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About the Author

George Tenet is on the faculty of Georgetown University and lives outside Washington, D.C., with his wife, author Stephanie Glakas-Tenet, and their son
Image credit: Official Central Intelligence Agency Portrait (Wikipedia)

Obras de George Tenet

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This is the book by the man who was in charge of America's spy network before, during and after the attack on the Twin Towers. Before: so how come the biggest spy network in the world didn't gather enough information to prevent the attack? After: so how come the biggest spy network in the world didn't gather enough information to prevent the Iraq invasion from
turning into such a disaster? These are Two Big Questions that George Tenet sets out to answer in this book. There are a lot more questions besides, and he is concerned to answer them too. However these are two of the Big Ones because they are hugely important for America and, given his position, hugely important to Tenet personally.
Tenet’s defence for not predicting the 9/11 attack is that he did predict it. That he and his staff were in fact predicting it, or something like it, for some time before it actually happened. Unfortunately, there was so much information coming through from all CIA sources world-wide about possible attacks that it was impossible to 'join up the dots', a figure of speech which he uses a number of times to explain how some apparently obvious leads were not followed up. It is a truism that the benefits of hindsight are enormous and so a reader should not rush to judgement on these failures of prediction. It's also the case that Americans prior to 9/11 had very little notion that they would suffer an attack like 9/11 (or indeed any attack at all, notwithstanding the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing) and on their mainland. Even for the CIA the enormity of what was going to happen must have been difficult to imagine. In short, Tenet makes good case as to why his CIA did not predict the actual attack and therefore was powerless to prevent it. In doing so, he reveals in detail how
the CIA was going about its business when he took over as CIA director in 1997 (not very well) and what he had to do before, and after, 9/11 to reform it (quite a lot). The picture of the organisation that emerges here belies its slick presentation often seen on TV and in films.
Big Question Number Two: so how come the biggest spy network in the world didn't gather enough information to prevent the Iraq invasion from turning into a disaster? This is harder to explain away. Invasions need accurate intelligence and planning. The deficiencies in CIA intelligence gathering and analysis at that time (and later) are obvious from Tenet’s
description of its failures regarding the 9/11 attack. As regards a plan for the invasion, Tenet quotes the old maxim that ‘no military plan survives its first contact with the enemy’ but also has to admit that ’parts of [the] U.S. plan ...unravelled long before that’ (p.397).
What plan? Well, the one in which American troops would be welcomed with flowers and national jubilation, something akin to the welcome for German forces in Austria in 1938 (at least according to those old newsreels of the event the Germans produced). Tenet makes a show of blaming the gung-ho attitudes of certain personalities in the White House and very few will deny that those same powerful personages were in favour of a full-scale invasion, and the sooner the better. He attempts to distance himself from those views, and aligns himself with those who saw no link between Al-Qaeda and Saddam's Iraq and who were, therefore, reluctant about the invasion. If this was really the case, he doesn’t seem to have made the case forcefully enough at the Oval Office. On the contrary, in the weeks before the invasion, his attitude and mind set does not seem much different from that of the war-enthusiasts. It was at one of these meeting that he came out with the phrase that will dog his legacy as a CIA director: 'Slam Dunk'.
Apparently, this is a term from basketball to describe an easy shot, one that cannot fail to score. A ‘sure thing’. The context was a meeting in December 2002 attended by most of the White- House-Iraq-War Dramatis Personae in which President George W. Bush was venting his doubts about how the idea of going to war could be sold to the American
Public. The decision to invade had already been made and so ‘some might criticize us [the CIA] for participating what was essentially a marketing meeting’ says Tenet (p. 362). He was asked ‘if we [the CIA] didn’t have better information to add to the debate ...If I had simply said, “I’m sure we can do better” I wouldn’t be writing this chapter – or maybe even this
book. Instead, I told the president that strengthening the public presentation was a “slam dunk”... a phrase that was later taken completely out of context and has haunted me since it first appeared in Bob Woodward’s book Plan of Attack’. (p.362) Woodward, says Tenet ‘painted a caricature of me leaping into the air and simulating a slam dunk, not once but twice, with my arms flailing.’
Tenet admits to using the phrase, but in a low-key way, conversationally. Either way, it was an unfortunate choice of words. The need to convince ‘Joe Public’ of the necessity to go to war involved the extraordinary feat of convincing him (Joe) that Iraq had a stock of Weapons of Mass Destruction which could be unleashed on America at any time. The fact that Tenet can say that he believed in their existence (p.362) doesn’t say much the competence for the CIA or its chief. And if it were the case that he had serious doubts about their existence, he didn’t share his doubts. It appears he ‘went along’ with the prevailing opinions and was not strong enough in character to oppose seriously the ‘hawks’
sitting beside him in the Oval Office. This lack of forcefulness on the part of the CIA director is in fact a theme that pervades his book.
It was not a good day for George Tenet, that day he uttered that stupid phrase. Later, during a Congressional hearing, a Congressman whom Tenet describes as a long-time friend of the intelligence community ‘and of mine personally’ (p.339) had harsh words to say to him, telling him ‘We depended on you, and you let us down.’ Tenet comments ’For me, it was one of the lowest moments of my seven-year tenure, because I knew he was right’.
There is a lot of self-justification and attempts ‘to set the record straight’ in George Tenet’s book. There are also a number of important issues barely touched on (waterboarding, anyone?). However, the picture emerges of an essentially decent man, who is not reluctant to admit his errors and faults (well, some of them at least) and who was a good deal out of his depth as CIA Director and no match for the powerful Oval Office personalities with whom he had to work.
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Eamonn12 | outras 7 resenhas | Feb 20, 2013 |
Finished listening to George Tenet's retirement project At the center of the storm. Wow. OK. For background, George Tenet served as the director of the CIA under both Clinton and W. He served for 7 years, and was deputy director of CIA prior to that. He was in some ways maneuvered into falling on his sword for the W administration and wound up resigning after a debacle where an incorrect line about nuclear weapons from Niger to Iraq wound up in Bush's State of the Union Address and around that time that Valerie Plame Wilson was outed as a CIA agent.

There's a lot in there, and though its been sanitized and censored as all things CIA must be, its not a book of cotton candy. Extremely well written, engrossing, fascinating look at behind the scenes CIA. From a writing and listening perspective, this was really interesting and I was really eager to make time to read it, the deeper I got. That being said, I gotta believe that it should be taken with a grain of salt. The book was written in part to explain and defend himself and CIA after falling on his sword during the Bush administration and CIA underwent a huge amount of scrutiny for screwing up about, you know, the whole WMD thing that Saddam Hussein never had.

The first third of the book, Tenet starts out with some of the changes he made to the CIA as an organization in terms of organization and focus, with a major focus on terrorism. Though this doesn't really get into the meat yet, he is able to describe what its like to be head of a large and somewhat cumbersome entity and how he was able to turn around morale and improve efficiencies etc. I felt that even though the content was specific to CIA, this section could actually be somewhat relevant to anyone running an organization or someone who has to find ways to motivate and improve performance. Tenet's love of the intelligence community and CIA is quite evident. He also describes why his focus had been on terrorism and al Qaeda long before Sept 11. He also describes his fascinating involvement in the mid-east peace process under Clinton, and how the CIA was viewing the Middle East in general and Israel and the palestinians in particular at the time.

The second third was really about not just why terrorism was the focus of the CIA but also what it was learning about al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, and a whole host of other baddies whose names either I only vaguely recognize/recall from the news then or were completely new to me. It also covered Sept 11, 2001, the failure of the CIA to analyze and communicate actionable intelligence at the right time. Tenet does not flinch from saying outright that he and CIA failed. He also talks about the fear that terrorist groups like al Qaeda would be able to acquire weapons of mass destruction. But that at that time terrorist groups and WMD were not really linked. He makes it resoundingly clear that there was no intelligence information to suggest that Iraq controlled or coordinated or was linked with al Qaeda and Sept11 though there apparently had been a meeting or two that never really went anywhere.

The third third of the book is about going to war in Iraq, what intelligence information there was at the time, that Tenet and did believe that Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction, but that the links to al Qaeda and Sept11 were not there. That policy decisions about Iraq were essentially made either a priori or without regard to the intelligence, or that the intelligence information was cherrypicked for what would support the political arguments at the time. That Cheney and others were particularly focused on Iraq and looking for intelligence to support his agenda. How ill-planned the whole thing was and how poorly the government at large understood the situation on the ground. That while the CIA was wrong about WMD in Iraq, they were correct in predicting that staying there would quickly not go well but were not listened to. That democracy cannot be forced. There were also portions of this section that were more self-defensive. Things like trying to clear up what Tenet knew and when he knew it. Things like trying to deal with the term 'slamdunk' and about how that was bandied about by Bob Woodward etc (now I want to go back and read those books). And other things that were occurring towards the end of his tenure as director of CIA including the outing of Valerie Plame Wilson as an undercover CIA agent.

One of the things that really struck me about the second and third portions of the book is that the CIA and the intelligence community at large is providing information -- but that this is distinct from what to do about this information, which is in the hands of the policy and decision makers. This is perhaps a subtle, but very important distinction. In many regards, this felt quite familiar to me as a scientist - even though my field (ecology) is entirely unrelated. Discussions I've had with other scientists suggests to me that the importance of the distinction between advising (providing information) and deciding on policy is similar to how many scientists or science advisers view their roles. Not a connection I would have intuited, but in retrospect makes a lot of sense. First, many in the intelligence community probably *are* scientists of various sorts (techies, remote sensing, modelers, etc). Second - there is a sense of doing something important that is personally satisfying, intellectually stimulating, and highly technical and interpretive (that is, there is a need to understand the data correctly), but that to be effective, must be translated to others who are in a position to do something about it. Thirdly, there is never enough data to create a complete picture, so uncertainties must be acknowledged and accurately and effectively conveyed along with the information content - yet no matter how hard one works to do so, the message is only one of a million things that a policy maker takes into consideration and there may be other things at play that wind up being more influential in terms of what actually happens. And fourthly - when playing the game at a high stakes level (ie a director role) there is always the risk of error on the part of oneself or others, as well as active mischaracterization and playing politics.

So - why read this book now? I got it a long time ago and its been patiently waiting in queue. I picked it up when Osama bin Laden was found, and felt that it was as good a time as any to take a look back. It's well written and engaging. Is it worth reading and dredging up all the pain in the ass divisive politics of the past decade? Well, I felt that I got a lot out of reading it and actually got a different perspective on the times, the people, and was able to compare it against my own political leanings, thoughts on these momentous and not-as-momentous issues of the day, etc. I don't know how much if any I changed my mind, but some perspective can be ok I suppose. The afterward is read by George Tenet himself, and is an interesting look forward (backward?) on the future of the intelligence community, in general, along with the restructuring to the Dept of Homeland Security and the intelligence community perspective on the FISA 'domestic wiretapping' issue. All of these are still being played out in one way or another, so this portion at least, is still timely several years post-publication. Ovearll, I'm glad I read this. Now's as good a time as any.
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GoofyOcean110 | outras 7 resenhas | Jul 9, 2011 |
Tenet convincingly makes his case as the fall guy for the Iraq war. The key point in the book (of course) is his explanation of the “slam dunk” remark. He claims it was taken out of context and that Bob Woodward misled him into believing it would be downplayed.
Other accounts of the lead up to the war support his claim that Doug Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheny, Donald Rumsfeld, and Condy Rice had long decided to go to war before the CIA was involved.

Tenet also explains (also backed up later) how the CIA handles the successful war in Afganistan. His accounts fit with many others.

But Mr. Tenet never stood up against the war or preached caution. He can outline many (and he does) times the CIA’s version of inforomation was ignored or exagerated. But the fact is he sta behimd Secertary Powell at the UN while much of the weak information was used as acase for war. He certainly has been made an unfair scaepgoat for Iraq and the “sixteen words” but he is not without blame.
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yeremenko | outras 7 resenhas | Sep 26, 2009 |
Since this the only "insider" book about the operation of the CIA for the 7 years that Tenet was chief, I'm completely able to judge it. Tenet seems to not plead other people dropped the ball and the book is not laden with why we should or should not have done anything about Somalia, the Balkans, Afganistan and Iraq. What he does explain is how difficult it is to get good intelligence, anywhere; and how extraordinarily difficult it is to get where we have no people.
I think George Tennant was a good soldier.… (mais)
 
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DeaconBernie | outras 7 resenhas | Dec 20, 2008 |

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