And just after I bitched

And just after I bitched about it too. How's this for instant gratification, eh?

WASHINGTON - CIA Director George Tenet, buffeted by controversies over intelligence lapses about suspected weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, has resigned. President Bush said Thursday that Tenet was leaving for personal reasons and "I will miss him." Tenet, 51, came to the White House to inform Bush about his decision Wednesday night. "He told me he was resigning for personal reasons. I told him I'm sorry he's leaving. He's done a superb job on behalf of the American people," the president said.

I suppose it's a testament to Tenet's political skills that he managed to hold on this long, but I would be highly surprised if Tenet is actually leaving for "personal reasons" as he claimed. Let's look at all the things that happened on his watch: the Embassy bombings in Africa; the failed retaliation in Khartoum and in Afghanistan for those attacks; the mistaken bombing of the PRC Embassy in Belgrade during the Kosovo action (remember how those faulty maps reportedly came from the CIA?);the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen; 9/11;WMD---I could go on. Of course we don't know how many CIA operations were successful, and we might never know how many times we were saved from a horrible fate, but you have to wonder. If these were the failures, well, how good could the saves have possibly have been? All of these events could have been prevented or---at the very least---been turned to our advantage if there had been good intelligence. A grasp on the operations of Al-Qaeda and their state sponsors was there for the taking in each one. Yet, we continue to still have massive intelligence failures where people die as a result. It is reportedly the DCI's job to provide good intelligence to the President and the Armed Services. Yet, good intelligence hasn't been presented. Instead, faulty intelligence, poor management and a bureaucratic attitude at the CIA have meant people died. Anyone else would have been sacked after the Embassy Bombings (you know, provided the Embassy that had been bombed was in Paris rather than in Nairobi and Dar-Es-Salaam. It would have been a bigger deal if it had been in Europe, where the media could cover it more easily. I am convinced that Tenet was saved because the Embassies were in Africa, where the western media does not have a great coverage. Same deal with the Cole in Yemen and the fact the 2000 election was coming down to the wire at the same time). Yet Tenet survived not only those events, he survived 9/11. I have to think Chalabi was the proverbial straw. It says something that, even though Chalabi was the Pentagon's guy, that Rummy is still there and Tenet's out, particularly after Abu Ghraib. Of course this is all rampant speculation, but it seems plausible to say that Bush very quietly asked for Tenet's resignation and Tenet gave it. The "personal reasons" is a face-saving maneuver for Tenet. He'll publish his memoirs and Bush can only hope that the fact he let Tenet go on the quiet will help Tenet give him a good recommendation, rather than a scathing one, later on. As much as I would like to, I can't let Tenet slide simply because he was handed the CIA in 1997 after it had been gutted by Congress. I just can't use that as an excuse. Yes, he was handed a nightmare. I can completely understand that and sympathize. But if Tenet's supposedly so crafty, he should have been able to work around the insular, bureaucratic mindset of the CIA worker bees. If it was obvious to me---an informed watcher---that the CIA needed to rely less on satellites and more on humint (human intelligence---spies on the ground)then it should have been obvious to Tenet by 1997. He should have made that option work. Anything's possible, after all. I can only give someone so much credit for working with what they've got when it's patently obvious that they didn't do anything differently to procure a different outcome. Tenet worked with what he had in an established way and did not bother to think outside of the box when it came to gathering intelligence. I do not want political people who are going to sit in their office, wondering how best to consolidate their position so that when the hits invariably come they'll survive the aftermath. I have to think that's what Tenet did. There's just not much there to point me in another direction, is there? Particularly not after all of the spectacular failures of the agency he had been tapped to lead. It has always been clear, to me at least, that satellites were not going to protect us from the threats we faced. Listening to phone calls of Minster of Porta Potties in Oman courtesy of Echelon isn't going to tell us what we need to know about how terrorism works, how it's financed, and where the threats are coming from. It just isn't. The World Trade Center bombings in 1993 should have been a big-ass wake-up call to anyone in the intelligence community. But they weren't. They were seen as a random event, instead of as a harbinger of what was to come due to the destabilization factors that the fall of the USSR brought about. It was patently apparent that after the collapse of the Soviet Union (a coup which took the CIA completely by surprise, I might add)that the world was going to become a much more dangerous place, rather than a safer one. I still don't know how people could have logically come to the conclusion they did come to, which was that since the Soviet Union had fallen, the CIA could now become a line on the budget where savings were to be found. It makes absolutely no sense. The paradigm had shifted. If your eyes are starting to glaze over just by my use of the word paradigm, think of it this way: we had two dodgeball teams: the US and the USSR. Countries chose teams, or were forcibly picked, for the massive game of dodgeball that played out since the end of WWII. These two massive superpowers played a stabilizing role: they kept it to two teams, and while, invariably, some of the players would get hit, they would still be on the team that they had chosen or had been chosen for them. The minute that one of the teams collapsed, it should have been obvious that the players, tired of incessantly being hit, would try to form their own teams when the time came. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, instead of having two teams playing dodgeball you now had many trying to play against each other, aligning with each other to play the one big team---who had also suddenly become the playground monitor as well as being a competitor in the newly reorganized dodgeball tournament. Things had changed. The geopolitics of choosing up sides had changed. To continue with the dodgeball analogy, it should have been obvious that better information was needed to see who was going to stay on the US's team or who, if anyone, was going to try and form their own team and what kind of hits with the big rubber ball the US was going to take. It's pretty simple stuff. If I can figure it out, it should be hugely surprising that the CIA and its funders up on the Hill couldn't. The world had been destabilized by the breakup of the USSR. Yet the new Balkanization that sprung up a year later took the CIA by surprise. Apparently they hadn't realized Yugoslavia was, in reality, a bunch of small teams banded together under the guiding influence of the USSR, yet who wanted to get the hell away from people who they thought had the cooties. Hot spots in Africa flared up and it took the CIA by surprise. (Of course, though, they had their eye on Cuba, which is still in the steady, yet meglomaniacal hands of Castro) I could go on, but I think you get the point. It almost seems to me that the CIA was in willful denial of the fact that the world had changed, like someone who refuses to believe that a loved one has died because they just couldn't deal with the ramifications if that turned out to be true. The CIA needed to put people on the ground in places they'd never been before to keep track of what was going on, but they refused to do this because they'd been bottle-fed with the amazing capabilities of our satellites for too damn long to make it a palatable proposition. Tenet had the ability to change this. He did. He saw the threat, but he didn't make the changes happen that were necessary to play the game well. Why? My guess is that he was dazzled by the current technological capabilities of the agency, decided to let it rest there, and that he felt he was too hamstrung by the budgetary requirements to make things different. I think with Tenet you had a guy who saw the big picture, but didn't think there was anything he could do to make a change. Then 9/11 happened. In my opinion he should have overhauled the agency right there and then: he had the mandate to do so. But he didn't. Perhaps he just wasn't creative enough a thinker. I don't know, but now that he's gone we have the opportunity to really get something done. In an ideal world, we would get a serious hawk into the top spot of agency. Someone who will work with Congressional oversight, but who knows how to get things done and can overhaul the agency, and damn the consequences of firing high ranking analysts. I don't want a James Jesus Angleton in there; nor do I want an Allen Dulles. I don't want more wily operators. I want someone like the founder of the OSS, "Wild" Bill Donovan. Donovan was a man who got things done. He managed to found the OSS, and make it a worthwhile organization, despite huge isolationist pressure---and he did this before WWII. We were positioned well for the war when Pearl Harbor meant that it was time for direct involvment because of Donovan's powers of persuasion, and his inability to give a damn when Congress screamed bloody murder. He was a guy who got the job done. It is time for the CIA to get down to brass tacks. We need someone in that agency who is going to make sure that human intelligence is taken seriously and is funded appropriately. I should also think we need someone who will be able to explain to Congress that intelligence gathering is a dirty business and that, however distasteful it might be to the people footing the bill, domestic sensibilities should not hamper the work of the agents on the ground. This is a huge opportunity for the Bush administration to get it right once and for all---to do what they said they were going to do after 9/11 when they formed the Department of Homeland Security: that agencies would work together and that the endless maze of bureaucratic crap would stop dead in its tracks. Tenet is the one who's been hampering things. Now that he's gone, I sincerely hope they will take this opportunity for what it's worth: a chance to get the war on terrorism on the right footing. If they place the right person in Tenet's position, someone who will make that agency work if it kills them in the process, good things will come out of it. Posted by Kathy at June 1, 2004 02:48 PM | TrackBack