Tenet's Victories Outweighed by Failures
WASHINGTON — When CIA Director George J. Tenet testified in mid-April before the commission investigating the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, the keeper of America's secrets revealed a little secret of his own.
"I sit back at night and look at a war in Iraq, a war on terrorism, conflict in Afghanistan and all the things I have to do, and recognize, you know, no single human being can do all these things," Tenet said. "If I've failed or made a mistake, I've been evolutionary in terms of the [intelligence] community. Maybe I should have been more revolutionary."
With the announcement Thursday that Tenet will step down next month, seven years after he took the helm of the CIA and America's 14 other spy agencies, Tenet's account is a fair summation of his troubled tenure.
Even his supporters concede that Tenet's efforts were insufficient. He worked hard to rebuild and rejuvenate America's battered intelligence agencies after their resources were slashed following the end of the Cold War. But his achievements did not meet the new demands of a world riven by stateless groups and faceless enemies practicing terrorism and seeking weapons of mass destruction.
Tenet's undeniable successes -- including the CIA's role in the recent disarming of Libya and the dissolving of a nuclear trafficking network -- have been vastly overshadowed by two of the worst intelligence failures in U.S. history: the inability to prevent the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the gross misjudgments of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's illicit weapons.
The CIA now faces such intense criticism that Jami A. Miscik, the deputy director for intelligence, compares it with the worst intelligence scandals of the past. CIA veterans "say they haven't seen anything like it since Vietnam, or since the period in the mid-1970s when the Church committee was investigating the agency," she told agency analysts in February. The committee headed by then-Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) probed allegations that the agency had spied on Americans and had otherwise abused its authority.
Some blame Tenet's overconfident predictions that Hussein's regime had resumed production of chemical, biological and perhaps nuclear weapons. A devoted Georgetown University basketball fan, Tenet even assured President Bush -- twice -- that Iraq's possession of such forbidden arms was a "slam dunk."
