeper than episodic leadership, though. During the 1990s, the conventional wisdom was that we had won the cold war and it was time to reap the peace dividend. Not only was that assumption wrong—the war was simply evolving from state-run to stateless armies and from intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) to nuclear manpacks and anthrax vials—but the supposed “peace dividend” was devastating to the spy business at a time when its vitality was most needed. The entire intelligence community, not just CIA, lost billions of dollars in funding. Our workforce was slashed by almost 25 percent. There is no good way to cut an organization’s staff by that amount. But there is one incredibly bad way to do it—and that was precisely the method the intelligence community used. They simply stopped recruiting new people. As a result, there was a half decade or so where hardly any new talent was coming in, and many, many experienced hands were going out the door.

  When I became deputy DCI in the summer of 1995, we were running two classes a year for new “case officers”—future members of our clandestine service, the men and women who recruit foreign agents to steal secrets. The class in session that summer had a grand total of six future case officers and six “reports officers”—people who don’t collect intelligence as much as write up the efforts of their colleagues who do. You can’t run a spy service that way. We later learned that, while we were training a handful of case officers each year, al-Qa’ida was training literally thousands of potential terrorists at its camps in Afghanistan, the Sudan, and elsewhere.

  Even if we had had the money, the will, and political backing suddenly to ramp up our training program in the mid-1990s, we did not have the infrastructure to support it. Our clandestine training facility had been allowed to deteriorate to an appalling state. Classes were being conducted in dilapidated World War II–era buildings. The housing for our instructors and their families was worse than anything they had to endure when deployed to developing countries. Our best and brightest were not teaching our future officers. Our recruiting program was in shambles, too.
Each directorate within the Agency had its own, and there was little or no coordination among them. Of all the telltale signs I tripped over in those first explorations into what was ailing the Agency, the one that stood out the most to me was this: the FBI had more special agents in New York City than CIA had clandestine officers covering the whole world.

  It wasn’t just the clandestine portion of the Agency that was in bad shape. Our analytic expertise had eroded to an alarming extent. In order to get promoted, analysts who had spent years becoming world-class experts in some critical issue or geographic region had to drop their area of interest and become managers. The Peter Principle is as true in the spy trade as in any other: the best analysts are often not the best managers.

  Not surprisingly, morale at the Agency was in the basement. CIA was still reeling from the espionage cases of Aldrich Ames in 1994 and Harold Nicholson in 1996, trusted Agency officers who betrayed the country and their colleagues by selling critical secrets to the Russians. The Agency had also been rocked by false allegations in 1996 that some of its members had been complicit in selling crack cocaine to children in California. The allegations were ludicrous, but even attempting to refute them gave legs to a lurid tale.

  Mid-and senior-level officers in the Agency were haunted by the fear of being hauled before Congress or into court and asked to defend their actions. A succession of administrations would tell them that they were expected to take risks and be aggressive. But if something went wrong, Agency officials faced disgrace, dismissal, and financial ruin. Many of those willing to stick it out at CIA rushed to purchase their own “professional liability” insurance. That helped, but the chilling effect of having to do so spread broadly through the organization.