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

by George Tenet;Bill Harlow

  Time and again, I told employees that senior leaders like me were only stewards for a short period of time. The workers, not the drive-through bosses, had to own the institution and take ideas and implement them on the local level.

  I’m convinced that the plan could have produced an invaluable boost to morale, but unfortunately, until the day I retired, Congress refused me the authority to implement it across the enterprise. We were allowed instead to conduct only a pilot program affecting thirteen hundred support personnel, and that was a resounding success. The employees knew what they had to do and managers were held accountable. Even more regrettably, the leadership team that followed ours scrapped the plan entirely. In their eyes, the plan suffered from the “not invented here” syndrome. In addition, the new team didn’t have the credibility or the will to drive home the sales pitch to the workforce. Still, not implementing the plan Agency-wide was a terrible mistake.

  As limited as our human resources were when I took over as DCI in 1997, our technological capacity might have been even worse. Once, CIA was the place to go to achieve technological feats that couldn’t have been managed anywhere else—like the creation of the U2 spy plane. But time and technology had passed us by. The private sector was infinitely more agile than were we in adapting the latest technologies. The then head of our Science and Technology Directorate, Ruth David, and her deputy, Joanne Isham, came to me with a bold plan. We had to find a way to harness the brilliance of young innovators in the IT industry. To them, we were their fathers: stiff, buttoned up, wearing suits. They wanted nothing to do with us. We needed to bridge that generation gap.

  We decided to use our limited dollars to leverage technology developed elsewhere. In 1999 we chartered a private, independent, nonprofit corporation called In-Q-Tel. A hybrid organization, In-Q-Tel blends research and development models from corporate venture capital funds, businesses, nonprofits, and government. While we pay the bills, In-Q-Tel is independent of CIA. CIA identifies pressing problems, and In-Q-Tel provides the technology to address them. The In-Q-Tel alliance has put the Agency back at the leading edge of technology, a frontier we never should have retreated from in the first place. This highly unusual collaboration between government and the private sector enabled CIA to take advantage of the technology that Las Vegas uses to identify corrupt card players and apply it to link analysis for terrorists, and to adapt the technology that online booksellers use and convert it to scour millions of pages of documents looking for unexpected results.

  If you were to ask me how far we came in the effort to transform CIA, I would say we built the foundation and first four floors of a seven-story building. We were far from perfect, and the world never stood still for a minute. After 9/11, making organizational changes had to be calibrated to allow men and women both to perform their mission and to continue the transformation. In the real time of the real world we operated in, the onslaught of threats and crises never abated as we tried to remake the institution. We couldn’t afford pit stops. We were changing the tires as the race car was careening around the curves at 180 miles an hour. The mission had to come first. Buzzy Krongard used to say, “Country, mission, CIA, family, and self.” That was the CIA I knew.

  The job of being DCI was really two jobs—running both CIA and also the larger intelligence community, sixteen diverse agencies. One of the criticisms of not only me but of all my predecessors is that we focused on CIA to the exclusion of the fifteen other parts of the intelligence community. But when I arrived at a badly damaged CIA and intelligence community, I believed first and foremost that it was essential to rebuild the director’s base, CIA. If the central pillar of American intelligence was wobbly, all else would be extremely difficult. Rebuilding and transforming CIA, I believed, would give me leverage to use recruitment, training, education, and diversity achievements at CIA to drive similar gains in the rest of the intelligence community.

  The resource shortfalls that plagued CIA were shared by the entire community. Despite what might have been seen as a CIA-centric focus, my highest budget priority was to restore the capabilities of the National Security Agency, which by the mid-to late 1990s was in serious jeopardy.

  It was in this period that we began to make investments across the community in capabilities that would serve us so well after 9/11. While the money never showed up in the early years, we were preparing for the future.

  My plan all along was to get CIA healthy while laying the foundation to do the same with the intelligence community. We made progress, but looming international crises would not wait for us to complete the task.

  CHAPTER 3

  Shot Out of a Cannon

  Jack Devine, a very able clandestine service officer who was acting deputy director of operations during the John Deutch era, once said to me, “George, somebody is going to fire a bullet today in northern Iraq, and you are going to find out where it landed two years from now.” As I was to learn, truer words were seldom spoken. So many things were going on in such disparate venues and coming at me from so many angles that it was impossible to keep track of everything. Too often, what seemed trivial at the moment would grow to huge significance, while what seemed hugely significant would disappear into the background noise. A predictable life this was not.

  On a typical day as DCI, I felt pretty much as if I had been shot out of a cannon. People were always queued up wanting my undivided attention on dozens of unrelated matters. I bounced from meeting to meeting, with people thrusting thick briefing books into my hands and snatching them away almost before I’d had a chance to digest the first page.

  My growing responsibilities even caused my space at home to shrink. Stephanie, John Michael, and I lived in a modest house in suburban Maryland that we had bought ten years before I became DCI. Now that I had the job, we had to give up a portion of our basement so that a security command post and classified document vault could be built. Inevitably the security detail became part of the family—and ours were wonderful, dedicated people—but even so, having armed men and women living in your basement takes some getting used to.

  My workday actually began at about ten o’clock the previous night. That’s when a printer in the basement command post would start to hum with the first draft of the next day’s intelligence briefing for the president. The President’s Daily Brief (PDB), or “the book,” as we called it, was our most important product. Most nights I would spend an hour or so reviewing the draft articles comprising the PDB, then call the PDB night editor with suggestions on needed changes and areas that required greater explanation. Sometimes, I spiked items that weren’t ready for prime time.

  By 5:45 in the morning I’d be awake, and usually around 6:15 or 6:30 I would head out the door and jump in the armored SUV idling in the driveway. Waiting in the vehicle in addition to the driver would be an armed security officer riding shotgun and a briefer ready to hand me the completed PDB, a stack of raw intelligence reports that the briefer had plucked from the overnight intake of secrets, and something guaranteed to sour my mood: a thick compilation of news clippings from the morning papers—the overnight leaks. In many cases, staying on top of the news was nearly as important as staying current on the incoming intelligence. In both administrations that I worked for, what was in the news would often drive the policy makers’ agenda. That was often the first thing they wanted to talk about.

  The two secure telephones in the car were in constant use, with the people from the CIA operations center providing updates and with calls from my staff asking for decisions, relaying messages from the White House, and telling me of constant schedule changes. It was sometimes hard to hear the scrambled communications over the phones because of the competing radio transmissions between my vehicle, a chase car, and members of my security detail pre-positioned at wherever my first stop would be.

  During the Clinton years, if I had no early morning appointments downtown, our convoy would cross the Potomac on the Beltway, then head down the George Washington Parkway to headq
uarters at Langley. Others were doing the actual briefing of the president then. Once George W. Bush came into office and made it apparent that he wanted me on hand personally when he was briefed, we would weave in and out of traffic all the way to the White House. The darting about was both for security reasons and because of the need to get where we were going quickly.

  Traditionally, VIPs being ferried around Washington sit in the right rear seat of their official vehicle. I used to enjoy encouraging new briefers to take that spot, calling it my “lucky seat.” Halfway to our destination, I would casually mention that the “lucky seat” was also the location that terrorists target with their rocket-propelled grenades.

  En route downtown during the Bush administration, my briefer would walk me through the final version of the PDB, a series of short, one-or two-page articles printed on heavy paper and contained in a leather binder. The president’s briefer, a different CIA analyst from the one who rode in the car with me, would be waiting in an office we had in the Old Executive Office Building (OEOB), directly across from the White House. Wilma Hall, a White House institution who had served under a half dozen or so presidents, ran my hideaway office and was a comforting anchor in a sea of confusion. There the president’s briefer and I would huddle over “the book,” trying to divine what questions the president might ask and often calling out to the Agency to contact subject-matter experts to get more data before showtime. Initially our office was in Room 345, looking out over Pennsylvania Avenue. (After 9/11 we were transferred to a room, away from the street, to minimize the potential effects of a terrorist bomb.)

  The president’s briefer traveled wherever the commander in chief went, updated him, took direction on additional information the president wanted to see, and reported back to me six days a week. It’s a killer job. You are up all night preparing for the next day’s briefing and up most of the next day preparing for the day after that. The compensation for the awful hours is a chance to witness history up close and personal, the chance of a lifetime. Usually, after a year in the position, briefers would be rotated to a new job in order to preserve their sanity and, in some cases, marriages.

  All around Washington, other CIA briefers were doing the same thing—meeting with their principals, from the vice president and secretaries of state and defense, to a handful of others privileged to receive the PDB. Those briefers would quickly report back to headquarters any significant reactions they got, and often those reactions would give us an early warning of what we might hear coming out of the Oval Office a few minutes later. Official Washington is like a spiderweb. Press it anywhere and the reverberations can be felt throughout the whole structure.

  Around 8:00 A.M., the briefer and I would go across the street to the West Wing of the White House and troop up the back staircase to the Oval Office. The actual briefing would generally take between thirty and forty-five minutes—an hour when things were really busy. The vice president, Dick Cheney; Condoleezza Rice, then national security advisor; and Andy Card, the president’s chief of staff, always sat in unless they were out of town. The briefer would usually “tee up the piece,” explaining each PDB article’s background or context, and then hand each item to the president to read. Often there would be additional material to flesh out the story—the nitty-gritty on how we had stolen the secrets contained in the item, and the like. Everyone loves a good spy story. More important, it was an opportunity to pull back the curtain, to talk to the president about a sensitive source or a collection method. The written items were generally short, and the president would read them carefully. Sometimes he would start tossing out questions before getting to the bottom line—a practice that would cause others in the room to start doing so as well. This interactive process was something I welcomed.

  My role was to provide color commentary and to provide the larger context. Since I had been around for a while, I could often give some of the historical underpinnings for why other governments were acting as they were. After 9/11, at the conclusion of the PDB briefings, we would be joined by the attorney general, John Ashcroft; FBI director Robert Mueller; and the secretary of homeland security, Tom Ridge, to go over a matrix of recent terrorist threats, weighing their validity and discussing what we were each trying to do to thwart them. By 9:00 A.M. we were generally done with this process. Also, post-9/11, the morning show was followed three days a week—Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays—by a “Principals Committee” meeting in the Situation Room, one floor below the Oval Office. The national security advisor would chair these meetings, except when the president chose to attend.

  With luck I might be able to head to my office by 10:00 A.M. During the twenty-minute ride to headquarters, I usually got in four or five calls using the SUV’s secure, scrambled, and sometimes over-scrambled phone system.

  When I reached my office, Dottie Hanson, my longtime special assistant, would have a list of calls on my desk that required my attention and another list of Agency and intelligence community people who had been bugging her for “just ten minutes” of my time. Dottie had to change my schedule three or four times a day, almost always beginning in the evenings—that’s when things began to settle down in the other offices around town, especially the one at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. I had no particular sense that she was doing this. I just went where I was pointed and consulted my “daybook”—an artful compilation of research papers, backgrounders, and biographic information that my staff prepared daily—before I arrived at the office. Dottie knew the building well; she had been with CIA for more than forty years. Indispensable and loyal, she was a good judge of character and always gave valuable advice. People sometimes joked with me, Who really ran the Agency? Let me clear that up right now: it was Dottie.

  Being responsible for CIA alone would have been a big enough job, but as DCI, I was also accountable for the rest of the intelligence community. That meant trying to monitor fifteen other agencies, including what the National Security Agency was up to, not easy with a place that generated thousands of intelligence reports on intercepted communications, called “signals intelligence,” each week. I also had to concern myself with the work of another agency, now known as the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which was cranking out hundreds of dispatches daily that tried to interpret what they were seeing from satellite reconnaissance photos. And I had to trust that somewhere in the organization people were marrying these products up—providing the “all-source analysis” that attempts to assemble a big picture.

  I wasn’t in the job long before I realized that there was precious little time for me to step back and say, “What does all this mean?” So I directed my “issue managers”—people who had responsibility for specific geographic regions or subjects—to send me a memo every two weeks summarizing the latest developments within their areas of responsibility, and to tell me what worried them the most. Even if the issue was not on the front burner today, it might be within months. I needed a baseline. With so much swirling around and through me, I often felt as if I were trying to watch eight television shows at once.

  Another big part of the DCI’s role was to maintain contact with the heads of foreign intelligence services. I met with visiting senior security officials from just about every country imaginable. Most countries had multiple intelligence services, and so I would need to be in touch with various sets of people from the same country. I would meet with both the Israeli Mossad and Shin Bet, for example, or the British MI-5 and MI-6. Mossad is the CIA equivalent; Shin Bet, the Israeli internal security service. MI-5 handles internal security in the United Kingdom, while MI-6 is the foreign intelligence service. Occasionally, a delegation from one service would be cooling its heels in one waiting room while we were trying to move a group from that country’s rival nation out the other door. Traffic jams were to be avoided at all costs.

  These weren’t social visits. There were briefing books to study before each meeting, telling me what the group wanted from us and what we wanted from them. Sometimes we wer
e seeking insights on threats from their region, but very often our visitors carried with them detailed requests for information, training, or financial assistance that needed to be dealt with. Visiting delegations often brought with them ceremonial gifts. Some were small tokens; others, touching and beautiful artifacts. With rare exceptions, I would accept on behalf of the U.S. government, and sometimes the gift would then end up auctioned off or stored. Any gift that was going to be placed on display at the Agency first had to be x-rayed to ensure that it was not bugged with listening devices.

  These meetings were often held at the cost of other pressing matters, but these vital relationships needed careful tending if it ever became necessary to call in the chits from our side. After 9/11, the time invested in such meetings paid off in willing partners ready to help us in a common cause when so much was on the line.

  Responding to the requests (and sometimes demands) of Congress was an equally large part of the job. I participated in hundreds of closed-door hearings and briefings during my tenure, not just for our two oversight committees but also before a half dozen other committees that thought they were owed a piece of my time. As a former Hill staffer, I understood the need to tend to Congress. It is important work. I believe in thorough and thoughtful oversight; it distinguishes this country from all other countries in the world. But I occasionally found myself wishing committees had focused more of their time on the long-term needs of U.S. intelligence rather than responding to the news of the day.

  When I was back at Langley, the afternoons were invariably packed with meetings, briefings, and the occasional pop-up crisis. I hated being tethered to the office and would sneak away as much as possible to drop in unannounced in offices around the 250-plus-acre headquarters compound. Early in my tenure, one Friday afternoon, I wandered into an office in the bowels of the headquarters building where two female employees were in the middle of a conversation that I had apparently interrupted. “Hi, howya doing? What are you working on?” I asked. One of the pair, a crusty veteran of the organization, stared at me for a second, then said, “I hope you don’t mind my asking, but who the hell are you?” I chose that moment to pop an unlit cigar in my mouth—something I was known to do at the time. The woman’s eyes got wide, her face turned red, and she said, “Oh my God, you’re him, aren’t you?”