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

by George Tenet;Bill Harlow

  Just before six o’clock on Monday morning, July 22, the MLP secure telephone rang in the command post in the basement of my home. One of the security officers on duty buzzed me on the intercom. Condi Rice wanted to talk to me. I wearily dragged myself downstairs to take the call. I had the impression that Condi was already at work. She told me that the administration had decided that this was the day that the White House would accept their share of responsibility. Finally.

  “Don’t do anything until I can talk to you,” I said. “I want to make sure you’ve seen all the same material I have.”

  Later that morning I went to the White House as usual for the president’s daily intelligence briefing. I brought with me two memos that my staff had recently dug up—memos we had sent the White House in October 2002 explaining in detail why the president should not cite the yellowcake information in his Cincinnati speech. Condi had told me earlier that she wouldn’t be available that morning—she was traveling—so I went to see Steve Hadley before the briefing and handed him copies of the memos. As he read them, I could see his face go ashen.

  We didn’t have time for a lengthy discussion about the memos’ content—the briefing was about to begin—but I had brought along a second set of the same memos to show the president’s chief of staff, Andy Card, someone whom I admired and respected greatly. Just before the PDB got under way, I asked Andy if I could see him privately in his office once we were finished. “Sure,” he said, “go down there and wait; there are a few things I need to discuss with the boss first.” As I recall, the vice president and Hadley also stayed behind when the briefing was over.

  Afterward, I waited in Andy’s office for what seemed like an hour, a highly unusual circumstance. When he finally showed up, I handed him copies of the two memos.

  “Andy,” I told him, “some folks here still don’t get it. Not only did I personally call Steve Hadley last October and demand he remove the yellowcake stuff from the Cincinnati speech, but my staff sent two, count ’em, two follow-up memos to make sure the NSC got the point.”

  Apparently, Andy had already been acquainted with the memos while I was cooling my heels waiting for him in his office. He told me that he just learned that Hadley, Rice, and the chief speechwriter, Michael Gerson, had read the memos when they were received in October. All three must have known from the memos that our objections to the Niger information were much broader than was alluded to in the background briefing at the White House the previous Friday.

  “Why are you giving me these memos only now?” Andy asked. He looked stunned.

  “I wanted to double-check on my end to make sure that not only did we write the memos, but that they were received as well. I had my staff confirm with the folks who keep the secure fax machine logs that the memos were in fact sent and received,” I said.

  Just to remove any doubt, I passed Andy a slip of paper indicating the precise times each memo had arrived at the White House Situation Room.

  “Besides,” I said, “I presumed you were doing the same thing around here—looking for the facts. If I have the memos, surely your staff gave them to you, too, didn’t they?”

  Andy shook his head and simply said, “I haven’t been told the truth.”

  Days later my staff was still digging through our files, trying to come up with a better understanding of the history of CIA’s involvement with attempts to get the yellowcake information out of presidential speeches. That’s when my executive assistant found a copy of draft remarks for a September 2002 speech, dated several weeks before the Cincinnati speech brouhaha. The White House staff had sent us some comments planned for use by the president in a Rose Garden event scheduled for September 26, 2002, following a meeting with congressional leaders. In the draft were these words:

  We also have intelligence that Iraq has sought large amounts of uranium and uranium oxide, known as yellowcake, from Africa. Yellowcake is an essential ingredient of the process to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons. With fissile material, we believe Iraq could build a nuclear bomb within one year.

  A footnote in the draft, typed in by the White House speechwriters, noted that the NSC and CIA were debating these three sentences. Apparently, we had earlier raised our concerns and were trying to persuade them to drop that segment of the speech. One of my assistants later marked the three sentences for deletion and penned in a note that read:

  9-24-02 (8 PM)

  Rice proposed simply removing the bracketed text. Jami concurred.

  I don’t believe that this earliest attempt to get the yellowcake information in the president’s mouth has ever been publicly mentioned before. Why do so here? What’s the significance of this nonevent? Either people overwhelmed with data and meetings had simply forgotten, or, for the White House speechwriters, the third time was the charm.

  On the afternoon of July 22, the same day I gave Andy Card copies of the memos regarding the Cincinnati speech, Steve Hadley and Dan Bartlett were again in the White House press room. This time they were “on the record.” The single-subject briefing lasted for one hour and twenty-three minutes. Hadley admitted having been reminded just that morning of our two October memos, which described weakness in the Niger uranium evidence and the fact that Iraq’s effort to procure the yellowcake was not particularly significant to its nuclear ambitions because the Iraqis already had in inventory a large stock, 550 tons, of uranium oxide. Hadley said that “the memorandum also stated that the CIA had been telling Congress that the Africa story was one of two issues where we differed with the British intelligence.” He said that the memo was received by the Situation Room and sent to both Dr. Rice and himself. One reporter asked Bartlett if they were saying that the mess was not George Tenet’s fault as had been said the week before. Bartlett ducked the question. That, I suppose, is what the White House meant when it promised to “share” the blame.

  Only sixteen days had elapsed since Joe Wilson’s Op-Ed piece about the sixteen words appeared in the New York Times. In that brief period, my relationship with the administration was forever changed.

  CHAPTER 25

  Going

  At some point in a job like mine, you just give out. You’ve been going on adrenaline for so long. The relentless pressure and middle-of-the-night phone calls take their toll. The work matters enormously, and it’s never over. But the family time lost, the high school lacrosse games missed, the vacations cut short or not taken—they all add up. And then something comes along, some essential trigger, and that’s it. You know you’ve hit the wall.

  I had just about reached that point when the sixteen-words flap broke out. Internecine warfare and finger-pointing are inside-the-Beltway intramural sports, but this time the pushing, shoving, and back-biting seemed to have been taken to an Olympic level.

  A few months earlier, in May 2003, Senator David Boren had asked me to come to the University of Oklahoma to deliver the commencement address. That afternoon, following the graduation, David and his wife, Molly, took Stephanie and me out to the site of the new house they were preparing to build. There, on a hill in the middle of a field, David once again argued vehemently that it was time for me to resign. I had put in my time, served under two presidents, and weathered 9/11, David said. No one could ask for more from a DCI. It was best to go out on a high note. I know of no more astute observer of the ebb and flow of politics than David, and I listened carefully to him. Back in Washington after that trip, I told Andy Card that I was considering stepping down, but I hadn’t fully made up my mind.

  During this time, I learned that the administration was talking with Jim Langdon, chairman of the president’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, about taking my job. Whether that was as a result of my conversation with Andy Card or an independent initiative, I have no idea. But beyond that, I heard very little until that September, when the president asked me to come in early one morning in advance of the daily briefing.

  Alone in the Oval Office, George Bush looked at me and said, “I really need you to st
ay.” It wasn’t a long conversation, and under the circumstances, with a war still going on in Iraq and the fight against terrorism still raging in Afghanistan and around the world, it would have been hard to say no to the president.

  At a personal level, yes, I was probably ready to go. The most important reason to leave was my son, then a sophomore in high school. The job was toughest on him, and the public pounding I was taking did not help. I was worn out, but the CIA had men and women committed on many fronts. Leaving them or the rest of the Agency workforce in the middle of that would have been difficult. We’d worked too hard together, put in too many long hours, and accomplished too much. I felt an enormous obligation to them; they had become family to me. Nobody is indispensable, yet I also knew there was so much more to be done. And in truth, while catching Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had been big, I wanted to be at the helm when Usama bin Ladin was brought to justice.

  Almost as important in my mind were the 9/11 Commission hearings looming on the horizon. You didn’t need a pitch-perfect ear to know that they would be contentious and politically charged. I was going to be called to testify whether I was still DCI or not, but the Agency was sure to be thrown into turmoil by the hearings. I couldn’t in good conscience leave that mess waiting for whoever my successor might be.

  So I settled back into the DCI’s chair, continued to put in the long hours, and did everything I could to keep morale high at an Agency that was being stretched perilously thin by Afghanistan, Iraq, and the global war on terror. As I had been doing for years, I also worried day and night about what al-Qa’ida and other like-minded groups might next have in store for us.

  On February 5, 2004, I delivered a major speech at Georgetown University, laying out the Agency’s record on Iraqi WMD and affirming our professional commitment to call them as we saw them. Seven weeks later, on March 24, and again on April 14, I testified publicly before the 9/11 Commission. Both commission appearances were grueling experiences. In the end, though, I tried to represent the Agency well. Then, on April 17, three days after my last appearance before the 9/11 Commission, I picked up my Washington Post, saw the front-page story touting Bob Woodward’s new book on the run-up to the Iraq war, and read the following in the second paragraph of the story:

  “The intensive war planning throughout 2002 created its own momentum, according to Plan of Attack by Bob Woodward, fueled in part by the CIA’s conclusion that Saddam Hussein could not be removed from power except through a war and CIA Director George J. Tenet’s assurance to the President that it was a ‘slam dunk’ case that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.”

  That’s when I pretty much knew the wheels had come off the train.

  As I wrote earlier, I’d had some advance notice of this. Woodward called just before Plan of Attack came out and, in an awkward way, raised the “slam dunk” issue. I guess he was trying to warn me it was going to be controversial, but my first reaction was almost a total blank. I remembered no such seminal moment. Now seeing the words in the Post, I felt as if I were reading about someone else in a parallel universe. Within days, though, Woodward’s book had ignited a media bonfire, and I was the guy being burned at the stake.

  This controversy was the last thing I needed. I took off for a few days and went up to the New Jersey shore, by myself. I wanted to get my thoughts together, and the beach, to me, is about the most serene place on earth. This, however, was not a peaceful time. Yes, we at CIA had been wrong in believing that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. In the National Intelligence Estimate, in testimony on the Hill, in briefings to almost every member of Congress, I, John McLaughlin, and others had delivered the same message: our analysis showed that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons and was working on a nuclear capability, though they were years away from achieving it. There was no secret about it. Now, thanks to White House spin, our long, complex record on a difficult subject had been reduced to some ridiculous scene out of a comic opera. It was like I was Tom Cruise jumping on Oprah Winfrey’s couch.

  It was obvious to me that this whole Oval Office arm-waving, jumping-off-the-sofa, slam-dunk scene had been fed deliberately to Woodward to shift the blame from the White House to CIA for what had proved to be a failed rationale for the war in Iraq. Woodward’s books, dependent as they are on insider access, have long been used in just this way—to deflect blame and set up fall guys. Now it had happened to me.

  I remember sitting there at the beach contemplating all we had accomplished in my seven years on the hot seat—the rebuilding of a broken Agency, the restoration of morale, the successes in Afghanistan and the larger war on terrorism, the takedown of A. Q. Khan and the neutralizing of WMD development in Libya, our role in the Middle East peace process, my own role as personal envoy to the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia and Pervez Musharraf, and so much else—and thinking, my God, none of that really matters to this administration. What I couldn’t stop wondering was, had the president been convinced by some of his advisors that the blame should be shifted onto me? In the end, I will never know the answer to that question.

  I like the president, plain and simple. We had been bound together after 9/11 by a national trauma and a common purpose. All of us at the storm’s center believed we were doing the right thing, and every one of us, the president included, had given it his or her absolute best effort. His staff, though, had different priorities. For them, preserving the president’s reputation—particularly with an election coming up and a war plan coming apart—was job one. Perhaps I was just collateral damage.

  Maybe my second day at the shore, I phoned Andy Card at the White House and laid it on the line for him. “Andy,” I remember saying, “I’m calling to tell you that I’m really angry. Yes, we wrote a National Intelligence Estimate, we expressed our confidence levels, John McLaughlin and I briefed almost every member of Congress; we were fairly strident about the fact that we believed Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. But what you guys have gone and done is made me look stupid, and I just want to tell you how furious I am about it. For someone in the administration to now hang this around my neck is about the most despicable thing I have ever seen in my life.”

  Andy is one of the most honorable, decent people I’ve ever worked with. What’s more, he was always very good to me. But he is also extremely disciplined about what he says when he talks to you, and this time he said nothing in response. There was only quiet from the other end. Yet in that silence, I understood that there had been a fundamental breakdown of trust between the White House and me. In short, it finally, absolutely was time to go. I couldn’t quit immediately over something that had appeared in a book, but I didn’t see any way I could or should stay on much longer.

  Over the next six weeks, I tried to think through the resignation process with Stephanie, my brother, Bill, John McLaughlin, John Moseman, and Bill Harlow. I also talked to David Boren about it in this period, as well as to my old friend Ken Levit, who went back years with me in the Senate and had served as my special counsel at CIA. That Memorial Day weekend, back at the beach, I had several long conversations with my brother. He was adamantly against resignation, because he felt that if I stepped down, the administration would dump on me whatever else they wanted to. “They’ve already done that,” I pointed out to him, “and I’m still in the job!” Stephanie was also opposed to my resignation, because she did not want me to leave while the country was at war and our men and women were at risk on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq. As for me, I already knew the answer. Unfortunately, to the outside world, my credibility had been undermined. My staying on would only hurt CIA. And then, as if by magic, someone appeared to confirm my decision to go.

  That Sunday evening we were cooking hamburgers, but we didn’t have any buns. I volunteered to run over to the A&P to get them. I’ve always found food stores and food shopping to be very therapeutic, probably as a function of growing up in my family’s diner. So there I was at the A&P, pushing my cart down aisle seven, and unbeknownst to me, Lo
uis Freeh, a dear friend who three years earlier had stepped down as FBI director and was a fellow devotee of the Jersey shore, was simultaneously pushing his cart down aisle eight. At the end of the aisle, Louis made a left turn, I made a right turn, and—yes, it’s true—our carts smacked right into each other.

  I looked up and said, “Well, Louis, how are you?” He said fine, and asked after me, and since we knew each other well and had gone through some of the same battles, I told him how upset I really was. We were both in shorts and T-shirts; my security detail was waiting outside. I explained my thinking, and we discussed my dilemma standing there in the middle of the A&P, our carts blocking the aisle. Louis first tried to talk me out of resigning. I looked at him and said, “I can’t stay. Trust has been broken.” Louis finally said to me, “You’re right. It is time to leave. Now, here’s how you do it.”

  To begin with, Louis said, you pick the date; no one else does.

  “Fine,” I told him. “Thursday.” Four days hence.

  “Okay, Thursday. You go in to see the president late Wednesday night. You ask to see him alone. You tell him that it is your intention to resign and to issue a public statement the following morning, and you ask him to keep this between the two of you until that occurs. Then, once he announces you’re leaving, you announce it to your workforce. The key thing is to allow no more than ten to twelve hours to separate your conversation with the president and your announcement to your own people. That’s why you don’t see him earlier in the day or in the middle of the day. You see him as late as you can possibly see him because you want to keep this buttoned up. The worst thing that could happen is that word reaches your people before you tell them. You don’t want to be in that position.”