By now Tenet’s ladder was more closely resembling a swiftly moving escalator. In 1995, Boren helped him move into the number-two job at CIA, deputy director. Two years later, upon the resignation of agency director John Deutch, and the withdrawal of his designated successor, National Security Advisor Anthony Lake, Tenet reached the top. Clinton nominated him to become the next director.
Weary of their successful battle against Lake’s nomination, which was largely a result of his liberal reputation, Republican senators were overjoyed with the possible choice of Tenet, whom most considered bipartisan and a centrist on most issues. At one point, during testimony in a closed hearing on the intelligence budget, a number of Republican senators began fawning over Tenet. Surprisingly to many, among those enthusiastically in Tenet’s camp was Republican Senator Richard Shelby, the chairman of the intelligence committee. Hearing these stories, Clinton pushed up the timetable and that same March afternoon went on television and announced the nomination. Four months later, on July 11, 1997, Tenet was sworn in as the eighteenth director of Central Intelligence, at forty-four the second youngest in the agency’s history.
“Washington is full of people who know how to scramble up the ladder of power. But George Tenet,” wrote Eric Pooley of
Time,
“has set new records for both speed and elegance of ascent.” Part of Tenet’s success was due to his ability to keep a poker face when it came to partisan politics. Even today, Boren claims he does not know whether Tenet is a Democrat or a Republican. “I’m registered in one party,” said Tenet, “but for the purposes of doing my job, no one should ever know because you have to serve everyone.”
When Tenet moved from the deputy’s office to the director’s suite next door, he brought with him more than boxes of papers and desktop trinkets. He brought a new style. Where John Deutch had been the ultimate technocrat—distant, aloof, and somewhat scornful of the workforce—Tenet would become their coach and cheerleader rolled into one. Part of it, he said, came from his old days back at Cardozo High in Queens. “My high school soccer coach [Ed Tatarian] taught me more about how to run a big organization and take care of people, as I look back at it, than anybody ever taught me for the rest of my life.”
Where Deutch was the geeky professor, absentmindedly walking home with top-secret disks in his pockets, Tenet became the tough but lovable mob boss—“Nobody bedda mess wit my crew.” Although he had never been anything but a deskbound staffer, figuring budgets and collating data in windowless offices, his dark, ruddy complexion combined with his blunt Queens speech and father confessor demeanor allowed him to pull it off. Employees, fatigued from post–Cold War neglect, the Aldrich Ames spy scandal, and confusion at the top—five directors in six years—quickly took to Tenet, adopting him as one of their own. Behind his back, some even began calling him “Puff Daddy” because of the unlit cigar that became a trademark and the paternal feeling he exuded. “George is arguably the most popular CIA Director we’ve ever had,” said former Deputy Director for Operations Jack Downing.
They also took to his casual, quirky style. “I’ll come in and his door will be shut, and he’ll be blasting opera music,” said one employee, who noted that Andrea Bocelli, the blind tenor, was his latest favorite. “He’ll be in sweatpants, unshaven—which is fine, you know, at seven
A.M.
So we’ll start talking about what’s in the papers, and what’s in the President’s Daily Brief. Then all of a sudden it’s time for the eight o’clock meeting, when we go over the previous night’s cable traffic. And he’ll still be in sweats, unshaven—and that’s fine. And then at eight-thirty there’s a much bigger meeting of all the senior staff, and he’s still in sweats. And you kinda begin to wonder . . . when’s he gonna change?”
Also unlike some of his predecessors, Tenet had a well-developed sense of humor. “I know most of you probably thought Tom Cruise or Harrison Ford was going to show up,” he once told a crowd at his old high school. “Instead, you got the short fat guy from Little Neck.” One of his lifelong “tenets,” he says, is “Laugh as much as you can. Never take yourself too seriously.”
By the time Tenet arrived, the agency’s Clandestine Service had reached a state of atrophy, largely as a result of post–Cold War budget cuts; the collapse of its longtime target, the Soviet Union; and a shift to massive technical collection by imagery and eavesdropping satellites. Throughout the 1990s, the CIA’s overall personnel numbers were slashed by 23 percent and its slice of the budget pie became a narrow wedge. When handing out about $27 billion to the intelligence community as part of the 1999 federal budget, Congress gave the high-tech eavesdroppers at the National Security Agency a “huge increase,” said one staffer, while leaving CIA’s funding about level. A few weeks later, Congress awarded an additional $1.5 billion in emergency supplemental funds. The technical spies received what one observer called “a windfall”—nearly a billion dollars—while leaving less than 20 percent for human agents.
Not only had the Clandestine Service withered in size, for many years its performance had also been rapidly spiraling downward. Just as it had no useful spies in East Germany or Moscow during much of the Cold War, it also had no useful spies in Iraq prior to or during the first Gulf War, or in India at the time of its 1998 nuclear test. “I called Tenet,” said Senator Richard C. Shelby, Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, about the India test, “and he told me, ‘We didn’t have a clue.’ I said, ‘That’s a strategic failure of intelligence,’ and I got to thinking, ‘I wonder what else they’re missing big time.’” With regard to the 1998 bombing of the U.S. embassies in East Africa and the 2000 attack on the American destroyer
Cole,
Shelby added, “They didn’t have a clue about these either.”
Some began wondering if the agency ever had any serious spies anywhere. “The CIA is good at stealing a memo off a prime minister’s desk,” sneered former National Security Agency Director William Odom, a retired Army lieutenant general, “but they’re not much good at anything else.”
“We never recruited a spy who gave us unique political information from inside the Kremlin,” admitted Robert Gates, the former Chief of Intelligence and later Director of CIA. Gates said that the first Gulf War might have proved a Waterloo of sorts for the Clandestine Service. “Perhaps the most compelling recent example of the gap between our technical and human capabilities was the Persian Gulf war,” he said. “U.S. military commanders had superb imagery and signals intelligence, but we had only sketchy human intelligence on Iraq’s intentions prior to invading Kuwait, Iraq’s ability to withstand sanctions, and the status of Iraq’s weapons program.” Former Secretary of State James Baker was even more blunt. “U.S. intelligence assets on the ground were virtually nonexistent,” he said.
Richard L. Russell, a seventeen-year veteran analyst at the CIA and now a member of the faculty of the National Defense University, agreed. “The greatest weakness of CIA’s performance [during the first Gulf War],” he said, “was its lack of human assets inside the Iraqi regime able to report on Saddam’s plans and intentions.” Concluded Russell: “The poor human intelligence performance is not a lone incident in CIA’s history. CIA has traditionally performed poorly in human operations against the United States’s most ardent adversaries.”
With regard to India, according to the report of the commission set up to examine the Indian intelligence failure, “The CIA had no spies worthy of the name in India.” The report went on to say, “Its ability to pry information out of people is weak worldwide.”
“The CIA’s spy service has become an anachronism,” argues Melvin A. Goodman, a twenty-four-year veteran Soviet analyst of both the CIA and the State Department. Now a professor at the National War College, he gave a number of examples of why the cloak-and-dagger spies have become endangered species. “CIA sources failed to decipher Leonid Brezhnev’s intentions toward Czechoslovakia in 1968, Anwar Sadat’s toward Israel in 1973, and Saddam Hussein’s toward Kuwait in 1990. . . . It’s time,” he concluded, “to jettison the myth that only clandestine collection of information can ascertain the intentions of foreign leaders.”
So far had the CIA’s human capabilities dwindled by 1998 that it led House Intelligence Committee Chairman Porter J. Goss—himself a former CIA case officer—to declare, “It is fair to say that the cupboard is nearly bare in the area of human intelligence.”
Nowhere was the decline of the Clandestine Service more visible than at Camp Peary, the CIA’s 10,000-acre Special Training Center near Williamsburg, Virginia. Hidden under the cover name Armed Forces Experimental Training Activity, it was more commonly known by its nickname: The Farm.
Code-named ISOLATION, the base was originally built during World War II as a training facility for Navy Seabees. In 1951, the CIA acquired it, and since then it has been the agency’s principal school for spies. At its height during the Cold War, the Spartan dormitories, worn classrooms, sweaty gym, and swimming pool were a beehive of activity as green recruits went through the Basic Operations Course. Veteran clandestine officers taught classes in field surveillance, infiltration and exfiltration, how to load and unload dead drops, and the best ways to make a “brush pass.” Students on bicycles pedaled from the Magnolia Conference Center to the Laurel Classroom to the Team Development Areas, and on weekends the staff would hunt turkey and deer.
Advanced weapons and explosives training were held down the road at the agency’s highly secret Harvey Point Defense Testing Activity. Located along Albemarle Sound near Hertford, North Carolina, the twelve-hundred-acre site was code-named ISOLATION-TROPIC and nicknamed “The Point.” Like The Farm, it was completely hidden from view—tucked away on a small marshy peninsula of graying barns with faded tobacco advertisements, dirt roads, and endless expanses of snowy cotton and spindly stalks of corn. The CIA originally acquired the property in 1961 as a secret weapons-supply base for its failed Bay of Pigs operation in Cuba, and since then it has been used as the agency’s bomb school. Veterans of The Point have taken part in every secret war from Congo to Iraq, and it is a key training base for the agency’s paramilitary grenade-tossers assigned to the Special Activities Division.
Oddly, among the things they trained to do at Harvey Point was practice blowing up buses—Palestinian-terrorist style. “We made a school bus disappear with about twenty pounds of U.S. C-4,” said former CIA officer Robert Baer. “For comparison’s sake, we tried Czech Semtex and a few other foreign plastic explosives. Not that you really need anything fancy. We blew up one bus using three stacks of fertilizer and fuel oil, a mixture called ANFO [ammonium nitrate fuel oil] that did more damage than the C-4 had. The biggest piece left was a part of the chassis, which flew in an arc, hundreds of yards away. . . . We were also taught some of the really esoteric stuff like E-cell timers, improvising pressurized airplane bombs using a condom and aluminum foil, and smuggling a pistol on an airplane concealed in a mixture of epoxy and graphite. By the end of the training, we could have taught an advanced terrorism course.”
Another CIA veteran of The Point during the 1970s was so repulsed by the terrorist bus-bomb training that he quit the agency. One of the exercises involved making a “mini-canon” from a #10 can packed with plastic explosives and then fastening it to the gasoline tank of the bus. “The incendiary projectile would rupture the tank and fling flaming gasoline the length of the bus interior,” he said, “incinerating anyone inside. It was my lot to show the rest of the class how easily it could be done. It worked—my God, how it worked. I stood there watching the flames consume the bus. It was, I guess, the moment of truth. What did a busload of burning people have to do with freedom? What right did I have, in the name of democracy and the CIA, to decide that random victims should die? The intellectual game was over. I had to leave.”
By the 1990s, Carolina’s coastal breezes were carrying fewer and fewer muffled booms and bangs to the 2,000 townspeople of Hertford. And no longer did strangers turn up at the annual “Pig Out on the Green” celebration, where locals covered paper plates with steaming mounds of barbecue pork and runny coleslaw, and listened to southern rock in front of the Perquimans County Courthouse. And The Farm began to more closely resemble a dying religious retreat as the number of new operations officers sent there dropped to a dozen by mid-1995. By then, only eight hundred case officers were left in the field.
In 1994, following their bombing of the World Trade Center, Khalid Shaikh and Ramzi Yousef flew to the Philippines to aid a local terrorist organization, Abu Sayyaf. Organized by several dozen veterans from the Afghan war, the group was hoping to establish an independent Muslim nation in the southern part of the country. A Christian island in a Muslim sea, the Philippines is 95 percent Christian in a region where 25 percent of the world’s Muslims live.
As part of their work for Abu Sayyaf, Yousef spent a short period of time in the Mindanao city of Basilan, where he trained around twenty members of the group in bomb-making. Khalid Shaikh and Yousef then moved to Manila, where they came up with a plan to assassinate the religious leader of the Christian world, the Pope, during a planned visit to the Philippines in January 1995. The assassination would also serve as a diversion for a much more ambitious terrorist operation, one that would be carried out at almost the same time against the United States.
Living in Manila, the two took full advantage of the lively nightlife in the neon-lit Malate nightclub district and the karaoke bars in Pasay City. “Hardly an Islamic fundamentalist,” said BBC reporter Ben Anderson in Manila, “Khalid Shaikh Mohammed spent his time here dating local strippers. With over forty-three aliases between them, they went scuba diving at beach resorts and got drunk in strip clubs. One thing they didn’t do was visit a mosque.”