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

by George Tenet;Bill Harlow

  In science and technology, an area where CIA was once a giant, the dot-com revolution was passing us by. Private-sector technology was far outstripping our ability to keep pace with our targets. The information technology tools we were putting in the hands of our officers looked like products of the mid-twentieth century rather than of the approaching twenty-first.

  Organizationally, the Agency was a mess as well. There was no chief information officer or chief financial officer. We had no coherent and unified programs of training and education, and our executive board made decisions through a democratic voting process. In a multibillion-dollar organization, “one man, one vote” guarantees lowest-common-denominator solutions—nobody will be truly uncomfortable or unhappy about outcomes. Good leadership, by contrast, demands that some segments of your organization occasionally have to swallow bitter but needed medicine. Organizations such as CIA exist to defend democracy, not to practice it.

  Overriding all these specific shortcomings, and most damaging, was a lack of an articulated and well-understood strategy for the Agency. We had no coherent, integrated, and measurable long-range plan. To me, that just seemed basic, and so that’s where I most focused my energy from day one.

  I wish I could tell you that I knew exactly what to do from the start. But I had several advantages. I had been the deputy director for two years. Being the deputy of a large organization in Washington is a great job—nobody knows who you are and nobody cares. And I had used the time to find out all that I could about the insides of the institution, learning about our people and where the best work was being done. The second advantage was the men and women of CIA, the most dedicated, passionate patriots you have ever met in your life. Their work ethic is second to none. The tradition and history of the organization is rich and full of daring and accomplishments. (In fact, there is a memorial wall in our lobby where stars denoting fallen colleagues speak of the ultimate sacrifice.) Change was certainly a necessity, but CIA’s history and heritage would provide the foundation upon which to build.

  The downside was that now I was no longer the deputy. I couldn’t hide behind my boss, and the Agency and the nation couldn’t afford for me to be stumbling my way up the learning curve. You might think that I had been preparing for this job for two decades, ever since I first went to work as a Senate staffer, but in fact a series of staff jobs does not prepare you for executive leadership. Certainly I knew the substance of the work, but leading a large, multifaceted organization with many lines of business, especially in more than one hundred countries overseas, is a lot different from running a relatively small congressional committee staff. I spent plenty of sleepless nights wondering, given the monumental task before me, if I was up to the job. No previous experience had prepared me to run a large organization. I was no Jack Welch and I knew it.

  I knew one thing that needed to be done, however: restoring humanity to the organization. The obligation of leaders is to listen and care for all their people, and not just those in the most skilled of occupations. A long time ago, in the Twentieth Century Diner, I had learned from my dad that if you took care of people, they would take care of you. And at CIA, if men and women believed that you cared about them and about their families, there was nothing they would not do for you.

  Throw your arms around an employee, ask him about his family, send someone a note about an ailing mom, walk around and talk to real people doing their great work, make them all feel that they are part of something special—from the kitchen staff to the cleaning crew to the crusty seasoned operations officer you share a cigar with on the office balcony at the end of the day. Show them that you care—and when you have to kick them in the butt, they will understand that it is not personal, but rather about doing the job right for the country.

  If you looked at the organization and dissected its business lines, the men and women of our clandestine service, the spies, would be our fighter pilots. Our analysts resembled a large college faculty; our scientists and engineers were the geeks who made everything work. Our security officers, logisticians, communications officers, and disguise specialists were the men and women who allowed us to be fast, agile, and responsive. They needed to feel special because they were, and they needed to be united with a common purpose, a mission statement—to protect America and its families—that tugged at their hearts.

  The first thing I did was build a leadership team that all these people would trust. I brought in very few outsiders. The message I wanted to send to the workforce was that the talent to help us get where we needed to go was already among us. To stress the importance of our relationship with the military, I picked Lt. Gen. John Gordon, USAF, to be my deputy. To head up the Directorate of Operations—the Agency’s clandestine service—I lured out of retirement a legendary officer named Jack Downing. Jack had served in Moscow and Beijing, and was a skilled linguist. His very presence on the team conveyed the notion that we were getting back to the basics of uncovering secrets to protect the nation.

  As head of our analytic unit, the Directorate of Intelligence, I installed John McLaughlin, to whom I (only half jokingly) referred as the smartest man in America. A highly respected analyst, John was renowned for the precision, rigor, and honesty that our tradecraft required. No coincidence, perhaps, he is also a world-class magician. His nickname, Merlin, suggests both his vocational and avocational talents.

  For executive director, I picked Dave Carey, the former head of the Agency’s Crime and Narcotics Center, and I retained Dick Calder, a much-esteemed member of the clandestine service, as head of the Directorate of Administration. In every case, I was going for talent, but I also wanted everyone in house to understand that our core functions were going to be run by people who had walked the walk before.

  One person I did bring in from the outside was A. B. “Buzzy” Krongard. He had been the CEO of the investment banking firm Alex. Brown. That’s heady territory, with salaries and perks to match. If Buzzy hadn’t been so ready to serve his nation in a time of great need, I never could have recruited him as a special advisor. His mission was to gather the data and assemble the metrics about all of our business processes that would allow us to make the changes critical to the Agency’s survival. He brought business savvy to an organization that seemed to pride itself on its unbusinesslike methods. Prior to Buzzy’s arrival, the Agency was a “data-free zone.” We didn’t know where the money was going; we didn’t know why people joined our Agency or why they left. All that would change with Buzzy’s expert help.

  I also gleaned from the outside someone to head our Office of Public Affairs. For years the Agency’s PR strategy was to proudly say “No comment” about virtually everything. Trouble was, we had long ago stopped functioning in a “no comment” environment. The media demanded responses, and when they didn’t get any, they assumed you had something to hide, even when, as with us, hiding things was part of your job description. To remedy the matter, I brought in Bill Harlow, an experienced communications professional who had worked in the comparatively media-friendly (and media-savvy) press operations at the Pentagon and White House. (I should note that despite Bill’s best efforts to get me to do a Sunday talk show, I had a seven-year unblemished record of almost never speaking to a television camera. It was my belief that a sitting DCI should maintain a low public profile and leave the “talking head” role to others.)

  With the leadership team in place, in August 1997, we were meeting at one of the Agency’s clandestine facilities not that far from Washington when someone said we were standing on a “burning platform.” If we didn’t work quickly to extinguish the blaze, the organization and all of us in it would sink into the sea. The term “burning platform” stuck—probably because it was so metaphorically accurate and because it reminded us every day of just how much was at stake. So we set out to learn how other organizations in disarray had transformed themselves. By the spring of 1998 we had a plan in place—a document we called the “Strategic Direction.” A key part of the document e
nvisioned what kind of officers we would need to have at the Agency in the year 2010. We looked at the skills they would need to possess, their languages, academic backgrounds, and so on. For five decades, CIA officers had been modeling themselves on the swashbuckling, mostly Ivy League–educated heroes of “Wild Bill” Donovan’s wartime Office of Strategic Services. Brains still count, and a little panache is always useful, but if CIA was going to be able to do its job in a seventh and eighth decade, we had to take into account the new world in which our people would operate.

  It took us nearly eight months of soul-searching to develop this plan for the future. On May 6, 1998, I stood up in front of five hundred Agency employees in our igloo-shaped auditorium known as “the Bubble” to talk about the burning platform and what we were going to do about it. Thousands of other employees watched me on closed-circuit television. Many of them were justifiably skeptical of what they were hearing. After all, they had seen so many other leadership teams come and go. How did they know I wasn’t just the flavor of the month?

  I tried to grab their attention by driving home how serious our problems were. CIA had recently celebrated its fiftieth anniversary, but unless we performed some sustained miracles, I said, the Agency was unlikely to be relevant by the time it reached its sixtieth birthday. I told them that, God and the president willing, I was going to be around for the long haul. There was no other job I wanted and no place I would rather be. The statement seemed necessary on my part, but I was stunned when it inspired a thunderous ovation. The reaction, for certain, was not about me. More than anything else, the applause spoke to how desperately the place wanted and needed stability.

  I continued, promising that the days of trying to do more with less were over. The things we were proposing were going to cost money, but I assured them that they shouldn’t worry about that part. My job was to get the necessary funding, and I pledged to try my damnedest to do so. I didn’t entirely succeed, but I made myself a royal pain in the ass trying. I begged for large increases in intelligence funding and obtained modest “plus ups”—small increases in our budgetary top line. We reallocated significant portions of our budget to counterterrorism. The budget for CT, as it is called, went up more than 50 percent from 1997 until just before 9/11—at a time when most other accounts were shrinking. In the fall of 1998, I asked the administration for a budget increase of more than two billion dollars annually for the entire intelligence community over the next five years. Alas, only a small portion of that increase was granted.

  So strongly did I believe that we were desperately short of needed resources that I went around my own chain of command. Although I was a cabinet officer in the Clinton administration, I struck up a relationship with then Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who was a strong believer in the fact that the intelligence community needed more support. To his credit, Gingrich pushed through Congress a supplemental funding bill in the 1999 fiscal year that provided for the first time a significant increase in our baseline funding. My off-the-books alliance with the House Speaker alienated some members of President Clinton’s team. Although the president was generally supportive of our mission, resources simply were not forthcoming. My only regret is that much of the money in the 1999 supplemental was for one year only, and was not continued in the years immediately following.

  Perhaps the most important message I had for the CIA workforce that morning was that we were going back to the basics of our core mission. From now on, we would emphasize blocking and tackling. Everything must support and empower the most important part of our business, the pointy end of the spear: espionage, stealing secrets, and what we call “all-source analysis.”

  Before I stepped away from the lectern in the Bubble that day, I promised we would rebuild our field strength, increase the number of our operations officers, and augment the number of stations and bases. Those promises were kept. Over the next six years we upped the number of our stations and bases by close to 30 percent, in some cases reversing decisions made a few years before to draw down, and in others opening new facilities in countries that had only recently come into being.

  The cornerstone of our business is people—analysts, field officers, managers, technicians, and, yes, spies. And no part of the Agency had been more neglected in the downsizing after the collapse of the Soviet Union than our human capital. The first thing we did was commit ourselves to establishing a centralized recruiting office on par with the finest in private industry. To bring in the best talent, we got back on college campuses, launched a national advertising campaign, and ensured that we had hiring bonuses in place for the skill areas we needed most—anywhere from thirty to fifty thousand dollars for scientists, engineers, information technology specialists, and people with unique language skills—serious money for serious needs. Some of the things we did might sound routine for the private sector, but I can guarantee you that they were revolutionary for a government intelligence agency. Traditionally, CIA recruits had to wait in a kind of limbo while we ran security checks on them. No more. We started making conditional offers of employment on the spot, and we gave recruits a paycheck while they were awaiting clearance. To be sure, this method increased our risk calculus. Today about 40 percent of all Agency employees have been there five years or fewer, barely time to get to know someone. But the simple fact is that the old standards and practices weren’t getting the job done.

  How did all this pay off? By 2004, 138,000 people were applying for a little more than two thousand Agency jobs. This wasn’t just the result of increased interest in our business after 9/11—we also experienced a steep climb in résumés received throughout the late 1990s and in 2000 and 2001. Our corporate attrition rate was 4 percent, remarkably low for any major organization. A survey of nine thousand engineering and science students at eighty-six universities named the Agency the top government organization to work for and the fifth best employer overall—in front of companies like Pfizer, Disney, and Johnson & Johnson. And the Black Collegian magazine named CIA one of the best places for young African Americans to work—twenty-seventh on a list of fifty companies, ahead of such giants as AT&T, GM, Ford, and PepsiCo.

  This second item was especially gratifying to me because I had made it a priority to enhance the Agency’s record on diversity. Forget for a moment the ethical reasons for diversity. More than any other entity, the intelligence community has a business need to have its workforce reflect a broad cross section of our populace. We needed demographic diversity and diversity of thought. If all of our employees looked like me, we would never be able to penetrate our toughest targets around the world. The critical decision was to stop treating diversity as a compliance issue and to treat it as a central business imperative.

  This issue vividly came to light early in my tenure when I attended a meeting in the Bubble called by some of our African American employees. Those were several of the most eye-opening hours I spent during my time at CIA. One after another, black employees rose to tell disturbing stories of how over the years they had been disrespected and treated as second-class citizens at the Agency. I vowed then and there that we would fix the problem, and I did everything in my power to make good on that promise. We built a program inside CIA that guaranteed that everyone would be afforded the opportunity to advance and grow—the only standard that mattered was excellence. Concurrently, we put in place a program to ensure that every man and woman would have the training and education opportunities to advance. These were not just words; they included metrics and performance reviews of all our major components, and accountability for leaders who did not get the message.

  As we were rebuilding CIA, we recognized that our training and education programs, just like recruiting, had been allowed to function independently without an integrated set of common values. So we made a major investment in creating “CIA University.” Today all CIA training takes place under one roof, in ten different schools: schools for operational and analytic tradecraft, foreign languages, business, and sup
port information technology, and, most important, a leadership academy where all levels of managers are taught how to lead change and take care of their people.

  Just before leaving office in 2004, I testified on Capitol Hill about our clandestine services. That year, we were graduating the largest class of clandestine officers in our history. Since 1997 we had deployed a thousand operations officers in the field. The numbers were great, I said, but nonetheless it would take another five years before our clandestine service was where it needed to be. This shouldn’t have been a surprise. When you have had a decade of neglect, it takes you at least as long to recover. No matter how bright the people you recruit, you cannot give them instant experience. Basic training takes about a year. Add in another year, or maybe two, for language school. Then the fledgling officers have to go out in the field and learn by doing. No one showed up at his first station instantly productive.

  We also set about improving our second major function: analysis. We changed the dynamic that encouraged top-notch analysts to pursue managerial posts so they could rise up the status ladder. Instead, we created a career path for people who wanted to gain deep analytic expertise. Now such people can go to the top of the pay scale and even be paid more than their managers as long as they enhance their skills and remain productive.

  When I first became DCI, I was handed a plan that had been in development for some time to completely overhaul the way we compensated our people. I set it aside because I knew instinctively that with the organization in so much disarray, the workforce would fixate on that and nothing else. We had more important work to do. Five years later, at the urging of Buzzy Krongard, when we judged the institution was healthy enough, we moved to implement a performance-based pay system. We needed a system that would create incentives for valued officers to take on the highest challenges, one that would encourage them to stay and help struggling colleagues to improve. The new system was structured so that it rewarded taking time off day-to-day duties to acquire critical skills. The plan was initially greeted with great cynicism, but we launched a large communication program to educate and make changes based on employee input.