CIA Director Robert M. Gates would also brief the senior Bush several times a week. “The relationship between the President and the CIA Director, if close, can assist enormously in the creation of foreign policy,” he said. “But to be effective, the Director has to be in the innermost circle. . . . The best part about meeting face-to-face with the President was to get instantaneous feedback on what his agenda was. He asked questions and we would get answers to him, and thus had a direct dialogue with the President that is most often missing in the normal daily mix of things.”
When George W. Bush was elected president, his father unequivocally instructed his son to develop a close relationship with his CIA chief. “The former president reinforced how important it was that a president have face-to-face meetings with the CIA Director, rather than just receive his intelligence reports on paper,” said White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card, Jr. “And so the President-elect told me, when I was the chief of staff-designate: ‘Make sure that happens. I want to see the CIA Director and be able to talk with him.’”
Over the past eight months, Tenet and George W. Bush had “really hit it off,” said one former senior agency official. Bush liked Tenet’s streetwise, casual, and unpretentious style. It was get-to-the-point Texas-like, without a lot of jargon-cluttered bureaucratese. “They’re pragmatists, they talk sort of ‘male talk,’” said Senator Bob Graham, who was chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. “George is a very smart person, but his rhetoric isn’t theoretical. It’s blunt. It’s straightforward.”
Arriving at the White House, an unlit cigar extending from the left corner of his mouth, the CIA Director power-strutted down the center of the short cement walkway toward the West Wing. George Tenet liked to keep to the center. It was the way he managed to survive as one of the longest-serving spy chiefs in the CIA’s history, and the only Clinton holdover in Bush’s inner circle. Through war and peace, Democratic and Republican administrations, quiet successes and noisy disasters, he defied the odds in a place lined with bureaucratic land mines and encircled by media snipers.
A Marine in dress uniform snapped to attention and in a single fluid motion pulled open the door to the West Wing Reception Room. It resembled an early-nineteenth-century drawing room, its many doors sparkled with ancient, highly polished brass handles, latches, and lockboxes. A multi-armed brass chandelier hung from the ceiling. And next to a two-hundred-year-old English library bookcase was Worthington Whittredge’s stunning 1868 painting “Crossing of the River Platte.” Looking around at the historic surrounding, waiting to give his daily Top Secret briefing to the President of the United States, George Tenet, a loudmouth kid from Queens, New York, who could never keep a secret, might have wondered how he got there.
Once described by a family friend as a child who was always talking and could never keep a secret, Tenet would later agree. “Nobody who knew me when I was younger believed that I would ever be the director of CIA,” he said. “I had the biggest mouth in town. No one would ever believe I could keep a secret.” But it was a trait he would teach himself. “I want to tell you that I have learned my lessons. I’m very discreet now; I don’t say anything to anybody.”
George Tenet’s parents, both Greeks born in the Albanian-controlled province of New Epirus, settled into a two-story row house on Marathon Parkway in the Little Neck section of New York’s Queens Borough. His father opened a Greek restaurant called the Twentieth Century Diner. Both Tenet and his twin brother, William, would later earn spending money there as busboys while attending P.S. 94, Junior High School 67, and Benjamin N. Cardozo High School. “Starting out with nothing, he made a success of the Twentieth Century Diner in Queens,” recalled Tenet about his father. “He taught me to value hard work, to honor this great country, and to take nothing for granted, least of all family. He is gone now, but the strength of his influence on my life is undiminished.”
In some respects, Tenet’s upbringing was straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting. When not playing soccer or basketball in the church league, Tenet was an altar boy at St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church. It was a formative period in his life. “When I went to high school, I learned about discipline and hard work,” he said. “I learned about being loyal to your family. I learned about taking care of people. I learned about standing up for what you believed in. I learned about never compromising what your core values are. And when you are sitting in a room with the President of the United States, and you have to gulp hard, because you have to tell him some very bad news, you have to have that inner being come from somewhere.”
Tenet graduated from Cardozo High in 1971. He avoided Vietnam, apparently with a student deferment, and enrolled at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. With both Tenet and his brother—who would go on to become a cardiologist in Queens—attending college at the same time, tuition was a hardship for their parents. To help out, both brothers spent the summers serving moussaka and spanakopita at the Twentieth Century Diner and beer and pretzels at Patrick’s Pub in Queens.
Then as today, Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service was a prep school for both the State Department and the spy world. Currently, some four hundred graduates work at the CIA. Although his mother desperately wanted him to become a lawyer, Tenet decided instead to remain focused on world affairs and went to Columbia for a master’s degree in international affairs. “I didn’t go to law school and broke my mother’s heart,” he recalled.
He quickly got a job as Director of Research for the American Hellenic Institute, where he focused largely on Greek-Cypriot issues. “Read ‘lobbying,’” Rick Horowitz said of the Greek-American public affairs group that would pepper members of Congress with requests for pro-Greek and anti-Turkish legislation. “I was a staffer myself,” he recalled, “for a congressman who was a major player on some of those very same issues. We had meetings, George and I and our respective bosses did. We compared notes. We talked strategies.”
From lobbying for Greek-Americans, Tenet moved on to pushing the worldwide virtues of photovoltaic cells as director of international programs at the Solar Energy Industries Association. But it was world power, not sun power, that pulled at Tenet in the early 1980s. Seeking to get into the action, Tenet signed on as a staffer with John Heinz, the late Republican senator from Pennsylvania and wealthy heir to the “57 varieties” fortune. Viewed by many as a Republican John F. Kennedy, he was young, physically attractive, and a Renaissance man who had a taste for early American and European art. He was also a respected environmentalist who was interested in energy solutions. Tenet’s background, which combined international affairs with three years in the energy field, appealed to Heinz, and he made him his national security and energy aide, and legislative director.
Three years later, in August 1985, Tenet transferred to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence as designee to the vice chairman, Patrick Leahy, a liberal Democratic senator from Vermont. It was an exciting time to be on the inside; the “Year of the Spy” was unfolding and the East-West espionage wars were at their peak. Tenet’s job was to direct the committee’s oversight of all arms-control negotiations between the Soviet Union and the United States. Of particular concern was the ability of the various spy agencies to monitor the Intermediate Nuclear Force Treaty.
He worked in Room SH-219 in the Senate Hart Building—“the vault”—a windowless, steel-lined, heavily guarded warren of cubbyhole offices, with brown paper “burn-bags” next to each desk and paper shredders on thick file cabinets with large black combination dials. Known as a “SCIF” (pronounced “skiff” and standing for Secure Compartmented Information Facility), it also contained a hearing room with pink chairs arranged around a horseshoe-shaped table that was frequently scrubbed for bugs. The olive-green walls were decorated with the seals of the various spy agencies, and three secure video monitors faced the committee’s seventeen senators seated around the table.
But Tenet’s luckiest move came in 1987 when the Democrats regained control of the Senate and David Boren, a senator from Oklahoma, was named chairman. Seeing Tenet as a moderate like himself, and with the personality of a football coach, he picked him ahead of more senior employees to be director of the committee’s forty-member staff. It was a large step on a slippery ladder for a thirty-four-year-old with only five years of government service. But Boren liked Tenet’s blunt, confident manner and became his “godfather,” shepherding his career higher and higher up the ladder.
While working largely with the analysts and the technical spooks when assigned to arms control, Tenet now began focusing more heavily on human intelligence—“humint.” Among his first assignments from Boren was to audit the shadowy, loosely controlled agent programs run by the CIA’s Clandestine Service. By the time he was finished, he had forced the agency to pull the plug on two of its most secret covert operations. His staff discovered that CIA case officers worked against U.S. policy objectives in several foreign countries and may have allowed informants to steal funds. To correct the problem, Tenet helped strengthen the covert-action reporting requirements and facilitated the creation of a statutory inspector general at the CIA. He also drafted legislation to reorganize the entire U.S. intelligence community.
As chief of the intelligence committee staff during the end of the Cold War, Tenet was also in a very good position to see just how inadequate the CIA’s human intelligence was—more Hollywood myth than reality. At the time, Milt Bearden, a highly regarded agency veteran who had previously served as chief in Pakistan during the Soviet war in Afghanistan, ran the agency’s Soviet–East European Division. He and Tenet would occasionally get together in Bearden’s second-floor office in the CIA’s New Headquarters Building, the “NHB.”
Recently completed, the NHB was designed to be state-of-the-art, with elaborate shielding to prevent electromagnetic eavesdropping. In a massive atrium hung models of the agency’s legendary spy planes, the U-2 and SR-71, and in a nearby courtyard was James Sanborn’s sculpture “Kryptos,” a maddeningly complex cipher built into an S-shaped copper screen near a bubbling pool of water. The new facility was connected to the Old Headquarters Building by a slightly curving tunnel called a “wave guide,” which was designed to prevent electromagnetic emanations from passing from one building to the next. But despite the high-tech wizardry, Bearden’s new office seemed patched together—with a wall not quite connecting with the door. “A pretty appropriate description of the agency,” he joked.
Returning to headquarters after his extended assignment in Pakistan, Bearden was shocked to discover how bumbling and ineffective the agency’s human intelligence efforts were against its longtime principal targets, the Soviet Union and its East European satellites. When a coup took place against Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991, for example, the CIA station chief, David Rolph, didn’t have a clue. “When David Rolph walked into the embassy Monday morning,” said Bearden, “he did not realize that the coup had actually been under way since the day before, did not know that Mikhail Gorbachev and his family had been surrounded and cut off from all communications.” Rolph actually learned of it from an embassy colleague who just happened to hear of it on the radio. “That’s how the CIA’s Moscow station chief found out about the coup that changed the twentieth century,” said Bearden. “The CIA simply did not have any assets inside the Kremlin who were in a position to give the Americans detailed and timely information about when or where a coup might take place.”
Although Bearden didn’t know it at the time, the situation was even far worse. The few agents the CIA did manage to develop had years earlier been compromised, revealed to the Russians by agency turncoat Aldrich Ames. Thus, worse than no information, the Soviet agents may have unwittingly been passing on disinformation.
According to Bearden, the situation was no better in East Germany. “The CIA did not have any high-level agents in the East German government,” he said in his book,
The Main Enemy,
coauthored with James Risen. “The CIA had no agents inside the internal security apparatus of the [East German] MfS, or in the HVA, the Hauptverwaltung Aufklarung, its foreign intelligence arm . . . the CIA had had no luck in recruiting even the dullest functionaries.” The lack of human intelligence sources was driven home dramatically as the Berlin Wall collapsed in 1989. “The CIA had no human intelligence on the events as they were unfolding,” said Bearden. “None of our human assets in the capitals of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were in a position to tell us what was going on; most were asking us what was happening.”
With the end of the Cold War, CNN replaced the KGB as the agency’s biggest competitor. “In truth,” said Bearden, “the CIA didn’t have spies with high-placed political access who could provide important political insights. How then should CIA officers try to satisfy policy makers hungry for a continuous flow of information? Tell them to turn on CNN and hope for the best? That was the awkward situation facing the CIA in East Berlin in November 1989. . . . It would be CNN rather than the CIA that would keep Washington informed of the fast-moving events in Berlin.”
Before Boren left the committee chairmanship in 1993, he made sure to take care of his young charge. He first helped Tenet become the head of the intelligence team for President-elect Bill Clinton’s transition, a position of high visibility. Then he pushed him for a key position in the Clinton White House as senior director for intelligence programs within the National Security Council. There he coordinated a number of Clinton’s Presidential Decision Directives—White House orders—dealing with issues ranging from intelligence priorities, to the effectiveness of U.S. counterintelligence activities, to policies on spy satellites.