June 4, 2004
Brian Knowlton/IHT
 
WASHINGTON For the Bush administration, the timing hardly seemed ideal for the departure of its director of central intelligence, George Tenet. Fighting continues in Afghanistan and Iraq, there has been no let-up in the war on terrorism or any lessening in the perceived threat to Americans, and it is a U.S. election year. The surprising nature of the announcement Thursday made by President George W. Bush — as he was barely minutes away from boarding a helicopter to begin a high-profile trip to Europe — raised a series of questions: Tenet and a White House spokesman said the director was leaving for personal reasons, but those reasons were not explained and the betting in Washington on Thursday was running against the official version. So, why resign now? The White House said Bush had learned of the resignation only on Wednesday night.

Will headlines about Tenet’s departure after seven years in office soon be overtaken by news from Bush’s Europe visit? Or might it overshadow the president’s voyage, reinforcing doubts about whether the administration, after a season of setbacks, remains firmly in control of its own players and agenda? Could there be a connection to the anticipated release of a Senate intelligence committee report on flawed intelligence over banned weapons in Iraq, a report said to contain damning language on the CIA? If so, or even if not, how is the public likely to react? Will Americans see this as a deserved rebuke to the man ultimately responsible for flawed intelligence cited by the administration in arguing for war with Iraq? Or might Tenet be seen as a scapegoat, a man who fought to resist overinterpretations of intelligence but who was overwhelmed by neoconservatives in the administration determined at all costs to unseat Saddam Hussein? The answers will take time to emerge, but voices on both sides were being heard Thursday.

‘‘It’s too significant a move at too important a time’’ to be a purely personal move, the former CIA chief Stansfield Turner said on CNN. ‘‘I think he’s being pushed out.’’

‘‘The president feels he’s got to have somebody to blame, and he’s doing it indirectly by asking George Tenet to leave.’’

At the same time, Turner said, Tenet had shown himself to be too loyal to his superiors to ‘‘pull the plug on President Bush in the middle of an election cycle without having been asked by the president to do that.’’ Tenet had been thought unlikely to stay on next year regardless of the outcome of the Nov. 2 presidential election.

Some Democrats suggested that Tenet was being made a scapegoat for broader administration failures. Senator Charles Schumer of New York called Tenet ‘‘an honorable and decent man who has served his country well in difficult times, and no one should make him a fall guy for anything.’’ Tenet is considered fiercely loyal to the president, as well as to the 17,000 employees of his agency; it cannot be easy for Bush to part ways with a man who led the CIA through a harrowing time of terrorist-inflicted disaster, through striking military successes and then through the messy second-guessing and aftermaths of both.

Tenet, the 51-year-old son of Greek immigrants, is a man with whom Bush has begun every working day, receiving the most sensitive of intelligence updates.

The two formed a tight bond, according to the Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward, who interviewed top administration officials for his book ‘‘Plan of Attack.’’ ‘‘I like him,’’ Bush is quoted as saying, ‘‘and I trust him, which is more important.’’ And trust, the president has made clear, means a lot to him, as he showed recently in standing by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld during the worst of the prisoner-abuse scandal.

Tenet, the only high-level Clinton administration security official to be held over by Bush, has often been controversial, with supporters and detractors on both sides of the congressional aisles. He is widely credited with dramatically improving the CIA’s abilities to place human operatives in other countries, a capacity badly eroded in the years after the cold war. His agency also helped lay the groundwork for the military successes in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

‘‘Really, they were very effective in helping to end up driving the Taliban and Al Qaeda out of Afghanistan,’’ said Turner, who led the CIA under President Jimmy Carter.

But these have been extraordinarily turbulent years for the CIA and extraordinarily trying months for the Bush administration.

It was Tenet, after all, who reportedly said early on in a White House planning session that the case for finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was a ‘‘slam dunk’’ — basketball parlance for a sure thing.

And it was Tenet who sat at Secretary of State Colin Powell’s shoulder, providing visible affirmation of the CIA’s own certainty, when Powell told the UN Security Council and the world in early 2003 that the evidence for banned weapons in Iraq was solid enough to justify war.

The CIA and its director have seemed caught in unending controversy and scandal, beginning with the failure to detect terrorists’ planning for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The staff report of the national commission investigating those attacks credited Tenet for saying in 1998 that he wanted ‘‘no resources or people spared’’ in a ‘‘war’’ against Al Qaeda. But it said Tenet had not developed a ‘‘management strategy for a war against terrorism before 9/11’’ and that communications and coordination among the various intelligence agencies remained inadequate. Tenet has faced and survived heavy fire before. Senator Trent Lott, Republican of Mississippi, said Thursday that he thought Bush should have let Tenet go sooner.

‘‘I have been surprised that he kept him on as long as he did,’’ Lott said. ‘‘I personally indicated that I thought maybe a change would have been in order six months, a year, or two years ago.’’

Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, called the timing of Tenet’s resignation ‘‘unusual,’’ and said the reasons for it should be fully explained.

‘‘I hope that this doesn’t send to the rest of the world a message of disarray,’’ she said, adding that she had confidence in John McLaughlin, Tenet’s deputy, who will become acting director in mid-July.

The change is likely to revive debate over whether a more fundamental reorganization of the CIA and the several other U.S. intelligence-gathering organizations might be required, as Feinstein and Lott favor.

International Herald Tribune

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