At the Center of the Storm.
My Years at the CIA.
by George Tenet.
PREFACE.
Wednesday, September 12, 2001, dawned as the first full day of a world gone mad. Nothing would ever be the same. Early that morning, operating on only a few hours" sleep, I headed out my front door to the armored Ford Expedition that was waiting to carry me to see the president of the United States.
The security outside my home in Washington"s Maryland suburbs was tighter than ever before. Arriving at the White House, I saw Secret Service personnel stationed every few feet, all of them brandishing weapons. Clearly visible overhead were fighter aircraft patrolling the skies above the nation"s capital. Less than twenty-four hours earlier, America had been attacked by a stateless foreign army. Thousands perished in New York City, at the Pentagon, and in a field in Pennsylvania. At CIA, we had good reason to believe that more attacks might be coming in the hours or days ahead and that 9/11 was just the opening salvo of a multip.r.o.nged a.s.sault on the American mainland.
All this weighed heavily on my mind as I walked beneath the awning that leads to the West Wing and saw Richard Perle exiting the building just as I was about to enter. Perle is one of the G.o.dfathers of the neoconservative movement and, at the time, was head of the Defense Policy Board, an independent advisory group to the secretary of defense. Ours was little more than a pa.s.sing acquaintance. As the doors closed behind him, we made eye contact and nodded. I had just reached the door myself when Perle turned to me and said, "Iraq has to pay a price for what happened yesterday. They bear responsibility."
I was stunned but said nothing. Eighteen hours earlier, I had scanned pa.s.senger manifests from the four hijacked airplanes that showed beyond a doubt that al-Qa"ida was behind the attacks. Over the months and years to follow, we would carefully examine the potential of a collaborative role for state sponsors. The intelligence then and now, however, showed no evidence of Iraqi complicity.
At the Secret Service security checkpoint, I looked back at Perle and thought: What the h.e.l.l is he talking about? Moments later, a second thought came to me: Who has Richard Perle been meeting with in the White House so early in the morning on today of all days? I never learned the answer to that question.
For better and for worse, the twin topics of terrorism and Iraq would come to define my seven years as Director of Central Intelligence. By the time I stepped down from the job in July 2004, those issues seemed to eclipse all the other work American intelligence had done, and all the other issues we had faced during my tenure. Although I didn"t realize it that day, I"ve since come to think of that brief encounter with Richard Perle as the moment when these two dominant themes in my professional life first intersected.
Growing up in the New York City borough of Queens, the son of working-cla.s.s immigrants, I never would have imagined I would find myself in such a position. I aspired to a career in government but never gave a moment"s thought to a life in the hidden world of intelligence. Yet somehow, through a series of unexpected occupational twists and turns, I found myself in the wilderness of mirrors.
As a career path, intelligence is equal parts thrilling and frustrating, because, by definition, it deals with the unclear, the unknown, and the deliberately hidden. What the enemies of the United States work hard to conceal, the men and women of American intelligence work hard to reveal. Throughout my working life, following the ethos of intelligence, I tried to maintain a low profile-to be little seen or heard among the general public.
When I left government, I felt a need to step back for a little while, to think before I wrote or spoke. Having benefited from time and perspective, I have come to believe that I have an obligation to share some of the things I learned during my years at the helm of American intelligence. I felt I owed it to my family, to my former colleagues, and to history to say what I could about the events I have observed.
This memoir relies on my recollections of a tumultuous period in our nation"s life. No such undertaking is completely objective, but it is as honest and as unvarnished as I can make it. There are many things about my tenure as DCI that I am proud of and more than a few things I wish I could do over. Where I, or the organization I led, made mistakes, I say so in these pages. Readers will find no shortage of such admissions. When I point out occasions where our performance was strong, I hope these a.s.sertions, too, are given fair consideration. This book reflects how things appeared to me as I found myself literally at the center of the storm.
Where you stand on issues is normally determined by where you sit. And from where I sat, I saw the tidal wave of terrorism building. From where I sat, I also saw a small group of underfunded and lonely warriors swimming against this tide-out there all alone, warning, deterring, disrupting, and attempting to destroy a worldwide movement operating in nearly seventy countries and bent on our destruction.
This is the story of how we saw the threat, what we did about it, what was proposed and not done, how our thinking evolved, and why the men and women of the Central Intelligence Agency were ready with a plan of action to respond forcefully to the loss of three thousand American and foreign lives. This is also a story about how we helped disarm a rogue nation of its weapons of ma.s.s destruction without firing a shot and how we brought to justice the most dangerous nuclear weapons proliferator the world has ever known. It is a recounting of efforts to bridge historic differences between Israelis and Palestinians and give to diplomats a chance to seek a political solution to an age-old crisis. It also is a cautionary tale of threats still uncountered that would make the attacks of September 11 pale in comparison.
Senior-level people in both the administrations in which I served, Clinton and Bush, tried to do what they saw as best for America. Their results and methods can and should be debated-but not their motives. And when it comes to the U.S. government"s handling of Iraq, there are few heroes in Washington, but plenty on the ground in that troubled country. When it comes to the war on terror, though, there are plenty of heroes, in Washington and elsewhere around the world. The same administration that later lost its way on the road to Baghdad performed brilliantly when it came to running down al-Qa"ida in the aftermath of 9/11. CIA undertook an enormous task with great courage and unbelievable dedication. We read too little about these heroes.
With all its burdens and all its pressures, as Director of Central Intelligence, I believe I had the best job in government. The greatest joy for me was the daily interaction with men and women who dared to risk it all every day to protect our nation. I had an opportunity to serve my country and to try to keep it safe in a time of peril. I was not always successful, but I take comfort in knowing that I was in the arena, striving to do what was right. Only in the United States of America can the son of immigrants be given such a privilege. I will always be grateful that John and Evangelia Tenet left their villages in Greece to give me that chance.
PART I.
CHAPTER 1
The Towpath.
It was like something out of a spy movie.
The date was March 16, 1997, a Sunday. I was at home, on a rare day off, when the phone rang. "Meet me by the C&O Ca.n.a.l, near the Old Angler"s Inn in an hour," a voice said, almost in a whisper. "Come alone." That was all. He didn"t have to identify himself; he knew I would be there.
The voice belonged to Anthony Lake, who had stepped down as national security advisor two months earlier, when Bill Clinton nominated him to be director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Back in 1992, at the start of the Clinton administration, Tony had made me part of his National Security Council staff. Prior to that I had served as a Senate staffer, and for the previous four years had been staff director of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Over the course of three years on the NSC staff, I had formed a warm personal and professional relationship with Lake and his deputy, Sandy Berger. Then, in May 1995, John Deutch, who was about to become CIA director, tapped me to be his second in command. We had gotten to know each other when Deutch was deputy secretary of defense and had even traveled together once overseas to deal with a sensitive intelligence matter. But now, after only a year and a half in the job, Deutch was leaving CIA, and my friend and former boss Tony Lake had been picked to replace him.
Tony had all the right tools for the job: intelligence, ac.u.men, the confidence of the president, and strength of character. Outsiders who observed Tony when he was national security advisor a.s.sumed from his quiet comportment that he was some misplaced mild-mannered professor. Not so. Amid many large egos, Tony was the unchallenged boss at the NSC, a master at process and bureaucratic intrigue. He had observed up close the dysfunctional backbiting that crippled the Carter administration and had worked hard to prevent a repeat performance under Bill Clinton. A rarity in Washington, Tony had no desire to have a high profile, and he emphasized to his staff that we would succeed or fail together as a team. None of us, he stressed, had been elected to the offices we held.
All those attributes made Tony an ideal choice, I thought, to lead CIA. Selfishly, I also knew that his arrival at Langley meant that I would be able to stay on in the deputy"s job-a position I was learning to love.
John Deutch-a brilliant, eccentric, and largely misunderstood figure-had an ability to translate his technical expertise into policy in a way few people could. A gregarious bear of a man, he wanted to be respected by the Agency"s workforce. But shortly after he arrived at CIA, the Agency"s inspector general issued a report criticizing the professionalism of some CIA officers in Guatemala in the 1980s, and John disciplined some of those named. That got him off to a rough start with the workforce. And then things got worse.
His downfall came when he told a reporter for the New York Times Magazine New York Times Magazine that he did not find many first-cla.s.s intellects at the Agency. "Compared to uniformed officers," the that he did not find many first-cla.s.s intellects at the Agency. "Compared to uniformed officers," the Times Times quoted John as saying, "they certainly are not as competent, or as understanding of what their relative role is and what their responsibilities are." The Central Intelligence Agency is a very emotional place, and after that, John"s chances of winning hearts and minds there were pretty much shot. I know he regretted his remarks. It was a valuable lesson that I would put to use later: You have to earn your employees" trust, keep your own counsel, be optimistic, and, as I always said, lead from "the perspective of the gla.s.s being always half-full." quoted John as saying, "they certainly are not as competent, or as understanding of what their relative role is and what their responsibilities are." The Central Intelligence Agency is a very emotional place, and after that, John"s chances of winning hearts and minds there were pretty much shot. I know he regretted his remarks. It was a valuable lesson that I would put to use later: You have to earn your employees" trust, keep your own counsel, be optimistic, and, as I always said, lead from "the perspective of the gla.s.s being always half-full."
John"s tumultuous tenure at CIA ended in December 1996 when he abruptly resigned. The conventional wisdom around Washington was that he really wanted to be secretary of defense and that when it became clear that post was not to be his, he left government for good. Whatever the actual reason, after he cleaned out his desk, I became acting director.
I thought I would have to handle the two jobs for only a short while until Lake was confirmed. But four months later, the nomination was still tied up in the Senate. I figured that the delay in Tony"s confirmation was behind his request to meet with me, but I had no idea why he had insisted on such an unusual location. His instructions to come alone were especially puzzling. He knew that deputy CIA directors don"t go anywhere alone. Since I"d taken the job at the Agency, a heavily armed security detail had been my constant companion. Everywhere I went, I was driven around in a big, black armored SUV with a second follow car full of guys with guns. Threats against senior CIA officials by terrorists and nutcases were very real. In the four months since I had become acting DCI, the security had been ratcheted up even tighter.
Nonetheless, I tried to comply with Tony"s request for discretion. I called in the chief of my security detail, Dan O"Connor, and told him that he and I needed to go for a little ride-alone. Dan, known around the Agency as "Doc," for his initials, is a big, genial New York Irishman. He would take a bullet to save my life without hesitation, but he hated the notion of our venturing out without the usual retinue of backups. His duty was to minimize the risk to me, not maximize it. Nonetheless, he drove over to my home, and the two of us headed south toward the Potomac River.
We pulled into the gravel parking lot across from the Old Angler"s Inn. From there, with Doc keeping a discreet distance, I set off down a dirt path to the century-and-a-half-old ca.n.a.l that once carried coal from the West to heat Washington"s homes. Although it was only mid-March, the parking lot and towpath were crowded with bikers, joggers, walkers, and hikers scrambling along the rocky Billy Goat Trail. Farther downhill, kayakers were pushing off into the churning waters of the Potomac not far from where it comes crashing out of Great Falls.
Memory tells me that a mist was still over the ca.n.a.l that day. Tony was waiting for me, dressed casually in a windbreaker and hiking boots. I was the one who stood out-still in the suit pants and good shirt I had worn to church that morning. I simply hadn"t thought to change. We shook hands, and Tony said, "Let"s take a walk." I"d been with Tony Lake in tough times, but on this day he had a grim countenance that I had never seen. After a half mile or so, we sat on a bench overlooking the ca.n.a.l.
"I want you to know that I plan to tell the president tomorrow that I am withdrawing my name from consideration as DCI," he said in a measured, flat tone. "It"s too hard. They want too much. It"s not worth it."
He didn"t have to say who "they" were. Tony had been around Washington for a long time. He"d played hardball with the best of them. Now that they had him in their crosshairs, a number of senators were determined to make his confirmation process as difficult as possible. Just how difficult had been driven home to me shortly after he was nominated. I had gone to Capitol Hill to deliver a briefing to members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. After the session, I was pulled aside by Richard C. Shelby, the Alabama Republican who was about to become chairman of the committee.
"George," he drawled, "if you have any dirt on Tony Lake, I sure would like to have it." This brazen remark left me speechless-not a common condition for me. Doesn"t this guy know that Tony is my friend and former boss? I thought. What makes him think I would do something like that?
Others apparently didn"t share my reluctance. Soon, issues involving Tony"s management of the NSC staff and baseless rumors about personal improprieties arose. The confirmation was clearly in trouble. Still, I believed that, eventually, good sense would prevail.
That day along the towpath, though, Tony told me his heart was no longer in the fight. He had suffered through three days of brutal public hearings and had been forced to endure the worst kind of demagoguery from some of the committee members. Prior to the hearings, Senator Shelby had insisted on, and finally got, administration agreement to allow him to look through the FBI"s raw files on Lake. "Raw" means just that-these files contain any allegation ever made against you, no matter how groundless. During the public hearings, Shelby and several of his colleagues took turns attacking the nominee. Democratic senators called it a "trial by ordeal" and a form of "malicious wounding." Even Republican senator John McCain asked Shelby to reconsider his approach-but to no effect.
I"m still convinced that once Shelby had tired of bludgeoning Tony, the votes would have been there, but Tony said that he had heard that Shelby was threatening to ask the FBI for yet another investigation as a delaying tactic. National Security Agency officials told us that Shelby staffers had been asking whether there was derogatory information in their communications intercepts on Lake. NSA rebuffed that fishing expedition, but Tony had had it. Enough was enough. What he told me next stunned me more.
"When I tell the president that I am dropping out, I am going to tell him that he must nominate you to become DCI," he said. To be sure, I was acting DCI, but the prospect of replacing Tony as the nominee had not occurred to me in my wildest imagination. After all, I was just forty-four years old, a relative unknown except within certain bureaucratic intelligence circles. That was one strike against me. Strike two was my health: I had suffered a heart attack fewer than four years earlier.
I can"t remember if I replied at all, but my face must have registered the surprise I felt. Tony filled in my silence. "Look, you know the place, you"ve got the skills, the president likes you, and the Senate will confirm you. Tell me anybody else that can be said about. You"d love the job," he added.
"Yes, but not this way," I answered.
Tears were welling up in my eyes while I processed the mixed emotions I was feeling-shock, uncertainty, sadness, and trepidation. I was like a Broadway understudy who"d just found out that his best pal, the star of the show, had been hit by a bus.
I thought about trying to talk Tony out of withdrawing his nomination, but it was clear that his mind was made up. Then I began expressing doubts about whether I was the right person for the job. Tony was sure that I was, and he didn"t want to debate the matter. "Look," he said in his patrician New England tone, "I didn"t bring you out here to ask you what you think about my plans. I asked you to come so that I could tell you what I am going to do. I am going to withdraw, and I am going to tell them that they must must nominate you. It is as simple as that." Tony was worried that President Clinton"s instinct would be to go to the mat with Shelby. "He"ll want to fight to every last drop of nominate you. It is as simple as that." Tony was worried that President Clinton"s instinct would be to go to the mat with Shelby. "He"ll want to fight to every last drop of my my blood," is how he put it. "But that would be terrible for the Agency. CIA needs a director now." blood," is how he put it. "But that would be terrible for the Agency. CIA needs a director now."
After talking for about a half hour we found our way back to our starting point, shook hands, and headed our separate ways. Back home, I went to the family room, in our bas.e.m.e.nt, to think about what had just transpired. Then, as I always do on tough matters, I asked my wife, Stephanie, for advice. Could I do this job? Should I try? What would it mean for our family? Our child, John Michael, was just finishing up elementary school, a time when a boy needs his dad nearby. As acting DCI, I had had enough of a taste of the job to know that it would eat up my hours. Stephanie has always been my strongest supporter. Over the previous two years, she had come to love the men and women of CIA. Like me, she"s also Greek, ready to take virtual strangers under her wing at a moment"s notice. The Agency employees and their families had quickly become part of her extended family.
"George, you can do this," she told me. "You have have to do this, because the Agency needs you. Don"t worry about me and John Michael; we will be fine and so will you." to do this, because the Agency needs you. Don"t worry about me and John Michael; we will be fine and so will you."
The next afternoon, Monday, March 17, Tony issued a stinging 1,100-word statement about his withdrawal. He said that Washington had gone "haywire," he decried the politicization of CIA, and he said that he hoped for a return to the day when priority would be given "to policy over partisanship" and "to governing over "gotcha."" (Nearly a decade later, I"m afraid his wish has not come true.) On Wednesday morning, I got a call from John Podesta, the deputy chief of staff, telling me that the president would likely nominate me for the DCI job. Like Tony, Podesta didn"t seem to be asking me what I thought about the idea. I was invited to come down to the White House to meet with the president.
At the White House, I was led upstairs to the president"s personal quarters. There I met with President Clinton, with Lake"s successor as national security advisor, Sandy Berger, and with Podesta. The president stayed seated throughout, having recently torn up his knee in a fall at golfer Greg Norman"s house in Florida, but there would have barely been time for him to struggle to his feet. We talked briefly, observed the niceties, and then almost before I knew what was happening, presidential staffers were asking that my wife and son be rushed to the White House as soon as possible.
Before long, a pool of White House reporters was called in to hear of the president"s intention to nominate me. With my wife and son at my side, I made a brief statement noting my "bittersweet" feelings, since my rise followed the fall of someone I deeply admired, Tony Lake. I promised the president my best efforts and then went back to the job I was already performing.
Thinking back, I find it odd now that there was no job interview. They knew me and what I stood for, of course, but no one asked me what I would do with the intelligence community should I get the job, what changes I might make, or how I intended to repair morale at a place that had experienced four DCIs in the past five years-not to mention two others whose nominations had been withdrawn.
The story of my nomination got big play in the tabloid papers of New York, where I grew up. The headline in one paper called me "The Spy Who Came in from Queens." Enterprising reporters found people from my old neighborhood who had known me for most of my forty-four years. Some explained how surprised they were at my nomination, since, as one person noted, as a child I had a "big mouth" and wasn"t known for keeping secrets. Others said they sensed something special about me based on the way I had played stickball thirty-five years earlier. (I was once the Public School 94 doubles stickball champion.) My favorite quote came from my mom, Evangelia Tenet. Although she had been in this country for forty-five years by that time, the embrace of the Greek American community was so strong that she still got along speaking only broken English. "I have one son in the CIA and one son who is a heart doctor. Not bad, eh?" she told the Daily News Daily News. Not bad at all, but the real story is my parents, not my brother or me. It is impossible to overstate their influence. Even though I have met scores of presidents, kings, queens, emirs, and potentates, the two people I still admire the most are my mom and dad.
My dad, John Tenet, was his own man since the day he was thrown out of his house at age eleven by an abusive father in Greece. He first traveled to France and found work in a coal mine. There he quickly decided that the mines were not where his future should be, and he made his way to the United States-arriving at Ellis Island just before the Great Depression. He didn"t have a nickel in his pocket or a friend in sight. All he knew was that he wanted to be his own boss and take care of his family, and that in America hard work would let him achieve what was unimaginable elsewhere. On that abiding faith alone, he managed to do what so many Greek immigrants did: he opened a diner.
Eventually Dad would become thoroughly American, but his European roots stayed with him. His hero was Charles de Gaulle. I vividly remember April 27, 1960, when my dad took me and my twin brother, Bill, from Queens to Manhattan to see de Gaulle riding in a ticker-tape parade in an open-air limousine. To this day, I can hear Dad shouting, "Vive la France!" "Vive la France!" and see de Gaulle casting his eyes in our direction. I knew I was in the presence of greatness-but, then, I always felt that way when I was around my father. and see de Gaulle casting his eyes in our direction. I knew I was in the presence of greatness-but, then, I always felt that way when I was around my father.
Dad was a gentle, honest man. He had no formal education, yet he devoured newspapers and was fascinated with world affairs. Our dinner table was the scene of lively debates about politics and news of the old country and of his adopted home. The conversations flowed freely from Greek to English. When Mom and Dad didn"t want my brother and me to know what they were saying, they would switch to Albanian.
Dad was the spitting image of Barry Goldwater, so much so that during the 1964 presidential campaign he was often stopped at the Long Island Rail Road platform and asked for his autograph. That says a lot about how times have changed. It seems odd now that New Yorkers would, even for a moment, believe that a presidential candidate might be standing alone waiting for the train from Little Neck to Flushing. Although twenty-three years have pa.s.sed since his death, I feel Dad"s loss as if it happened yesterday.
As arduous as my father"s journey to the New World was, my mother"s route to America was even more remarkable. She fled what is today southern Albania. Her two brothers were killed by the Communists, and her father, devastated by their murders, died of a heart attack. Alone, Mom somehow managed to make it to the Adriatic coast and board a British submarine after World War II, just as the borders were closing.
Mom made her way first to Rome and then to Athens, and there she might have spent the rest of her life had it not been for one of her uncles, who was in the restaurant business in New York. Uncle Lambros bragged to my dad about his young niece, who was not only beautiful but had recently escaped from a village near where my father was born. Dad must have been enchanted by the tale because in 1952 he flew to Greece, courted Mom for two weeks, and married her. A week later, she arrived in New York to join him in the restaurant business at a place he called the Twentieth Century Diner. She was the baker and he was the chef. It was there, in Queens, with its large Greek American community, that she proudly raised her family.
For an arranged marriage, theirs worked out very well. In another era, with resources and a family behind her, Mom might have gone to college and on to law school. She would have been formidable in a courtroom. My mother has an uncanny ability to read people-private citizens and public figures alike. Mom can spot a liar a mile away. Had I been able to put her to work at CIA, we could have sc.r.a.pped all our polygraph machines. She is a woman of few words, but her temper is on a hair trigger, especially when anyone tries to make life difficult for her two boys. I tell people-only half kidding-that after dealing with my mom, Ya.s.ser Arafat was a piece of cake.
In many ways, I am my father"s son. He was a very trusting man, loath to say anything bad about anyone. Many times when I was director of CIA, I would find myself longing for a chance to get Dad"s advice on some th.o.r.n.y problem, though he had pa.s.sed away in 1983. When things got tough, brother Bill would always say, "Just think about what the old man would do." Dad believed in inclusiveness. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Sometimes, though, I wish I were more like my mom, who firmly believes that constant confrontation can be cathartic. They were an extraordinary couple. I am thankful every day that their courage and determination brought them to this country.
I thought about my parents" remarkable journey that March Sunday in 1997-a journey that had brought me to that towpath and to this turning point in my life.
CHAPTER 2
The Burning Platform
In a perfect world, I would have been fully prepared for my new job, and the Agency would have had the resources to tackle the growing terrorism menace head-on and across a global frontier. From the lethal 1983 attack on the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut to the 1988 bombing of Pam Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing to the 1996 attack on another U.S. military barracks, Khobar Towers in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, we had seen Hezbollah, Hamas, al-Qa"ida, and others at work, and we knew how state sponsors from Libya to Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan used these killers and suicide bombers in a proxy war against Americans and our friends and interests abroad.
Believe me, there was never any doubt who the enemies were, but in the world we lived in and at the CIA I had inherited, things were never that easy. The CIA of 1997 was not a well-oiled machine with an abundance of resources or an organization that ran with crisp precision. If it had been, plenty of other people would have been vying to lead it. In reality, the job probably fell my way more by default than anything else. One newspaper at the time described me as an "unconventional" choice to run the place. The New York Times New York Times quoted an anonymous official as saying, "I can"t give you a better name" than Tenet or, given the challenges facing the Agency, "even a name at all." At least the quoted an anonymous official as saying, "I can"t give you a better name" than Tenet or, given the challenges facing the Agency, "even a name at all." At least the Times Times had my name right. Fifteen months earlier my face had been on the cover of had my name right. Fifteen months earlier my face had been on the cover of Parade Parade magazine, along with that of John Deutch. Amusingly, magazine, along with that of John Deutch. Amusingly, Parade Parade identified me for its thirty million plus readers as "David Cohen," who was actually our director of operations at the time. identified me for its thirty million plus readers as "David Cohen," who was actually our director of operations at the time.
Perhaps the most critical problem the Agency faced was the lack of continuity in leadership. I was the fifth director in seven years. No company can succeed with that kind of turnover. The view of much of the workforce about edicts from the seventh floor, where the most-senior officials work, was that if you didn"t like an order, just wait awhile-the person who gave it would soon be gone.
The problems ran deeper than episodic leadership, though. During the 1990s, the conventional wisdom was that we had won the cold war and it was time to reap the peace dividend. Not only was that a.s.sumption wrong-the war was simply evolving from state-run to stateless armies and from intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) to nuclear manpacks and anthrax vials-but the supposed "peace dividend" was devastating to the spy business at a time when its vitality was most needed. The entire intelligence community, not just CIA, lost billions of dollars in funding. Our workforce was slashed by almost 25 percent. There is no good way to cut an organization"s staff by that amount. But there is one incredibly bad way to do it-and that was precisely the method the intelligence community used. They simply stopped recruiting new people. As a result, there was a half decade or so where hardly any new talent was coming in, and many, many experienced hands were going out the door.
When I became deputy DCI in the summer of 1995, we were running two cla.s.ses a year for new "case officers"-future members of our clandestine service, the men and women who recruit foreign agents to steal secrets. The cla.s.s in session that summer had a grand total of six future case officers and six "reports officers"-people who don"t collect intelligence as much as write up the efforts of their colleagues who do. You can"t run a spy service that way. We later learned that, while we were training a handful of case officers each year, al-Qa"ida was training literally thousands of potential terrorists at its camps in Afghanistan, the Sudan, and elsewhere.
Even if we had had the money, the will, and political backing suddenly to ramp up our training program in the mid-1990s, we did not have the infrastructure to support it. Our clandestine training facility had been allowed to deteriorate to an appalling state. Cla.s.ses were being conducted in dilapidated World War IIera buildings. The housing for our instructors and their families was worse than anything they had to endure when deployed to developing countries. Our best and brightest were not teaching our future officers. Our recruiting program was in shambles, too. Each directorate within the Agency had its own, and there was little or no coordination among them. Of all the telltale signs I tripped over in those first explorations into what was ailing the Agency, the one that stood out the most to me was this: the FBI had more special agents in New York City than CIA had clandestine officers covering the whole world.
It wasn"t just the clandestine portion of the Agency that was in bad shape. Our a.n.a.lytic expertise had eroded to an alarming extent. In order to get promoted, a.n.a.lysts who had spent years becoming world-cla.s.s experts in some critical issue or geographic region had to drop their area of interest and become managers. The Peter Principle is as true in the spy trade as in any other: the best a.n.a.lysts are often not the best managers.
Not surprisingly, morale at the Agency was in the bas.e.m.e.nt. CIA was still reeling from the espionage cases of Aldrich Ames in 1994 and Harold Nicholson in 1996, trusted Agency officers who betrayed the country and their colleagues by selling critical secrets to the Russians. The Agency had also been rocked by false allegations in 1996 that some of its members had been complicit in selling crack cocaine to children in California. The allegations were ludicrous, but even attempting to refute them gave legs to a lurid tale.
Mid-and senior-level officers in the Agency were haunted by the fear of being hauled before Congress or into court and asked to defend their actions. A succession of administrations would tell them that they were expected to take risks and be aggressive. But if something went wrong, Agency officials faced disgrace, dismissal, and financial ruin. Many of those willing to stick it out at CIA rushed to purchase their own "professional liability" insurance. That helped, but the chilling effect of having to do so spread broadly through the organization.
In science and technology, an area where CIA was once a giant, the dot-com revolution was pa.s.sing us by. Private-sector technology was far outstripping our ability to keep pace with our targets. The information technology tools we were putting in the hands of our officers looked like products of the mid-twentieth century rather than of the approaching twenty-first.
Organizationally, the Agency was a mess as well. There was no chief information officer or chief financial officer. We had no coherent and unified programs of training and education, and our executive board made decisions through a democratic voting process. In a multibillion-dollar organization, "one man, one vote" guarantees lowest-common-denominator solutions-n.o.body will be truly uncomfortable or unhappy about outcomes. Good leadership, by contrast, demands that some segments of your organization occasionally have to swallow bitter but needed medicine. Organizations such as CIA exist to defend defend democracy, not to practice it. democracy, not to practice it.
Overriding all these specific shortcomings, and most damaging, was a lack of an articulated and well-understood strategy for the Agency. We had no coherent, integrated, and measurable long-range plan. To me, that just seemed basic, and so that"s where I most focused my energy from day one.
I wish I could tell you that I knew exactly what to do from the start. But I had several advantages. I had been the deputy director for two years. Being the deputy of a large organization in Washington is a great job-n.o.body knows who you are and n.o.body cares. And I had used the time to find out all that I could about the insides of the inst.i.tution, learning about our people and where the best work was being done. The second advantage was the men and women of CIA, the most dedicated, pa.s.sionate patriots you have ever met in your life. Their work ethic is second to none. The tradition and history of the organization is rich and full of daring and accomplishments. (In fact, there is a memorial wall in our lobby where stars denoting fallen colleagues speak of the ultimate sacrifice.) Change was certainly a necessity, but CIA"s history and heritage would provide the foundation upon which to build.
The downside was that now I was no longer the deputy. I couldn"t hide behind my boss, and the Agency and the nation couldn"t afford for me to be stumbling my way up the learning curve. You might think that I had been preparing for this job for two decades, ever since I first went to work as a Senate staffer, but in fact a series of staff jobs does not prepare you for executive leadership. Certainly I knew the substance of the work, but leading a large, multifaceted organization with many lines of business, especially in more than one hundred countries overseas, is a lot different from running a relatively small congressional committee staff. I spent plenty of sleepless nights wondering, given the monumental task before me, if I was up to the job. No previous experience had prepared me to run a large organization. I was no Jack Welch and I knew it.
I knew one thing that needed to be done, however: restoring humanity to the organization. The obligation of leaders is to listen and care for all their people, and not just those in the most skilled of occupations. A long time ago, in the Twentieth Century Diner, I had learned from my dad that if you took care of people, they would take care of you. And at CIA, if men and women believed that you cared about them and about their families, there was nothing they would not do for you.
Throw your arms around an employee, ask him about his family, send someone a note about an ailing mom, walk around and talk to real people doing their great work, make them all feel that they are part of something special-from the kitchen staff to the cleaning crew to the crusty seasoned operations officer you share a cigar with on the office balcony at the end of the day. Show them that you care-and when you have to kick them in the b.u.t.t, they will understand that it is not personal, but rather about doing the job right for the country.
If you looked at the organization and dissected its business lines, the men and women of our clandestine service, the spies, would be our fighter pilots. Our a.n.a.lysts resembled a large college faculty; our scientists and engineers were the geeks who made everything work. Our security officers, logisticians, communications officers, and disguise specialists were the men and women who allowed us to be fast, agile, and responsive. They needed to feel special because they were, and they needed to be united with a common purpose, a mission statement-to protect America and its families-that tugged at their hearts.
The first thing I did was build a leadership team that all these people would trust. I brought in very few outsiders. The message I wanted to send to the workforce was that the talent to help us get where we needed to go was already among us. To stress the importance of our relationship with the military, I picked Lt. Gen. John Gordon, USAF, to be my deputy. To head up the Directorate of Operations-the Agency"s clandestine service-I lured out of retirement a legendary officer named Jack Downing. Jack had served in Moscow and Beijing, and was a skilled linguist. His very presence on the team conveyed the notion that we were getting back to the basics of uncovering secrets to protect the nation.
As head of our a.n.a.lytic unit, the Directorate of Intelligence, I installed John McLaughlin, to whom I (only half jokingly) referred as the smartest man in America. A highly respected a.n.a.lyst, John was renowned for the precision, rigor, and honesty that our tradecraft required. No coincidence, perhaps, he is also a world-cla.s.s magician. His nickname, Merlin, suggests both his vocational and avocational talents.
For executive director, I picked Dave Carey, the former head of the Agency"s Crime and Narcotics Center, and I retained d.i.c.k Calder, a much-esteemed member of the clandestine service, as head of the Directorate of Administration. In every case, I was going for talent, but I also wanted everyone in house to understand that our core functions were going to be run by people who had walked the walk before.
One person I did bring in from the outside was A. B. "Buzzy" Krongard. He had been the CEO of the investment banking firm Alex. Brown. That"s heady territory, with salaries and perks to match. If Buzzy hadn"t been so ready to serve his nation in a time of great need, I never could have recruited him as a special advisor. His mission was to gather the data and a.s.semble the metrics about all of our business processes that would allow us to make the changes critical to the Agency"s survival. He brought business savvy to an organization that seemed to pride itself on its unbusinesslike methods. Prior to Buzzy"s arrival, the Agency was a "data-free zone." We didn"t know where the money was going; we didn"t know why people joined our Agency or why they left. All that would change with Buzzy"s expert help.
I also gleaned from the outside someone to head our Office of Public Affairs. For years the Agency"s PR strategy was to proudly say "No comment" about virtually everything. Trouble was, we had long ago stopped functioning in a "no comment" environment. The media demanded responses, and when they didn"t get any, they a.s.sumed you had something to hide, even when, as with us, hiding things was part of your job description. To remedy the matter, I brought in Bill Harlow, an experienced communications professional who had worked in the comparatively media-friendly (and media-savvy) press operations at the Pentagon and White House. (I should note that despite Bill"s best efforts to get me to do a Sunday talk show, I had a seven-year unblemished record of almost never speaking to a television camera. It was my belief that a sitting DCI should maintain a low public profile and leave the "talking head" role to others.) With the leadership team in place, in August 1997, we were meeting at one of the Agency"s clandestine facilities not that far from Washington when someone said we were standing on a "burning platform." If we didn"t work quickly to extinguish the blaze, the organization and all of us in it would sink into the sea. The term "burning platform" stuck-probably because it was so metaphorically accurate and because it reminded us every day of just how much was at stake. So we set out to learn how other organizations in disarray had transformed themselves. By the spring of 1998 we had a plan in place-a doc.u.ment we called the "Strategic Direction." A key part of the doc.u.ment envisioned what kind of officers we would need to have at the Agency in the year 2010. We looked at the skills they would need to possess, their languages, academic backgrounds, and so on. For five decades, CIA officers had been modeling themselves on the swashbuckling, mostly Ivy Leagueeducated heroes of "Wild Bill" Donovan"s wartime Office of Strategic Services. Brains still count, and a little panache is always useful, but if CIA was going to be able to do its job in a seventh and eighth decade, we had to take into account the new world in which our people would operate.
It took us nearly eight months of soul-searching to develop this plan for the future. On May 6, 1998, I stood up in front of five hundred Agency employees in our igloo-shaped auditorium known as "the Bubble" to talk about the burning platform and what we were going to do about it. Thousands of other employees watched me on closed-circuit television. Many of them were justifiably skeptical of what they were hearing. After all, they had seen so many other leadership teams come and go. How did they know I wasn"t just the flavor of the month?
I tried to grab their attention by driving home how serious our problems were. CIA had recently celebrated its fiftieth anniversary, but unless we performed some sustained miracles, I said, the Agency was unlikely to be relevant by the time it reached its sixtieth birthday. I told them that, G.o.d and the president willing, I was going to be around for the long haul. There was no other job I wanted and no place I would rather be. The statement seemed necessary on my part, but I was stunned when it inspired a thunderous ovation. The reaction, for certain, was not about me. More than anything else, the applause spoke to how desperately the place wanted and needed stability.
I continued, promising that the days of trying to do more with less were over. The things we were proposing were going to cost money, but I a.s.sured them that they shouldn"t worry about that part. My job was to get the necessary funding, and I pledged to try my d.a.m.nedest to do so. I didn"t entirely succeed, but I made myself a royal pain in the a.s.s trying. I begged for large increases in intelligence funding and obtained modest "plus ups"-small increases in our budgetary top line. We reallocated significant portions of our budget to counterterrorism. The budget for CT, as it is called, went up more than 50 percent from 1997 until just before 9/11-at a time when most other accounts were shrinking. In the fall of 1998, I asked the administration for a budget increase of more than two billion dollars annually for the entire intelligence community over the next five years. Alas, only a small portion of that increase was granted.
So strongly did I believe that we were desperately short of needed resources that I went around my own chain of command. Although I was a cabinet officer in the Clinton administration, I struck up a relationship with then Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who was a strong believer in the fact that the intelligence community needed more support. To his credit, Gingrich pushed through Congress a supplemental funding bill in the 1999 fiscal year that provided for the first time a significant increase in our baseline funding. My off-the-books alliance with the House Speaker alienated some members of President Clinton"s team. Although the president was generally supportive of our mission, resources simply were not forthcoming. My only regret is that much of the money in the 1999 supplemental was for one year only, and was not continued in the years immediately following.
Perhaps the most important message I had for the CIA workforce that morning was that we were going back to the basics of our core mission. From now on, we would emphasize blocking and tackling. Everything must support and empower the most important part of our business, the pointy end of the spear: espionage, stealing secrets, and what we call "all-source a.n.a.lysis."