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

by George Tenet;Bill Harlow

  I shook hands with Louis when he was through and went back to the house feeling terrific. “God has spoken,” I said when I walked into the house. “Louis has told me how to do it, and that’s what I’m going to do.” After I explained what that was about, Stephanie felt better about it, too, but she wasn’t yet convinced this was the right course. As for me, I slept great that night, better than I had slept in months, maybe in years.

  Before Louis and I parted at the A&P, we had agreed to meet the next morning with our families, under the American flag, for the terrific local Memorial Day parade. Louis, his wife, Marilyn, and Stephanie and I chatted away about the situation. For Stephanie, I know it was an important moment. She got a great deal of comfort from Louis and from the way he reinforced that this was the right thing to do, and by the time we set off that afternoon to drive back to Washington, she had come into camp, too. Louis Freeh swore me into office in 1997, and now he was telling me how to quit. Life had come full circle.

  Wednesday morning, I set out to put the Freeh Plan into motion. The president and Andy Card were traveling that day, so I placed a call to Andy’s office and he called me back from the road. “I want to see the president tonight,” I told him. Andy didn’t ask why. He told me when they were due back early that evening and said he would try to fit me in around eight o’clock. “That’s fine,” I said. “I’ll see him then.”

  That evening I drove down to the White House and entered the grounds by the southwest gate. I’m not sure what the security people thought was happening, but John Moseman, Bill Harlow, and Dottie Hanson, my executive secretary, were the only CIA people who knew for sure what I was doing. The three of them waited back at Langley to learn how it had gone.

  Inside the West Wing, I stopped briefly by Andy Card’s office. “It’s time to go,” I told him. “I want to tell the president myself.” Andy was considerate as always. As always, too, he didn’t tip his hand as to whether he was surprised by my announcement.

  In short order, Andy led me upstairs to the residence, where President Bush greeted me in the library, and the three of us sat down together. “It’s time for me to go,” I repeated. “I’ve been doing this a long time. I have a boy who needs me, a family that needs me. I’ve done all I can do. This is a good time for me to go, and I feel very strongly about it.”

  “When do you want to announce it?” the president asked.

  “Tomorrow morning,” I told him. I think that caught him off guard a bit, but it also raised a logistical problem. John Howard, the Australian prime minister, was coming early the next day, and he and the president were scheduled to have a joint morning press conference. Howard had been one of our closest allies. Not only had he deployed troops to Iraq, but he’d also had the enormous political courage to say that he’d gone to war in Iraq not because of what the intelligence said but because he’d believed it was the right thing to do. The president didn’t want to do anything to step on Howard’s visit. Nor did I. Instead of launching the daily news cycle with my resignation, the president decided that he would hold off on that news until after the Howard press conference, and then make the announcement as he was heading to the helicopter for yet another overseas trip. In the meantime, we would enforce silence.

  “We tell nobody,” the president told Andy Card. “We don’t tell Rice. We don’t tell anybody about this until tomorrow morning.”

  I thanked him for making that extra effort, and he told me how much he appreciated what I had done, but unlike our previous conversation, in September 2003, there was no attempt to talk me out of resigning.

  Afterward, I walked back out the gate I had entered and found Stephanie, who had come down to the White House with me, waiting at the base of the monument honoring the 1st Infantry Division, a magnificent sixty-foot column topped by a fifteen-foot gilt representation of Winged Victory.

  “You look twenty years younger,” she told me.

  “I feel great,” I said.

  The two of us then sat together by the monument for what must have been fifteen or twenty minutes. I told her about my meeting, and Stephanie said that while I was inside, a dark cloud had suddenly appeared, accompanied by a hard downpour. One of the security guys, Bob Woods, had come running over with an umbrella, and he and Stephanie raced back to the car. They were just about to get in it when the sky cleared and the setting sun reappeared in a brilliant show of color, and just at that moment, she said, I walked out of the White House grounds.

  I learned later that while Stephanie and I were talking, the contingent back at headquarters had migrated from my office down to the “cage,” where the security detail operated, and were frantically radioing Bob Woods and others for a heads-up on just what the DCI and “Daphne,” Stephanie’s code name, were droning on about. I think they were as relieved as I was when I finally got back to Langley that evening. I filled them in on what the president had said, and assured one and all that the show really was over.

  Thursday morning, still sticking to Louis’s script as well as I could, I assembled our top people in my conference room, roughly fifteen minutes before I knew the Howard press conference was going to go off. I told them that I had submitted my resignation the night before and that the president would soon be making the announcement. I did not let anyone leave the conference room until the president had finished and was headed to the helicopter to take him to Andrews Air Force Base.

  A happy side effect of my departure plan was that by the time the president announced it, most of his staff was already airborne, en route to a summit meeting in Europe, so their ability to spin the reasons behind my departure was mercifully constrained—at least for a few hours.

  Maybe an hour later, I went to the Bubble. The rest of the people at Langley, at outlying buildings, and at many locations overseas could watch on closed-circuit TV. Stephanie and John Michael were waiting in the front of the audience when I walked in. By then, I’m sure, the surprise was gone—we are an intelligence agency, after all—but I told everyone that I was leaving all the same, and how proud I was to have worked by their side. Stephanie tells me that I was far from the only person in the auditorium getting choked up. By then, even our always-cool security detail was getting a bit misty-eyed. Near the end, I looked at John Michael and said, “You’ve been a great son, and I now am going to be a great dad.” That’s when I lost it, completely.

  A footnote to the story: A few days earlier, when Stephanie and I discussed my resignation with John Michael, I told him that he was the main reason I was stepping down. I’d missed too many good times with him. That wasn’t going to happen any longer. As much as John Michael appreciated that, he also expressed the fear that the president would be mad at him for causing my departure. I told the president that story when we met Wednesday evening. Thursday afternoon, after my resignation, the president called John Michael from Air Force One to assure him that, no, he wasn’t mad at him and to tell him that his father had done an outstanding job.

  That wasn’t the first time George Bush had gone the extra mile for my son. He knew, from firsthand experience as the son of a former DCI, what it was like to see your dad get chewed up in the press, and he always asked about John Michael and how he was bearing up. Back in February 2004, three months before I left for good, I had told the president that John Michael was having an especially rough time watching me get pummeled, and the president invited him down to the White House for a chat. John Michael never told us about their conversation, but he came home feeling a lot better about life.

  I set my resignation date for July 11, in part so I would have time to hand matters over to my successor in some reasonable shape, but also for sentimental reasons. I had been sworn in on July 11, 1997, exactly seven years earlier. Four days before my last day, Stephanie and I flew out to Sun Valley, Idaho, to attend the annual conference sponsored by Herbert Allen and to see the hundreds of wonderful people who had made us feel so welcome over the years. I even got back to the Smiley Creek Lodge for a milkshake an
d fries.

  We returned home on the eleventh. Late that afternoon I decided to go back to my office one last time. It happened to be a Sunday. The headquarters was all but deserted as I went up to my office on the seventh floor. As I entered, I walked up to the charred American flag at the far wall that had been pulled out of the rubble of the World Trade Center shortly after 9/11. I sat at my desk for a while, thinking about what an amazing nine years it had been since I had come over to CIA as John Deutch’s deputy. I was rolling events through my mind when I remembered that I had stored away a great Cuban cigar that King Abdullah of Jordan had sent me. I found it and lit up, and then I walked alone around the CIA compound—my own way of saying good-bye to a place I loved.

  AFTERWORD

  My journey as DCI, which began along the Towpath on the C&O Canal, had more twists and turns than I could ever have imagined. My relinquishing the helm after seven years, in July 2004, did not lead to the calm that usually follows a storm. In fact, the performance of the intelligence community became a debating point in the 2004 presidential campaign. The political arguments generated much heat but little light. Each party tried to bludgeon the other, using American intelligence as a cudgel. The debate also led to a rush to reorganization—an effort destined to provide only a false sense of progress and security.

  Somehow the country survived, and shortly after the 2004 election, Brett Kavanaugh, the president’s staff secretary, surprised me with a call saying that the president wanted to present me with the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian commendation. Kavanaugh explained that I was to be honored jointly with Tommy Franks and Jerry Bremer. I was not at all sure I wanted to accept. We had not found weapons of mass destruction and postwar Iraq hadn’t been the cakewalk that some had suggested it would be.

  I asked Kavanaugh why the president wanted to honor me, and to read me the proposed citation. It was all about CIA’s work against terrorism, not Iraq. Fair enough, I thought. Perhaps I could accept a medal on that basis, not for me so much as for the Agency. But I was a long way from convinced. “I’ll get back to you,” I told him.

  I understood the politics clearly, but I weighed that against what I believed the medal would mean to the many heroic men and women of CIA and U.S. intelligence who had performed superbly in responding to the attacks of 9/11. In the end, I said yes for that reason. I also hoped the ceremony might bring a kind of closure to my tenure as DCI and help ease the pain of those last months for my family. Family often gets forgotten in these difficult times; but believe me, they feel the sting of criticism every bit as much as the principals do.

  On December 14, 2004, in the East Room, the president showered praise on us. The part I recall best were the words meant not for me but for the Agency I had led: “In these years of challenge for our country,” he said, “the men and women of the CIA have been on the front lines of an urgent cause, and the whole nation owes them our gratitude.” What meant the most, though, was the look on my son’s face as the ceremony proceeded. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him so happy, so proud, so much at peace.

  The ceremony turned out to be only a momentary interlude. Time has passed, and controversy has continued to swirl. But in that time, I have given considerable thought not just to the lessons learned in my seven years as DCI, but also to what lies ahead for the country and the intelligence community.

  First and foremost, it must be said that intelligence is not the sole answer to any complicated problem. Often, at best, only 60 percent of the facts regarding any national security issue are knowable. Intelligence tries to paint a realistic picture of a given situation based on expert interpretation and analysis of collected information. The results are generally impressionistic—rarely displayed in sharp relief.

  Being able to obtain these impressions, however, is critical. To do so, a nation must devote constant attention and resources to its intelligence capabilities—not just in times of crisis but always. Years of neglect cannot be overcome quickly, no matter how intense or well intentioned the recovery effort. The investments made today—in developing intelligence collectors and analysts and in nurturing relations with foreign partners—may not pay dividends for decades to come. But ignore those requirements now, and the cost in terms of lives and treasure will be exponentially higher.

  No matter how conclusive intelligence assessments may be, policy makers must engage and ask tough questions. Intelligence alone should never drive the formulation of policy. Good intelligence is no substitute for common sense or curiosity on the part of policy makers in thinking through the consequences of their actions.

  Terrorism and Iraq were the two most pressing issues of my tenure, but as critical as they are, we should not be blind to other issues in that troubled region. The Middle East is less stable today than at any time in the past quarter century. The security of Israel is at greater peril than at any time I can remember. The United States entered into the war in Iraq and acted as if our actions there had no relationship to the Middle East peace process, events in Lebanon or Syria, or to the broader struggle against Sunni Islamic terrorism. In fact, these issues are intertwined and now require a strategy that sees them as inextricably linked.

  Take the ill-fated Palestinian-Israeli peace process. Had we seriously tried to rejuvenate discussions several years ago, we might have mitigated the agitation in the Sunni world and created an environment more conducive to regional peace and security and less hospitable to the forces of Islamic extremism that we see today.

  In the mid-to late 1990s, security cooperation between the Palestinians and Israelis was made possible by a political process dedicated to Palestinian and Israeli states existing side by side in peace. So long as a political process was alive, extremists had little base of support on the Palestinian street for terrorism, and Palestinian security forces could work against extremists and not be seen as collaborators.

  True, Arafat’s flawed policies and tactics, and his reliance on violence, were major obstacles to peace, but we failed to seize the initiative, upon his death in 2004, to create a political process that offered real hope to the Palestinian people. As a result, they were driven toward extremists who offered them false hope through violence. Security deteriorated, and without a partner, the Israelis properly took measures to protect themselves. In the Middle East, the window of opportunity opens only for brief moments. Sadly, when the window presented itself upon Arafat’s death, we did not reassert ourselves as honest brokers seeking to bring a solution to the issue.

  When the Bush administration pushed for elections in the Palestinian territories, those elections only served to deliver power to Hamas, which is now ascendant. Hamas’s victory was disastrous for the peace process. An Israeli friend asked me, “Why did you Americans insist on elections?” Both the Palestinian Authority and the Israeli government, he said, had requested a delay. The implication of the elections’ going forward was that that “the United States was on the side of Hamas.” My friend’s comments illustrate the fundamental contradiction, in this region, between stability and democracy, especially when democracy is equated only with elections. Was insistence on elections worth Hamas’s accession to power? No.

  We need to understand that people in the Middle East need a foundation that will allow them to migrate to more representative forms of government in their own way and at their own pace. Simply shouting “democracy” without the existence of a vibrant civil society, and without paving the way for the educational, economic, and institutional transformations required as a foundation for that democracy, may well take us backward and empower the very extremists whose strength we are trying to diminish. Once these extremists gain power, they are unlikely to let it go. Their concept of democracy is “One man, one vote…one time.” I believe that if we insist on trying to remake the world in our image, we will fail. Still, we must engage relentlessly to foster a solution to these problems, because the region that served as the cradle of civilization also holds the potential to be its gra
ve.

  Unfortunately, the task ahead is made more difficult as a result of the United States’ current low standing in the Middle East. Commentators have talked about American arrogance and incompetence as the cause for this. Whatever the reason, we should stop acting as if it were irreversible. A bold new framework for security, stability, and the growth of reform in the Middle East is required, with the people of the region leading the effort and the United States serving as their most ardent and forceful supporter.

  Overlaying the very general problem of instability in the Middle East is the very specific challenge of the war in Iraq. The wisdom of our entering that war will be debated for years to come. No doubt, the uncertain road to war was paved, in part, by flawed performance from the U.S. intelligence community, which I led. The core of our judgments on Iraq’s WMD programs turned out to be wrong, wrong for a hundred different reasons that go to the heart of what we call our “tradecraft”—the best practices of intelligence collection and analysis. It is no comfort to know that other intelligence services made the same misjudgments. In the case of Iraq, we fell short of our own high standards.

  Even if the invading coalition forces had discovered stockpiles of WMD in Iraq after Saddam’s ouster, the current situation on the ground would be the same. The same U.S. post-invasion policies would have produced the same disastrous results. While we got it wrong on much of our WMD analysis, we correctly anticipated what might ensue during an extended occupation. What I did not know at the time was how badly our government would mishandle the invasion’s aftermath and the effort to win the peace. Once on the ground, CIA provided clear warning of a growing insurgency. The problem was that our warnings were not heeded. For too long our government was either unable or unwilling to look at new facts and transform its policy. As a consequence, a domestic insurgency in Iraq worsened daily and the political and military situation spiraled out of control. We followed a policy built on hope rather than fact.