How the boss sees things
If anyone knows the frustrations of managing the U.S. intelligence community, it ought to be George Tenet. After seven years as CIA chief and director of central intelligence, Tenet resigned July 11. He had weathered criticism about the CIA's performance against al Qaeda and Iraq, but allegations that he failed to coordinate the intelligence community prompted him to speak out for the first time since his resignation.
"I had two missions in life," Tenet told U.S. News. "I had to rebuild the CIA and rebuild the community." He dismisses as "preposterous" suggestions that he put the CIA first. The top job, Tenet said, requires constant trade-offs: "CIA would say I gave too much attention to the community, and the community would say I gave too much attention to CIA." His earliest priorities, Tenet said, were rebuilding the CIA's spying and covert-action wings and modernizing the National Security Agency.
Successes. Tenet's supporters credit him with putting U.S. intelligence back on its feet. "What we built before 9/11 has come home with great clarity," he says, pointing to well-coordinated successes in the routing of the Taliban in Afghanistan and in taking out two thirds of al Qaeda's leadership. CIA integration into the Pentagon's war-fighting machine, he adds, has never been better. "I'm damned proud of what we built," Tenet said. "I understood that I had to build a community, not independent fiefdoms."
Among the successes he cited: his intervention to guarantee that the next generation of spy satellites addresses the needs of analysts across the entire intelligence community. But most of all, Tenet said, he stressed good intelligence work: "We put blocking and tackling back into the playbook and focused on fundamentals."
Tenet worries, he said, that the nation's attention will wander and that it will again fail to support a robust intelligence capability. "This country has to have a serious debate about the importance of intelligence and how it's funded," he warned. "If the spigot turns in the other direction, you could lose all this as fast as you gained it." -David E. Kaplan
This story appears in the August 2, 2004 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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