The Reluctant Spy (23 page)

What our spies and informants were noticing, of course, was that Iraqi scientists specializing in chemistry, biology, and, to a lesser extent, nuclear power kept showing up at international symposia. They presented papers, listened to the presentation of others, took copious notes, and returned to Jordan, where they could transit overland back to Iraq. We also saw Iraq's embassy in Amman, Jordan, used as an active agent to circumvent sanctions. Throughout the 1990s, Iraq had an aggressive program to buy “dual use”
products—that is, components and subcomponents that could be used for both civilian and military purposes.

Chalabi's “intelligence,” meanwhile, kept worming its way into our collective work product, even though our no-contact order meant that he was persona non grata to the CIA. He managed this because he fed material to his civilian friends at the Pentagon, who then put it into the larger pool of intelligence as DODIR, or Department of Defense Intelligence Reporting. DODIR tends to be, at best, spotty in its reliability, since any Defense Department official, in a suit or a uniform, can collect information and write it up as a military intelligence report. We would often see reports that were largely cut-and-paste jobs of newspaper articles classified as “confidential” and sent along as intelligence. The attribution needed only to be “a reliable source.” Some of these reports became very detailed on Iraq's WMD programs and on the purchase of component parts for those programs. But there was no specific sourcing. The sources were Chalabi and his underlings.

Was it an intelligence failure? Yes. Bad information was getting into our intelligence system. Was it a failure of analysis? No. The agency's protocols for analyzing the quality of information are very detailed. Although I cannot discuss the specifics, suffice it to say that the CIA does a credible job of distinguishing between untested sources and genuinely reliable sources. There was no way for us to prevent the corruption of DOD intelligence when Chalabi's recipients were drooling over his awesome sources and insisting that we take what they were saying with utmost seriousness. We simply were not permitted to vet these “reliable” sources.

Secretary of State Colin Powell raised some red flags about Chalabi and questioned the stuff he was funneling into the intelligence mix. But he got outmaneuvered by Vice President Cheney at every turn. Cheney managed to run circles around everyone, including my boss, George Tenet, and even the president of the United States.

On Sunday, January 26, 2003, I had just returned from a
weekend visiting Chris and Costa at my folks' house in Pennsylvania; in those days, my routine was to leave Pennsylvania in the late afternoon; when I hit the D.C. area, I'd head straight for the office, arriving around 10 p.m. to read cables. I'd then go home for a few hours, then return at 4 or 5 a.m. Monday. The objective was to clear my in-box, or at least reduce the size of the stack in it, so I wouldn't be overwhelmed when the regular workday began later Monday morning. That evening, Bob Grenier was still at the office; at a conference table near him was a familiar face in unfamiliar clothes—Colin Powell, in jeans and a T-shirt.

“What's he doing here tonight?” I had no idea what was going on.

“Oh, he's going over the latest draft of the State of the Union,” Bob said. “We're in a battle over the line about the yellowcake.” I shrugged and went about my business.

This particular battle dated back to the previous fall, when President Bush was preparing to deliver a national security address in Cincinnati. His draft included language suggesting that Saddam had sought “yellowcake,” a mix of uranium oxides, in Niger, a country in northwest Africa. The context was that the Iraqi dictator wanted the stuff to help him develop his nuclear weapons program. As the draft circulated among the various agencies and departments on the review list, we got involved in a game of ping-pong with the White House. Director Tenet, relying on agency analysts, insisted that the yellowcake line could not be supported by intelligence and needed to go. In the back-and-forth, Tenet finally prevailed and Bush gave the speech in Cincinnati on October 7, 2002, with no mention of Niger, Africa, or yellowcake.

Now, our people and Secretary Powell, probably the most admired person in the Bush administration, were trying to keep the genie in the bottle once again. We had seen the original report, which contained misspellings, multiple fonts, and other indications that it was a forgery. With Powell's support, we managed to purge the language from the State of the Union address, or so we thought.
But on Tuesday night, January 28, 2003, George Bush delivered an address that included the following sixteen words: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” Between Sunday night and Tuesday night, someone had overruled the CIA and the secretary of state and, presumably, the National Security Council staff to reinsert the suspect line. The someone, the world would later learn, was Vice President Dick Cheney.

Director Tenet would not tender his resignation until July 2004. By then, he had become a party to Colin Powell's presentation to the UN Security Council on February 5, 2003, making the case for the existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction—a spectacle of flimsy evidence supported by visual props, including the director of central intelligence seated prominently behind the secretary of state. Tenet would have his integrity sullied and his judgment called into question. The words “slam dunk” would attach to him in a pejorative context that had nothing to do with basketball and everything to do with politics as a contact sport. But if there was a beginning to the end of Tenet as DCI, it was probably Bush's 2003 State of the Union address.

Tenet deserved better. He was director during one of the most tumultuous times in CIA history, and he made plenty of mistakes. Who doesn't? But the sharp criticism of him, in isolation from the White House he served, strikes me as unfair. He did the best he could, for the most part, trying to be an honest broker for the intelligence community in an executive branch with more hidden agendas than even Richard Nixon could have dreamed up. He wanted—perhaps too much—to please.

I FIRST SAW
George Tenet up close in the early 1990s when JoAnne and I attended the Greek Orthodox Church of Saint George in Bethesda, Maryland, where the parents of Tenet's wife, Stephanie, were regulars. At the time, he was director for intelligence programs at the National Security Council, so every once in a while, the priest would make a comment about how honored we were to have such a distinguished man in our congregation. I made a mental note: This guy's in the White House and involved in intel, so he must be pretty important.

He came to the CIA in July 1995 as deputy director of central intelligence, the DDCI in the world of intel alphabets. I confess that the idea of a fellow Greek near the top of the pyramid was appealing. We Greeks are a clannish bunch, I suppose; we stick together and try to help one another. How could having Tenet near the top possibly hurt?

Still, the CIA is a massive organization, with thousands of employees. It wasn't until the summer of 1997 that I first met him, shortly after he took over the top job. He was standing in the shish kebab line behind my brother, Emanuel, and me at the Saint George Greek Food Festival. I was saying that I thought the best
loukoumades
, or Greek doughnuts with honey and cinnamon on them, were made on the island of Chios. The voice behind me piped up: “Me, too! Chios definitely has the best
loukoumades
.” I turned and stared into the face of George Tenet.
Okay, junior, there's no better time to meet the boss than right now. Think of something clever. Or witty or wise
.

“Oh, hello, Mr. Tenet. I'm one of your analysts, John Kiriakou. Nice to meet you,” I said, extending my hand. Well,
that
was bright, I thought.

“Oh, nice meeting you,” he said, shaking hands. We chatted for a minute and went our separate ways.

A month later, he was doing a walk around our office, trying to introduce himself to all the analysts.

As he approached my desk, he registered recognition and said he remembered me. I wanted to make sure he remembered the name as well as the face.

“Yes, sir, nice to see you again,” I said. “John Kiriakou, nice to see you.”

He became director of central intelligence in July 1997. About eight months later, I was called in to brief him and his deputy, John McLaughlin, on Iraq. It was a Sunday, so I put on my good suit and met my office director at Langley before we went up to the DCI's suite. Tenet's secretary ushered us in. McLaughlin, a gem of a guy, was impeccably dressed in a suit that put my Sunday best to shame. Tenet, however, was treating the day as casual Sunday in the extreme; he was wearing jeans torn at one knee and a red-and-black plaid shirt, the kind lumberjacks wear. He's a stocky guy so he looked a little like the picture-book image of Paul Bunyan.

After the briefing, he took me aside and asked, “So where are your people from?” This is standard operating procedure when Greeks meet: As I said, we're a clannish tribe, and everyone figures they must have people in common.

“All four of my grandparents came from Rhodes.”

“Ohhhh,” he said, drawing it out, “an islander. You islanders think you're better than the mainlanders.”

“Oh, no, sir, not at all.” This islander-versus-mainlander business is a long-standing competition among Greeks, signifying absolutely nothing. “Where are your people from?”

“Mine are from Epirus,” he said. That's in the northwestern corner of Greece, but the part where his family came from is now in Albania. We exchanged a few more words on the lands of our antecedents' birth, then went home to separate Sunday dinners.

A couple of months later, I was supposed to join a handful of other analysts in briefing the director on several issues. The minute he spotted me, Tenet was at it again. “Kiriakou, tell me one more time, where are your people from?”

“We're from Rhodes.”

“Riiight,” he said, drawing out the word again. “You islanders, you all think you're better than us mainlanders, don't you?”

“No, sir, we don't think we're better at all.”
An inside joke with the DCI? I suppose there are worse things that could connect us. But maybe I should be careful. I'm not sure what's happening here
.

After my temporary assignment in Europe, I was back at headquarters walking down the hall one day with Katherine, whom I had begun to date, and there he was, coming from the opposite direction. As usual, Tenet was chomping on the unlit cigar that usually occupied one or the other corner of his mouth all day long. Our eyes made contact and I said, “Hello, sir, how are you?”

“How are you, islander? Still think you're better than I am?”

Here we go again. “No, sir, I've never thought that I'm better than you are.” And so it went for another two or three rounds of imagined Greek rivalry before he walked on.

Katherine was mystified: “What was that all about?”

“I don't know. The first couple of times he said it, I thought he was kidding, that it was a joke between us, kind of funny. But now? I have no idea what he's thinking.”

In the spring of 2002, I briefed him again, this time after I'd captured Abu Zubaydah. Tenet has a gruff, in-your-face kind of style, very personal. I don't know what I expected. I would have happily settled for an “attaboy” with an accompanying chuck to the shoulder.
Instead, he turned to one of the other people in the room and said, “Islander. He thinks he's better than I am.”

I went through my ritual denials: Believe me, I didn't think I was better than he was.

“You islanders all think you're better than the mainlanders,” he went on. “Why? Because you guys were fishing while we were up in the mountains?” Now it's fishing versus mountain shepherds? What the hell does that mean?

Afterward, as we walked out, Bob Grenier asked me whether I had some kind of beef with the director.

“Bob, I swear to God, I don't even know how this began, but he does it every time I see him.”

During the Iraq war, he did it on a Saturday morning in front of two or three dozen people. And then, shortly before I left the agency, we met again. After we exchanged hellos and how-are-yous, he went at it:

“Have you done anything to adjust that attitude of yours?” I threw up my hands and made my case for islander-mainlander equality one last time. I haven't seen or talked to him since.

Is there a point to this story of intra-Greek fencing? I think so. In the CIA's earliest days, during the late forties, fifties, and early sixties, its personnel profile tended to be white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, Ivy League or exclusive small college, and moneyed. That started to change in subsequent decades, as the agency began to compete against other government and private-sector employers and broaden its recruiting to include women, African Americans, and even white ethnics with strange names like Kiriakou.