U1D2-24 - Consider the traditional values and ethical issues that confronted George Tenet

George Tenet’s Machiavellian Moment

Philip Giraldi

George Tenet’s tenure at the Central Intelligence Agency, which spanned the years 1995 until 2004 as deputy director and then director, was controversial even prior to the recent publication of his memoir, At the Center of the Storm. Tenet, gregarious and affable, blessed with a gift of gab and well able to mix smoothly with Washington politicians of both parties, was an enthusiastic director but had little knowledge of actual CIA operations at the working level. He had never actually served as an intelligence officer, instead start- ing his career as a congressional staffer and later moving on to the National Security Council and eventually the CIA. He was also well known to be averse to confrontation, an accommodator, rarely willing to challenge those in power, and he surrounded himself with like-minded subordinates. He did not, for example, take aggressive action when it was learned that his prede- cessor as director of central intelligence (DCI), John Deutch, had mishandled extremely sensitive information, and instead permitted Deutch to retain his security clearances and chair the Commission on the Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction that had been set up by the Clinton administration. Nor did he openly challenge the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans (OSP) headed by Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, which was producing and disseminating extremely questionable information in 2002 that helped make the case for war against Iraq. Tenet’s silence regarding Feith was par- ticularly troubling in that OSP’s critique was based on the contention that the CIA was failing in its responsibilities and was not paying enough attention to

Mediterranean Quarterly 18:3 DOI 10.1215/10474552-2007-015 Copyright 2007 by Mediterranean Affairs, Inc.

Philip Giraldi is a former CIA counterterrorism officer who served in Europe and the Middle East. He is a contributing editor for the American Conservative magazine and is currently a partner in Cannistraro Associates, a security consulting firm based in McLean, Virginia.

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information linking Saddam Hussein with al Qaeda, a hypothesis that Tenet surely knew was completely untrue.

Tenet had essentially two roles, one as the head of the CIA and the other as the face and voice of the intelligence community’s sixteen separate com- ponents, of which the CIA was one. As the most senior manager at the CIA itself, Tenet had both successes and failures. His greatest success was the CIA-led invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001. On the minus side, he pre- sided over the Clinton-era cost cuttings and politically correct restrictions on recruitment of agents that brought about the weakening of the Deputy Directorate of Operations, a process that led to the termination of nearly half of the agency’s human reporting assets and resulted in many overseas sta- tions being shut down or downsized. This reduction in overseas capabilities bore bitter fruit when al Qaeda struck the Khobar Towers in 1996 and two US embassies in Africa in 1998. The decline in overseas intelligence capa- bilities might also have contributed to the failure to learn in advance about India’s 1998 nuclear test, the inability to disrupt the Pakistani A.Q. Khan nuclear-smuggling operation in its early stages, the faulty intelligence that led to the bombing of the pharmaceutical plant in Sudan in 1998, and the apparently mistaken bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999. But Tenet also deserves credit for beginning the rebuilding of the clandestine services after the al Qaeda attacks in 1996 and 1998 and against the USS Cole in 2000. One might reasonably argue that Tenet’s greatest damage to the CIA has come with his book. His revelation of confidential conversa- tions with policy makers, including the president, quite likely will mean that future administrations will not trust CIA directors to protect deliberations that should, by their very nature, remain secret.

Prior to 9/11, Tenet’s performance against international terrorism was inconsistent. In 1998, he unilaterally “declared war” on al Qaeda, but sources at the CIA indicate that he did not, in fact, allocate any significant new resources to counterterrorism efforts. In summer 2001, he became aware of the urgency of the al Qaeda threat against the United States and briefed National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice that a major attack was immi- nent. She was not interested enough in the information to take any action, and Tenet, always a team player who was careful not to rock the boat, did not feel the need to brief President George W. Bush independently. Tenet has

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recently stated in his defense that he did not do so because the “US govern- ment does not work that way” and the president was not an “action officer,” at a minimum a curious interpretation of the Constitution, which designates the president as the principal government officer in the executive branch as well as commander-in-chief of the armed forces.

Tenet’s performance prior to 9/11 aside, he rose to prominence in the after- math of that terrorist attack when he crossed over from being an intelligence chief to become a key part of the policy-making process that was being man- aged by the White House. Unlike previous DCIs, he frequently briefed the president personally rather than delegating the responsibility to his senior staff. His development into an enabler of the Iraq war has become the prin- cipal charge leveled against him, one that his book does little to resolve, but his post – 9/11 job should have been straightforward. The National Security Act of 1947, which created the Office of the Director of Central Intelligence, makes the DCI responsible for providing intelligence that is “timely, objec- tive, [and] independent of political considerations,” and that is “based on all sources available to the intelligence community.” The DCI’s consumers were also identified in the 1947 act. They consist of the president, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and congressional committees “where appropriate.” The director was also tasked with producing “national intelligence estimates for the Government including . . . alternative views held by elements of the intelligence community.”

As the National Security Act of 1947 makes clear, Tenet’s principal responsibility was to provide the president and other policy makers with the most reliable and carefully nuanced intelligence available to assist in mak- ing decisions that literally involved life and death. The director should be judgmentally neutral, not favoring intelligence based on any perceptions of policy imperatives, and not dismissing information that goes against those perceptions. Whenever analysis is based on information that is suspect it should be submitted to the White House with caveats or dissents providing alternative interpretations. This role is frequently referred to as “speaking truth to power” and, if the CIA director is doing his job properly, it will not necessarily endear him to those in the White House.

In the lead-up to war with Iraq, Tenet provided the intelligence that made the case that Saddam was a threat to the United States. Nearly all of the

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assessments made by Tenet turned out to be wrong. In his defense and in an attempt to obtain closure on the issue, he now states that he believed that there really were weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq, and he also notes in mitigation that most of the world’s leading intelligence services agreed that the weapons existed. But it is not really that simple, because Tenet’s job was to speak with an independent voice, not to reiterate what other intelligence services were saying. He had to be above the fray and both willing and able to distinguish between reliable fact-based intelligence and bogus information being used to support a preexisting policy. To be sure, few foreign intelligence agencies had any knowledge of what was going on inside Iraq, some like the Israelis and Saudis had their own particular agendas that they were pursuing, and most of the rest made their judgments based on what the CIA was reporting. Tenet was both intelligent and experienced enough to accomplish this key task of telling the good from the bad, but he chose not to and opted instead to become a player on the White House team and appar- ently made a deliberate decision to ignore some information that ran counter to the desires of the policy makers. The version of reality expressed in Tenet’s book, and in the many interviews that he has given to promote, it does not coincide with the facts in two key areas: the alleged WMD and the alleged ties between Saddam and al Qaeda.

In the world of the Washington policy maker, the basic document that pro- vides the consensus of the intelligence community on issues of concern to the United States is the National Intelligence Estimate, or NIE. Tenet signed off on an October 2002 NIE that stated that “Iraq has continued its weap- ons of mass destruction programs in defiance of UN resolutions and restric- tions. . . . [It] has chemical and biological weapons. . . . [I]f left unchecked, it will probably have a nuclear weapon during this decade.” All of those asser- tions proved to be untrue, but each was supportive of ongoing administra- tion efforts to make a case for war with Iraq. Tenet signed the document and thereby confirmed its reliability even though he knew, or should have known, the following:

•   In 1995 Hussein Kamel, former director of Iraq’s Military Industrial  Corporation and Saddam’s son-in-law, defected to Jordan. He brought with him boxes of relevant documents and testified that Iraq had elim-

Giraldi: George Tenet’s Machiavellian Moment 35

inated all of its WMD programs. He provided the information to the United Nations weapons inspectors who in turn provided it to the CIA. The information was carefully checked and found to be reliable. Shortly thereafter, Kamel was enticed back to Iraq, where he was executed.

•   Reports of UN inspections of Iraq, which ceased in 1998 but were  resumed in 2002 – 3, estimated that 90 to 95 percent of all weapons stocks had been destroyed under the inspections regime that started in 1991. This confirmed the information provided by Kamel.

•   In summer 2002, the CIA’s European Division recruited Iraqi foreign  minister Naji Sabri. It was a major intelligence coup, and Sabri agreed to work in place to answer questions posed to him by his CIA handlers. He stated, inter alia, that Iraq had had no connection with al Qaeda and no longer had any WMD. Sabri was considered to be a reliable source who had good access to the information he was providing. His reporting had been checked and verified. This information was substantially the same as that provided by Kamel and the UN weapons inspectors.

•   Within the intelligence community itself there was considerable dissent  over the alleged Iraqi weapons program. State Department intelligence stated that it did not believe that Iraq had “reconstituted” its nuclear weapons program and also dismissed the story about attempts to obtain uranium from Niger as baseless. The Department of Energy rejected claims that the so-called aluminum tubes could be used for uranium enrichment. Defense Intelligence Agency analysts working for the Air Force did not believe that Saddam possessed drones capable of flying across the Atlantic Ocean and spraying chemical and biological agents.

That Iraq did not have a WMD program would not have been welcome news for the White House, which was maintaining just the opposite. When the president and his key advisors were briefed about the Sabri recruit- ment, for example, they expressed no interest in the information that he had revealed, prompting CIA Chief of European Division Tyler Drumheller to exclaim, “Well, this isn’t about intel any more. This is about regime change.” The dissenting views from the intelligence community were also largely sup- pressed in the Iraq NIE, making it appear that there was a general consensus about the viability of the threat posed by Saddam.

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The search was also on to find “alternative” intelligence that would sup- port the administration’s position. Between January 2000 and September 2001, a source named “Curveball” provided information on the Iraqi weap- ons program, most particularly on mobile biological and chemical weapons labs. Curveball was an Iraqi taxi driver who had studied engineering and who claimed, falsely, to be a former head of Iraq’s bioweapons program. He was a convicted embezzler and may have been the brother-in-law of an aide to known intelligence fabricator and Pentagon protégé Ahmed Chalabi. He was regarded by the German intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst, which was debriefing him, as an “out of control,” mentally unstable alco- holic. Drumheller warned senior agency management on numerous occasions that the information that came from Curveball was unreliable, and now states that his complaints about Curveball are fully documented in CIA archives if anyone doubts his veracity. In November 2002, UN weapons inspectors also tried to confirm the Curveball information and were unable to do so. Tenet nevertheless used the Curveball intelligence in the NIE, and Curveball was also the source of many of the misstatements made by Secretary of State Colin Powell at the UN on 5 February 2003, a presentation in which Tenet sat behind Powell to bolster his case. Tenet, in his defense, denies that there were any warnings about Curveball, but Drumheller insists that “everyone in the chain of command knew exactly what was happening.”

It is quite possible that Tenet was comfortable in making his case concern- ing the WMD because he fully expected that something would turn up after the fall of Saddam to make the critics go away. As a result, the influence of the bad intelligence continued even after the invasion and occupation of Iraq. In May 2003, CIA analysts working for Tenet produced a report stating that a trailer discovered earlier in the month was a bioweapons lab such as had been described by Curveball. President Bush, on a trip to Poland at the time, declared on the basis of the analysis that the Iraqi WMD had been found. Unfortunately, the report proved to be inaccurate, and it was quickly deter- mined that the trailer had been used to inflate weather balloons. Carl Ford, head of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, aware that the Curveball information had long since been discredited, personally confronted Tenet about the report, saying afterward that “it is clear that they

Giraldi: George Tenet’s Machiavellian Moment 37

[Tenet and his deputy, John McLaughlin] had been personally involved in the preparation of [the] report.” He added that “it wasn’t just wrong, they lied,” and then went on to say, “They should have been shot.”

Tenet’s credibility on the broader issue of manipulating the intelligence process to support the White House decision to go to war has also been ques- tioned. On 23 July 2002, the then head of the British foreign intelligence ser- vice, Sir Richard Dearlove, had his staff prepare a report, referred to as the “Downing Street Memo,” on his meetings with Tenet a few days before. The document, which was eventually leaked to the Sunday Times of London, has been curiously under-reported by the mainstream media in the United States. The memo states that “there was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” The memo is not particularly ambiguous and indicates that the intelligence would have to be construed so as to support the decision to go to war, a distortion of the usual process, in which the intelligence is viewed as both objective and policy neutral.

Finally, there is the issue of al Qaeda and its connection with Saddam. On Sixty Minutes on 29 April 2007, Tenet conceded that there had been absolutely no connection between Saddam and al Qaeda, an assertion that he repeated to Wolf Blitzer on CNN the following night. That there was no connection should have been evident from the exhaustive CIA inquiry into the alleged April 2001 meeting of 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta with Iraqi intelligence officials. Agency investigators demonstrated that no such meet- ing had ever taken place and Tenet, to his credit, never stated anything to the contrary. The lack of any al Qaeda – Saddam connection should also have been clear from the reporting coming from the CIA’s top-level penetration agent, Sabri. Also, it might have been common sense to assume that Saddam would have had little to do with a group that was philosophically dedicated to overthrowing him. That said, Tenet has not been consistent and has in the past claimed that the connection existed. An admittedly nonverbal asser- tion of the possible linkage took place on 5 February 2003, when Tenet sat behind Secretary of State Colin Powell at the UN as the latter declaimed that

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there was a “sinister nexus” between Saddam and al Qaeda. Tenet then told Congress on 11 February 2003 that Iraq was harboring senior members of al Qaeda, that it was providing training in document forgery, bomb-making, poisons, and gases and that there was a cadre of two dozen Egyptian Islamic Jihad members working for al Qaeda associate Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, oper- ating out of Baghdad with the connivance of the Iraqi government. In an earlier letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee on 7 October 2002, Tenet stated that there was solid reporting of senior-level contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda going back a decade and that al Qaeda had sought Iraqi help in acquiring WMD. For good measure, he added that Iraq was training al Qaeda members “in the areas of poisons and gases and making conventional bombs.” Unfortunately, none of the above was true. When confronted on the contradictions, an evidently uncomfortable Tenet explained to Wolf Blitzer that, “well, you . . . have to get to the subordinate clause,” adding, “we were sloppy in that letter.”

Tenet’s book includes a picture that is almost a metaphor for his descrip- tion of his time as DCI. A photo of Secretary of State Powell at the UN with Tenet sitting behind him has been cropped to eliminate Tenet. Sitting stoi- cally behind Powell to validate information that he surely knew to be dubious at best, Tenet must now realize that he squandered the CIA’s most precious asset — its credibility.