Sidney Blumenthal: George Tenet, spook for all seasons

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http://salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2007/05/03/george_tenet/print.html

George Tenet, spook for all seasons
The former CIA chief seems strangely oblivious that his self-serving defense is shredding the remains of his reputation.

By Sidney Blumenthal

May. 03, 2007 | If former CIA director George Tenet's "At the Center of the Storm" were an intelligence operation, it would have to be assessed as achieving precisely the opposite of the results intended. Tenet hoped that his elaborate apology for his government service would cast him as honest, prudent and professional; his admission of his own mistakes would shine a light on his integrity; his disclosures of the machinations of Vice President Dick Cheney and the neoconservative cabal would show him as a truth teller; and his refusal to say nary a bad word about President Bush would demonstrate his respect for the presidency.

But Tenet's sketchy book, devastating in patches, is glaringly misleading about many decisive events in which he played an important role. By depicting himself as a spook for all seasons, moreover, he has simply exposed himself as a self-serving poseur. Tenet, after all, never served as an intelligence agent and was never posted overseas. For years he was the staff director of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, until then CIA director John Deutch chose him as deputy director, in great part on the strength of his congressional ties. When Deutch self-immolated for downloading classified files onto his personal computer, Tenet was promoted by President Clinton to the directorship and retained by President Bush, who seemed to appreciate his chameleon-like quality of adapting to any environment.

Despite this résumé as a consummate bureaucratic player, Tenet has shown himself to be politically impaired. He appears unable to perceive what he has done or what he is doing. He has only the dimmest sense of the moment into which he has inserted himself. Rather than being hailed for bravery, he finds himself in a hail of fire. He seems strangely oblivious that his supposed self-defense is shredding the remains of his reputation. His promotional performances on TV reveal an angry man careening out of emotional control, attempting to deflect difficult questions by demanding deference to his departed and tarnished authority. "Now you see what we've had to deal with," a former high CIA official told me. "And I like George."

Tenet's version of his notorious statement assuring the president that the intelligence reports that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction were a "slam-dunk" may clarify the historical record, but his account only reveals his poor judgment. In an Oval Office meeting on Dec. 21, 2002, Tenet did not use the phrase as Bob Woodward reported in his book "Plan of Attack" but, as he tells it, "Instead, I told the president that strengthening the public presentation was a 'slam dunk.'" If true, Tenet is confessing that as director of the CIA he engaged in freewheeling political strategy meetings on the propaganda campaign to the American public to sell them the Iraq war, skirting close to the edge of violating the CIA's charter against involvement in domestic affairs. Unaware of the egregious inappropriateness of his revelation, Tenet is consumed with rage against the source that "later described the scene to Bob Woodward," making him the scapegoat for bad intelligence. "It's the most despicable thing that ever happened to me," Tenet said on CBS's "60 Minutes." But he is blind that his alternative account is equally undermining.

In his TV appearances, Tenet proclaims his devotion to the professionalism of the men and women of the agency he once headed, but his book depicts him as feckless in defending them from the intimidation of Cheney and the neoconservatives. He acknowledges that Cheney and his former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, frequently turned up at the Langley, Va., headquarters to browbeat analysts into accepting their disinformation that there were direct links between Saddam and al-Qaida. Tenet describes how analysts, in response to the pressure, produced a study, "Iraq and al-Qa'ida: Interpreting a Murky Relationship," which "made clear that there were no conclusive signs between Iraq and al-Qa'ida with regard to terrorist operations" but indicated there were signs "to at least require us to be very concerned." In fact, there were no such ties, and the "murky" conclusion was a middle ground between the utter absence of any solid evidence and the falsehoods that Cheney & Co. were pushing. Libby and then Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz rejected the paper out of hand.

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