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

by George Tenet;Bill Harlow

  Perhaps I should have pounded the table harder. But let me be clear: I am not among those who, with twenty-twenty hindsight, now say, “If only they had listened to me, we never would have gotten into this mess.” I did not oppose the president’s decision to invade Iraq. Such decisions properly belong to the policy makers, not to intelligence officials.

  The lessons derived from our national nightmare in Iraq are many and have been painfully learned. To start, I would say that even the world’s lone superpower must see that there are some mountains too high for it to climb, and that military might alone cannot solve the endemic political and social problems of other nations. We should enter into wars of choice only with the greatest reluctance, and then only after being completely honest with ourselves and the world about our rationale for undertaking such missions. It is not enough to know how to win wars; equally important is having the knowledge, and the will, to secure the peace. Going into Iraq, the United States let the desire to bring down Saddam’s regime overwhelm the recognition that we were unprepared to create the conditions that would put a workable model in its place.

  In Iraq we removed a Sunni-dominated and tribally based cult of personality and backed an increase in Shia power without allowing any Sunni alternative to develop. We did this without a broader political strategy that contemplated an outcome whereby Iran would be deterred and contained, and without a strategy to pull Syria away from the Iranian orbit of influence. In effect, we kept Syria and Iran in the same orbit, shunning them and refusing to talk to them about important issues in the region. Over time both countries became determined to resist us. Rather than seeking to create a broad regional consensus for our goals in Iraq, we have isolated Iraq within the region and, more important, isolated the United States.

  The administration did not understand that in the volatile Middle East it is often imperative to fight and talk at the same time. We need to talk to the Arab world about issues they care about, not simply issues of concern to us.

  The problems in post-Saddam Iraq grew in large part out of an erroneous belief that we could impose our vision of the future on a diverse set of people with very different motivations and expectations. Some in our government felt that the United States could dictate to the Iraqi people our view of their sovereign will, that we could provide legitimacy for their new political leaders simply through our military strength. They were sadly mistaken.

  I don’t know whether putting more American troops on the ground in Iraq in the middle of a sectarian conflict is going to work. At this writing, such a new strategy is being implemented by Gen. David Petraeus. It may have worked more than three years ago—before a country that believed it had a national identity reverted to the politics of religious and ethnic identification—but whether it will work now only time will tell. My fear is that sectarian violence in Iraq has taken on a life of its own and that U.S. forces are becoming more and more irrelevant to the management of that violence.

  In the end it will not matter how many troops the United States puts on the ground. Only Iraqis can determine what kind of country they want and whether they want to pursue a national reconciliation that allows them to remain unified. They can no longer use the U.S. presence as an excuse for failing to make fundamental decisions about their future as a nation.

  Any surge in U.S. forces must continue to be accompanied by the ongoing diplomatic effort to bring to the table all the regional stakeholders. This must include the Iranians and Syrians. This is not a question of sanctioning Iranian behavior that leads to the killing of our troops in Iraq; this behavior is unacceptable and it must be addressed on the ground there. Nor is it a question of fearing that Iran will want to discuss their nuclear program. This subject should properly be dealt with separately.

  But Iran is not a monolith. It has serious internal problems, including rising unemployment and a very young population that believes that Khomeini’s revolution has failed the Iranian people. Chaos and civil war in Iraq may be a threat to the Iranian regime, too. Is it possible that there is a convergence of interest between us and the Iranians? We will know only after we talk to them in front of their Sunni counterparts in the region. Should the Iranians resist such a dialogue, what would be lost?

  What we don’t want is Sunni countries stoking the flames of the Sunni insurgency, which would increase the likelihood of a broader Sunni-Shia conflagration that could spill over Iraq’s borders and further endanger the region. A Shia political revival is occurring across the Middle East. It needs to be understood and considered in any plans for broad political reform in countries throughout the region. Only in this way can Iranian attempts to gain greater leverage and cause more mischief be restrained.

  All of this requires carefully managed and staged discussions, sometimes with the United States, and sometimes without us. But we can never be far away from the process.

  As difficult as the problems in Iraq, Iran, and the Middle East might seem, they pale in comparison to the global challenge of terrorism. Our highest priority must be to continue to fight terrorists around the world. The campaign against terrorism will consume the next generation of Americans the way the cold war dominated the lives of their parents and grandparents. It will require an intensity of focus unmatched by any other challenge. Let down our guard for a moment, and the consequences could be devastating. When your enemy wants to kill you, is not afraid to die himself, and actively looks forward to the prospect, then you have a daunting challenge.

  Few understand the palpable sense of uncertainty and fear that gripped those in the storm’s center in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Before 9/11, our country was without any systemic program of homeland defense. We allowed ourselves to exist on the home front without the capability to prevent the onslaught of a determined enemy. Moving quickly to compensate for what we did not know—the potential al-Qa’ida cells that I believed were likely already in our country planning another round of attacks—we implemented a surveillance program that critics said was an abuse of our rights as Americans.

  This was never so. I sat in on every briefing given to the leadership of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees where then NSA director Gen. Mike Hayden methodically walked through the surveillance program, how it was being implemented, and the care NSA was taking to ensure that its sole focus remained on providing us with the speed and agility we needed to protect the country.

  As for the treatment of detainees, the senior leadership at CIA understood clearly that the capture, detention, and interrogation of senior al-Qa’ida members was new ground—morally and legally. We understood the tension between protecting Americans and how we might be perceived years after the trauma of 9/11 had faded from the nation’s memory. History had taught us that decisions made to protect the public from another more devastating al-Qa’ida attack might be viewed later as our sanctioning torture or abuse, thus jeopardizing the CIA and public trust in it. None of this was taken lightly. The risks were understood.

  By speaking out about the use of certain interrogation techniques, Senator John McCain engaged the country in an important moral debate about who we are as a people and what we should stand for, even when up against an enemy so full of hate they would murder thousands of our children without a thought. We at CIA engaged in such a debate from the beginning, struggling to determine what was required to protect a just society at so much risk. But from where we sat, in the late summer of 2003, preventing the death of American citizens was paramount. It is easy to second-guess us today, but difficult to understand the intensity of our concerns when we made certain decisions and the urgency we felt to protect the country.

  Leaders of our country must find a way to build a broad political consensus on the lengths American citizens will expect intelligence, law enforcement, and military personnel to go to protect the United States. To find such consensus, there must be a sound foundation of consultation and understanding.

  After 9/11, gripped by the same emotion and fears, Congress exhor
ted the intelligence community to take more risks to protect the country. But if the elected representatives of the American people do not want an NSA surveillance program, no matter how rigorous the oversight, then the program should be shut down. If they believe that certain actions taken during an interrogation process put us in a difficult place morally—even if we believe those actions to be disciplined and focused, in compliance with the law, and invaluable for saving American and foreign lives—then we should not employ those actions. Our role as intelligence professionals is to inform policy makers of both the hazards and the value of such programs. We should say what we think but the final decision belongs to the political leadership of the country. It is they who must engage the American people.

  In all these programs, we believed we were doing what was right for the country; we calibrated the risks and discussed the tensions. But the debate must be broadened, the guidance made clear, and the consequences of either taking or not taking an action clearly understood.

  But I ask that we all remember those decisions when the next terrorist attack occurs. We must understand collectively that if we decide not to empower our intelligence-collection activities, we have to be willing to take the risk and pay the price. If we do not have that debate now, the pendulum will swing much more dramatically after the next major attack.

  The president must lead. No president can subordinate day-to-day decision making to others. In the days after 9/11, the president was confronted with an unprecedented danger. He has been criticized for justifying NSA’s surveillance program on the basis of the power the Constitution provides him in a time of war. But the fear present in those early months and years has all but been forgotten.

  Today we must all recognize that the campaign against terrorism will be of unlimited duration. It will require a different and enduring bipartisan legal foundation to carry us forward. The senior political leadership of our country should be asking together what we need to do now to increase our odds of deterring future attacks.

  Beyond a discussion of what steps to take in the fight against terrorism, there must be honest and realistic expectations for the work of the intelligence community; there is no perfection in our business. Intelligence does not operate in a vacuum, but within a broader mandate of policies and governance. The men and women in the intelligence community are ready and willing to be held accountable for their work. But when policies are inadequate and warnings are not heeded, it is not “failure of imagination” on the part of intelligence professionals that harms American interests and the American people.

  Terrorism is the stuff of everyday nightmares. But the added specter of a nuclear-capable terrorist group is something that, more than anything else, causes me sleepless nights. Marry the right few individuals with the necessary material, and you could have a single attack that could kill more people than all the previous terrorist attacks in history. Intelligence has established beyond any reasonable doubt that the intent of al-Qa’ida is to do precisely this. There is an abundance of nuclear material in the world, some of which may already be within reach of terrorist groups. It will require incredible alertness, foresight, and determination to prevent such groups from acquiring that material—a development that would have devastating consequences. Our nation ought to be moving heaven and earth to get a handle on all the deadly fissile material currently unaccounted for and possibly available to the highest bidder. If we do not quickly and completely snatch this material from our enemies’ grasp, we will rue our lack of foresight and our misperception that “men in caves” lack the ability to acquire and employ such weapons.

  Tactically, we can fight these extremists, and we will—for the next twenty-five years, person by person, cell by cell, bank account by bank account. One thing is certain: we have to continue the tactical elements of this campaign. And we cannot do it alone. There is no unilateral American solution to this problem. The relationships we nurtured with intelligence services around the globe and particularly in the Arab and Islamic world have been critical to the many successes we have enjoyed. The adversary we face will not negotiate, accommodate, or settle for peace. At the same time, we must recognize that you cannot kill or jail them all and hope to prevail.

  The battle against terrorism must never be just about tactics. We will never get ahead of the problem unless we penetrate the terrorist breeding grounds and do something about promoting honest government, free trade, economic development, educational reform, political freedom, and religious moderation.

  The first responsibility lies within Islam itself, to create and foster a religious dialogue that loudly repudiates the violence and radical thought that al-Qa’ida promotes and thrives on. No Westerner can shape this debate. It is the purview of governments and religious leaders and Islamic thinkers, who must no longer turn a blind eye to the extremist message. There must be a way to defeat the perversion of the Islamic faith that sends the message to its followers: “We have been humiliated because of the lack of opportunity and, as a result, our enemies—Christians, Jews, and apostate Muslims—need to die.”

  The second responsibility lies with the West and these same governments to facilitate educational and economic reforms that allow young men and women to have opportunities to live and flourish in a globalized world on terms in which they are respected and have a stake in their societies. Too often, such compacts have been broken.

  Western governments, especially our own, must find ways to engage the mainstream Islamic world, focusing on common interests and objectives. And to do that effectively, we must have a multiyear, long-range commitment in resources, personnel, and deep expertise in Islamic cultures, societies, and languages. We must convince Muslims through their leaders and opinion makers that terrorism is their enemy as well.

  Changes in the way we function operationally and diplomatically are urgently needed. But we must not fall prey to typical American impatience and rush into “solutions” that only make matters worse. To some extent, that is what happened with the 9/11 Commission. The commission did some very good work describing the nature of al-Qa’ida’s plot. But it did not fully understand what actions were working against the terrorists prior to the attacks and did not fully analyze the actions taken in the months immediately after 9/11 that led to the successful takedown of two-thirds of Bin Ladin’s top leadership.

  The 9/11 Commission’s mandate was not extended beyond the 2004 election as commissioners had requested. As a result, the politics of the moment demanded immediate action. John Kerry’s campaign endorsed the commission’s recommendations within twenty-four hours of the report being published. The Bush administration quickly followed suit, and thereby abdicated its obligation to lead and manage the executive branch in a responsible fashion.

  A strong case can be made that the three roles in which I served—as head of the intelligence community, Director of CIA, and the president’s principal intelligence advisor—were too much for any one person. Perhaps so. But to embrace a new structure without careful consideration of the implications was unwise. In the aftermath of 9/11, legislative changes were imposed before we had asked some fundamental questions. What was the world going to look like over the next twenty-five years? What threats and opportunities would we face? What capabilities would the country need to ensure its security? What kind of people would we need to recruit, train, and retain to accomplish the mission? These questions by themselves would have resulted in a vigorous debate and study. Then, and only after understanding the problem before us, should we have asked the question, “What architecture or structure should we put in place to maximize our potential to allow us to succeed?” Little of that was done. The legislation that was passed was based on structure, power relationships, and how they should be altered in Washington, rather than on what the country needed from intelligence to protect its future interests. The result was an over-centralized, multilayered structure that, at least where terrorism is concerned, lacked the speed and agility to meet the challenges we face.


  From my perspective, the single biggest obstacle we needed to overcome was that there was no single place where foreign intelligence and domestic information could be put together and analyzed quickly to empower those who could do something about it—that is, CIA officers, FBI agents, foreign partners, or state and local police officers inside the United States.

  In fact, prior to 9/11, there was precious little domestic data gathered. We had no systematic capability in place to collect, aggregate, and analyze domestic data in any meaningful way. Domestically, there were few if any analysts. There was no common communication architecture that allowed the effective synthesis of terrorist-related data in the homeland, much less the seamless flow of information from overseas to state and local officials inside the United States. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, U.S. intelligence officers in Islamabad could not talk to FBI agents in Phoenix.

  While the 9/11 Commission stated that there were “fault lines within our government—between foreign and domestic intelligence, and between and within agencies,” it focused almost exclusively on restructuring the American foreign intelligence community. Little if any attention was paid to the systemic deficiencies that existed on the domestic side.

  The Department of Homeland Security was in place, and a new intelligence division was being created in the FBI, even before the 9/11 Commission had ended its inquiry. These changes were Washington-centric solutions that did not incorporate state and local officials, the men and women who could actually act on any data gathered—data they still don’t receive.