At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA

A well balanced and straightforward memoir that incorporates a contextual methodology to illuminate the seven challenging years Mr. Tenet faced as CIA Director. Of particular note is the reverence Mr. Tenet pays to his employees, whom he showers with praise and admiration. It is in many extents, a portrayal of the little known successes of the American intelligence community that he led.

The media hype has cherry picked the more controversial parts of the work (i.e. Agency torture allegations, and flawed intelligence for the Iraq war, etc.), but has failed to provide the contextual framework that answers and clarifies the mountain of myths that have surrounded the intelligence community for much of the past decade. For instance, Mr. Tenet clearly argues, and provides sound evidence, that his organization had been developing a strategy, albeit with meager funding and support from the Clinton and Bush Administration, to locate and neutralize the Al Qaeda network long before 9/11.

This work is well worth reading for those whom seek to understand the reality of intelligence collecting and analyzing, and to understand that policy makers are the ultimate decision makers for the American public. The "slam dunk" for the reader, is a better understanding of how the entire bureaucratic wheel (from the policy maker to the intelligence analyst) failed to serve the American public. The finger pointing, and blame game mentality, of the Bush Administration has left the brunt of the wave with the CIA - when in reality, the surf has touched all facets of the US government.

Contrary to what the book's back cover might have you believe, George Tenet does not use this book as a means to deflect criticism. Instead, he recaps his experience as DCI (1997-2004) in the most honest way that he can.

Tenet never criticizes President Bush (43) explicitly. At times, he paints him as a man with good intentions. However, through much of Part III, Tenet implies that the President delegated (and abdicated) too much authority to his staff. Tenet vilifies Douglas Feith (undersecretary of defense for policy (2001-2005)) for promoting war with Iraq in advance of adequate supporting intelligence. He places Feith as a man who wielded a disproportionate amount of influence in the White House. It is left as an exercise for the reader to consider why President Bush was so willing to accept Feith's ideas in lieu of other credible viewpoints.

As articulated in the `Afterword' [p. 490-491, 499], Tenet constantly reminds the reader of the CIA's role in government:

"Often, at best, only 60 percent of the facts regarding any national security issue are knowable... Intelligence alone should never drive the formulation of policy. Good intelligence is no substitute for common sense or curiosity on the part of policy makers in thinking through the consequences of their actions... Intelligence does not operate in a vacuum, but within a broader mandate of policies and governance."

Here are some other highlights of the book:

- The CIA told the White House that Iraq likely possessed WMD (Chapter 17), but it never established a link between Iraq and al-Qa'ida (p.307).

- "In Afghanistan, we had started from the ground up, allowing the various political groups to legitimize themselves, then building to a central, representational government. In Iraq, the process couldn't have been more different... We were in charge, and by God, we knew what was best." (p.439)

- "Although CIA came to take everything we heard from [Ahmed] Chalabi with a healthy dose of skepticism, others, such as the vice president, Paul Wolfowitz, and Doug Feith, welcomed his views." (p. 397)

- "On one of his trips to Iraq, Wolfowitz told our senior [CIA] man there, 'You don't understand the policy of the U.S. government, and if you don't understand the policy, you are hardly in a position to collect the intelligence to help that policy succeed.'" (p. 430)

- The CIA suggested ways that the United States could establish peace in Iraq, but these suggestions were ignored (Chapter 23 and p. 441, 446).

- Brent Scowcroft was the only administration official who expressed public disapproval of the White House's plan to go to war with Iraq (p. 315).

- After the attack on the USS Cole, the U.S. "...Didn't need any additional excuses to go after UBL or his organization. But simply firing more cruise missiles into the desert wasn't going to accomplish anything. [The U.S.] needed to get into the Afghan sanctuary." (p. 128-131)

- "For years, it had been obvious that without the cooperation of the Pakistanis, it would be almost impossible to root out al-Qa'ida... The Pakistanis always knew more than they were telling us, and they had been singularly uncooperative in helping us run these guys down." (p. 139)

- Al-Qa'ida planned to attack the New York City subway in the fall of 2003. The attack was cancelled during the last stages of preparation "for something better". (p.260-261)

- "When I was with King Hussein, I always felt that I was in the presence of wisdom and history... I've often wondered what impact his wisdom would have had in helping all of us avert the mess we find ourselves in today." (p.71-72)

George Tenet's book "At the Center of the Storm" is not a belated effort to offer excuses for the failure of the CIA to prevent the 9/11 tragedies or to provide the Bush administration with correct intelligencee before the
decision to invade Iraq, as some critics have said. In fact, the opposite is true. Tenet, with remarkable candor,
identifies not only the shortcomings of the intelligence commuity but his own mistakes.
The book, however, is much more than a litany of errors. To a degree seldom if ever seen in other books that have covered critically or otherwise the inside operations of the American government at the highest levels, Tenet gives astonishing details about the real way major decisions are made, how interlligence is gathered and evaluated, how the various agencies cooperate or feud over turf, how human beings having tremendous power may not be as wise, impartial, competent or honest as the ordinary citizen wants to believe that they are. He does that by naming names, describing in detail specific meetings, revealing what happened behind the scenes at critical moments in the years Tenet was Director of the CIA. This is not hearsay, or second-tier stuff.
I found especially refreshing his admission that, in retrospect, it appears that Saddam Hussein deliberately fed the intelligence community with false information to create the impression that he possessed biological and chemical weapons with the expectation that this would deter the United States from invading Iraq (pp.316-333). "Before the war," Tenet writes on p. 333, "we didn't understand that he was bruffing, and he didn't understand that [in threatening to invade] we were not." Interestingly, in my bi-weekly column in "The National Herald," I had presented on July 24, 2004 (p.7) under the title "A Saddam Hoax?" evidence that Saddam had indeed used disinformation deliberately as a deterrent.
Georger Tenet's book is an eye-opener and a must-read for every citizen who wants to know with specifics how our leaders get by, their own choice, into situations leading to disastrous consequences, and how uncommon is common sense in high places.
Professor Dimitrioss G. Kousoulas

In what is probably the best Washington insider book of recent years, George Tenet documents the intelligence and policy screw-ups leading up to 9/11 and the invasion of iraq. The story has been told by others, but Tenet tells it especially well, spreading the blame widely for these awful fiascos, but accepting some himself.

The book is inadvertently revealing about the Tenet CIA's priorities and shortcomings. For instance, little mention is made of Russia and China and of the multiple challenges that these countries' emergent economic and military strength poses to U, S global leadership. Tenet stresses that CIA recruitment was expanded and democratized during his tenure, but intelligncee is not a numbers game--CIA doesn't need more analysts and spies as much as it needs smarter ones. The CIA and the intelligence community generally are consumed with short- range problems and success targets, while sometimes missing the bigger picture. On this latter point, Tenet portrays Afghanistan as a CIA success story, but modern-day Afghanisttan is a catastrophe in the making--comprising a patchwork of narco-principalities, a resurgent narco-funded Taliban and a government that can't exercise its writ much beyond Kabul. Of course, Tenet's CIA was a product of the times--an obsessive national focus on terrorism---but the Agency needs now to recalibrate its priorities and move on.

Like I imagine so many thousands of others, I spent the last month counting down the days till the release of this book, contenting myself alongside everyone else with the tidbits revealed in the media. Ultimately, like some sort of hard-core Harry Potter fan, I used a connection at a local bookstore to get a copy at five AM, and spent this morning reading five-hundred of the most disturbing pages of revelations I've seen since the publication of Bob Woodward's State of Denial last year.

Anyone who claims this book is former CIA director George Tenet's self-exonerating backlash against his former agency or his one-time boss, President George W. Bush, has not yet read At the Center of the Storm, and is in for a surprise. If no other part of this book is read, I'd urge anyone to turn to the chapter entitled "They Want To Change The World" and then defy anyone to walk away without feeling slightly less secure. Yes, Tenet does give his side of the story for his now-infamous "slam dunk" remark, and has select critical words for the current administration, particularly Secretary of State Rice, and Vice President Cheney, but instead of using this work as a vituperous denunciation of Washington insiders, he makes what I found to be a responsible criticism of exactly what was mishandled in the time between September 11, 2001, and the period that followed the end of the (first stage of the) Iraq War, and what has come to be termed the occupation of that country.

Still, what kept me glued to these pages, what frightened and disturbed me, and what is sure to outshine the revelations on the conduct of the Bush administration and be most discussed in weeks ahead, is Tenet's revelations on the tenacity of the west's greatest foe, al-Quida (to use this book's spelling), its murderous ambitions, and the scope of what he maintains are some of its plots for mass-homicide. In At the Center of the Storm, Tenet writes of al-Qaida's 2003 plans for a gas attack on New York City's mass transit system. He tells of that organization's efforts to persuade scientists in Pakistan to sell it nuclear materials, and Tenet writes with a chilling detachment as he tells of bin Laden's meetings with Pakistani leaders with a goal of attaining that same technology. Most disconcerting of all is Tenet's statement that these meetings, including a face to face session between bin Laden and the Pakistani president, took place in the summer of 2001, mere weeks before 9-11, leading to the conclusion that things could actually have been so much worse than they were.

Tenet also has a mixed opinion on the Saudis as partners in the fight against global terrorism. On one hand he is critical of Prince Naif's frequent unwillingness to provide names of suspects, and accuses him of indifferent vacillation, and yet Tenet also has praise for (now) King Abdullah, and writes that without Saudi cooperation, US efforts to defend itself would be greatly hampered, perhaps past the point of effectiveness.

At the Center of the Storm is an engrossing read written by a credible source who one feels is coming clean here, as well as telling his side of things. Part insider's take on recent politics and policy, part revelation of the state of danger in our tumultuous world, it will become a best seller, and deserves to be.