Ghost Wars

by Steve Coll

  He deferred to senators and did not attempt to usurp their power or prerogatives. “He was very, very careful in dealing with members, irrespective of party,” recalled Senator Warren Rudman. He was direct and won the trust of his superiors by delivering bad news in a way that did not upset them. Recalled his colleague Eric Newsom, “George sort of proved something I saw happen over and over in the Senate, which was that experience mattered less than the ability to interact effectively with people.” He had a “very unbureaucratic way of talking,” crisp and colorful. To some seasoned colleagues Tenet’s style of speech appeared to oversimplify complex issues, but it was effective and allowed him to stand out from the crowd.7

  Tenet left Heinz to join the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence as an aide to Senator Patrick Leahy, a liberal Democrat, in the summer of 1985. He was a junior staffer who worked on oversight of Cold War arms control negotiations. When Leahy left the committee because of regular rotations, Tenet almost lost his job, but the incoming chairman, David Boren, a conservative Democrat from Oklahoma, agreed to keep him on the payroll for a few months. Tenet ingratiated himself with Boren and within a year had been named staff director of the elite, secretive Senate committee charged with keeping track of the CIA’s budget, regulations, and covert action programs.

  “The thing that I found most valuable is, he would march right in and say, ‘You don’t want to hear this, but you need to know such and such.’ Or ‘You’re out on a limb on this,’ ” Boren recalled. “He’s very blunt, straightforward. And then totally loyal.”8 Tenet had never worked in intelligence and had rarely traveled, and what he knew about the agency he had learned only from hearings, conversations, and briefing books. But aside from the elected members themselves, he was now the CIA’s most important overseer in the United States Senate.

  He could be tough on the agency. Tenet helped draft and pass laws that tightened congressional oversight of CIA operations. He had a budget-cutting streak and felt taxpayer money was sometimes wasted by the intelligence community. “He was always giving the third degree to the agency,” Boren recalled. On one occasion, involving disputes over an internal audit, “it got so heated that they were accusing Tenet of witch-hunting.” William Webster, then CIA director, turned up at the next closed Senate oversight meeting in a bulletproof vest, trying to slough off Tenet with humor. Yet as Tenet began to make contact with the CIA’s career spies, he also gradually became loyal and helpful to them, just as he was to the senators. Veteran officers such as Thomas Twetten spent long hours cultivating Tenet and educating him about the details of espionage tradecraft. When longtime CIA analyst and manager Robert Gates was nominated as the agency’s director, Tenet carefully shepherded him through the confirmation hearings, protecting him from partisan attack. He began to build a network of relationships at Langley.9

  Tenet rarely revealed his political and foreign policy views. A colleague remembers him denouncing Dan Quayle and speaking up for the Texas Democrat Lloyd Bentsen during the 1988 vice presidential debates, but this colleague also remembers Tenet as skeptical about a fellow Greek, the liberal Democrat Michael Dukakis. Tenet was conservative on arms control verification, progressive on women’s rights, and elusively neutral or centrist on much else. “He had an ambidextrous quality that was something Boren particularly valued,” recalled John Despres, a colleague on the intelligence committee. Tenet has “never been a great intellect. He’s an operator.” His role was to synthesize and organize the views of others so that elected officials could make decisions. There were hundreds and hundreds of people in Washington with strong opinions and ideologies. There were thousands of pointy-headed foreign policy experts and technical specialists. Much rarer was the staff man who knew how to traffic among them all, picking pockets and getting things done.10

  On one occasion where he provided strong advice, it did not go very well. When a closely divided Congress faced an emotional vote over whether to authorize President Bush to launch war against Iraq to expel Saddam Hussein’s army from Kuwait, Tenet recommended to Boren that he vote against the war. “I think Senator Boren relied on him to a large degree,” recalled a colleague. Classified briefings from the Defense Intelligence Agency had emphasized the potential for bloody disaster. “There was a concern there would be a lot of casualties. It was a cautious vote.” Boren, who had been seen as presidential material, was hurt politically by his decision, as were other congressional Democrats who opposed what turned out to be a swift and popular war that took thousands of Iraqi lives but produced few American casualties.11

  This would become a Tenet pattern until 2001: He did not often offer direct, forceful policy advice, preferring to assemble options and analysis for others to act upon. But when he did make policy recommendations, he could at times be cautious, especially if there was a risk of casualties or unknowable consequences.

  Clinton had few experts in intelligence to draw upon after his election in 1992. The Democrats had been out of the executive branch for twelve years. The main place where the party had loyal members with deep, recent experience in foreign affairs was Congress. Tenet’s resume might have been thin by historical standards, but he was a natural to serve as a transition director for intelligence issues after Clinton’s election. The transition job “was where you showed whether you were capable of being a member of the administration,” recalled Newsom, Tenet’s colleague on the intelligence committee. “It was a cattle show to see if you were going to pass muster.”12 Tenet did, and he followed Lake and Berger to the National Security Council as senior director for intelligence. This was a sensitive staff job run out of the Old Executive Office Building, beside the West Wing of the White House. Tenet’s office was the bureaucratic junction between the CIA, the White House, and Congress on intelligence operations and policy. His daily work involved not only continuous negotiations over budgets and oversight issues but legal reviews of proposed covert actions. He worked so hard at the job in 1993 and 1994 that he suffered a heart attack, an event that caused him to give up cigar smoking but had little apparent impact on his schedule.

  Memos about covert action plans, international criminal cases, and intelligence policy flowed continually between Tenet’s desk and the CIA’s Office of General Counsel, the NSC, the Justice Department, and the Pentagon. As the chief supervisor of this paper flow, helping to organize it for presidential decision-making, Tenet became steeped in the politics and regulation of espionage, the use and impact of intelligence analysis at the White House, and the legal and budgetary architecture of American spy agencies. By osmosis and participation he also began to learn the major foreign policy issues in even greater detail. He watched presidential decision-making about espionage and covert action from up close.

  This insider’s track shaped Tenet’s agenda when he arrived at Langley. When he was promoted to the CIA director’s office in the summer of 1997, Tenet conceived his reform program by looking at the CIA’s original blueprint. He was attracted to the agency’s “streak of eccentric genius,” as Tenet put it. He also had a large sentimental streak, and he saw his own success against the backdrop of the American myth: “Nowhere in the world could the son of an immigrant stand before you as the Director of Central Intelligence,” he said as he was sworn in. “This is simply the greatest country on the face of the earth.”13

  In his early weeks as director he was invited by former president Gerald Ford to appear on a panel titled “Does America Need the CIA?” The mere existence of such an event signaled how low the agency had fallen. As he prepared his speech, Tenet returned to the CIA’s founding by Harry Truman. The agency’s purpose was to prevent another Pearl Harbor. The CIA was “an insurance policy” against that sort of strategic surprise. “It is clear to me that the potential for dangerous surprise is as great as ever,” he told Ford’s panel. “That is true whether I look at terrorist groups whose sole purpose is to harm American interests, the biological weapons that Saddam Hussein is still trying to build and to hide in Ira
q, or the programs Iran has for building intermediate range missiles and nuclear weapons.”14

  Tenet vowed to improve the agency’s core ability to warn presidents about unexpected danger. This in turn meant refocusing on collecting intelligence, especially from human sources, against “hard targets,” the states and groups most likely to deliver a nasty surprise. Some of the CIA’s critics argued that in an age of global, digital media, where policy makers had instant access to multiple sources of news and information worldwide, the CIA was becoming just another news organization. Tenet thought that was a stupid assertion, even absurd, but to refute the critics the CIA had to deliver what no other information source in Washington could. To do this it had to steal secrets and recruit paid agents with exclusive access to hard targets.

  Tenet also argued that the CIA had to improve analysis work so that it did not miss future threats by failing to track them as they percolated in the early stages. Such all-source analysis was the agency’s “core function,” Tenet said. The CIA’s first job was to “protect the lives of Americans.” To concentrate on the basics, the CIA needed to move away from “soft targets” like economic issues and human migration. Whatever their importance, those kinds of crises would not likely produce another Pearl Harbor. The agency had to focus on the most pointed lethal threats.15

  The lessons of the two previous Langley regimes, and of failed CIA directors dating back to Stansfield Turner, seemed clear enough: Do not attempt to impose change by bringing in outsiders to clean house. Work from within. Find the career employees who have respect, win them to your cause, put them in charge, and let them do the work for you. Tenet reached out for help that first summer to former directors such as Richard Helms. He appointed the influential veteran spy Jack Downing as chief of the Directorate of Operations. He refused to criticize the agency or its employees in public even when there was cause. He walked around the building in his swaggering, bantering, tactile way, throwing arms around people, plopping down at cafeteria tables, and adopting the bluff macho style common at the agency.

  At the same time Tenet sought to build bridges with the White House and Congress. His career had been shaped by the oversight process; Tenet’s CIA was not going to elude regulations or the law even when that constrained operations. “We are more transparent than we used to be to policymakers within the executive branch, and more integrated into their decision-making,” Tenet said approvingly in an early speech. “I dare say the CIA receives more oversight from the Congress than any other agency in the federal government. This is not a complaint. In fact, this oversight is our most vital and direct link to the American people—a source of strength that separates us from all other countries of the world.”16

  There was an all-things-to-all-people quality about Tenet’s reform program. The CIA’s sharpest critics in Congress feared that he would be too forgiving of the agency’s incompetents. Some of his former midlevel colleagues in the bureaucracy, stunned at his rocket-speed ascension to the CIA directorship, grumbled that Tenet was more salesman than substantive leader. Tenet did have the accomplished Washington staffer’s ability to create a clear list of priorities without offending any important constituents. He said early on that he wanted to create “a program based on common sense which accelerates and deepens what we have already begun to do in all-source analysis and clandestine collection.” The agency was not broken, in other words, but he would fix it.17

  Tenet deemphasized lethal covert action and paramilitary programs, which placed the CIA at the greatest political risk. He pointed out that of the CIA’s major functions, “covert action is by far the smallest,” yet it was “also the most controversial.” At the same time Tenet assured the agency’s paramilitary operatives that he was determined to “sustain the infrastructure we need when the President directs us to act.” He defended the CIA’s small paramilitary department, modeled on some of the Pentagon’s Special Forces units, on the grounds that every president since Truman had found a need at times for this capability. Covert action was “a critical instrument of U.S. foreign policy,” but it “should never be the last resort of failed policy,” Tenet said, carefully arguing both sides.18 Tenet could get away with all this because he was so forceful and convincing personally. His eclectic, inclusive outlook did not seem to be a dodge; it seemed to reflect authentically who he was.19

  His views about the global threats America faced in the summer of 1997 stood squarely in the center of CIA and Clinton administration analysis. He saw five “critical challenges” to the United States. These were the “transformation of Russia and China”; the threat of rogue states such as North Korea, Iran, and Iraq; the “transnational issues” such as terrorism, nuclear proliferation, drugs, and organized crime; regional crises; and failing states in places such as Africa and the former Yugoslavia. There was nothing remotely controversial about Tenet’s list; it covered such a wide range of potential foreign policy problems as to be almost immune from criticism. To the extent it made choices, it was a list of hard targets, and it focused on the potential for strategic surprise. It was also the list of a synthesizer, a collator of other people’s analyses, including, crucially, the president’s. Clinton had provided the intelligence community with a list of priorities in a classified 1995 presidential decision directive. First on the list was intelligence support to the Pentagon during military operations. Second was “political, economic and military intelligence about countries hostile to the United States.” Third was “intelligence about specific transnational threats to our security, such as weapons proliferation, terrorism, drug trafficking, organized crime, illicit trade practices and environmental issues of great gravity.” It was a long, sprawling mandate.20

  Tenet was sharpest when he reflected on the CIA’s core mission of strategic warning against surprise attack. “It’s easy to become complacent,” he said. With the Soviet Union gone and American economic and military strength unchallenged, “the world is different, but it is not safe.”21 The CIA’s job was to tell presidents about dangerous surprises, it was that simple. This led Tenet quickly to the threat of terrorism, missiles, and weapons of mass destruction. Through discussions at the White House he absorbed and then recapitulated Clinton’s own emerging obsessions with terrorism and especially biological weapons.

  At Tenet’s confirmation hearing, Senator Bob Kerrey asked the nominee if he thought the threat of terrorism “may be overstated.” The question reflected a broader skepticism on Capitol Hill and in the press that summer. The CIA and the FBI, according to an oft-repeated argument, were hyping terrorism to win budget increases. But Tenet told Kerrey that the terrorist threat was real and that it was growing. “The sophistication of the groups capable of launching terrorism against U.S. interests now is worldwide. They have a capability to move money and people and explosives, and the level of activity continues to be enormously worrisome to U.S. intelligence. They’re fanatical. They have every reason to continue doing what they’re doing… . The activity worldwide at this moment in time is unprecedented and the threat to U.S. interests is enormously high.”22

  It was the terrorists, far more than the governments of Russia or China, or even Iraq or Iran, who would most likely deliver a devastating shock to the United States. “What are the forces at play that we must contend with?” Tenet asked the CIA staff early on. He answered his own question: “First, the threat environment is growing more diverse, complex, and dangerous—biological agents, terrorism, information warfare. It’s easier and easier for smaller and smaller groups to do serious damage, with less visibility and warning. The potential for surprise has increased enormously.”23

  BY THE AUTUMN OF 1997 persistent lobbying against the Taliban by the Feminist Majority had influenced the two most important women in the Clinton administration, Madeleine Albright and Hillary Clinton. When Albright visited a refugee camp in Peshawar that November, she departed from her prepared script and denounced the Taliban’s policies toward women as “despicable.” It was the fir
st time a Clinton Cabinet member had made such a forceful statement about Taliban human rights violations. A few weeks later Hillary Clinton used a major speech about human rights at the United Nations to single out the Taliban. “Even now the Taliban in Afghanistan are blocking girls from attending schools,” Clinton said. The Taliban were harassing those “who would speak out against this injustice.” It was the first time that either of the Clintons had seriously criticized the Taliban in public.24

  The impetus had come from old friends of Albright and Hillary Clinton in the feminist policy networks of the Democratic Party. These were accomplished, professional women of the baby boomer generation now stepping into powerful positions that women had not held in Washington before, at least not in these numbers. They kept in touch with one another and worked each other’s issues. The Taliban had now slipped onto the agenda of this fax machine network. Sitting cross-legged in their barren ministries thousands of miles away in Kandahar, the Taliban’s leaders had no idea where this turn in American attitudes had come from. They made little effort to find out.When pressed on the issue of education for girls by the occasional visiting American delegation, they said, “This is God’s law,” recalled the State Department’s Leonard Scensny. “This is the way it’s supposed to be. Leave us alone.”25