At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA (Hardcover)

by George Tenet (Author)
Key Phrases: threat matrix, entire intelligence community, key judgments, United States, White House, Middle East (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Former CIA director Tenet leaves the main vocal duties for this audio in the capable hands of Conger (who also recently narrated The Reagan Diaries). Yet in reading both the brief introduction and lengthy-but highly compelling-afterword, Tenet demonstrates a command of the spoken word that makes one wonder why he did not handle his own narration. However, the two men project a compatible style and tone, conveying deeply personal emotion within the boundaries of professionalism and decorum. Tenet does not shy away from acknowledging his own responsibility in controversies involving terrorism and the Iraq War, but he also takes several key political leaders to task for scapegoating the intelligence community in the wake of unpopular policy. The musical interludes at the start and end of each CD serve to maintain the cloak and dagger ambience. Those who prefer to skim the surface of news events may find the length taxing, but listeners ready to move beyond the headlines and into a wider world of nuanced complexity will be more than satisfied.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

From The Washington Post
Reviewed by Bob Woodward
In his remarkable, important and often unintentionally damning memoir, George Tenet, the former CIA chief, describes a meeting with Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser, two months before the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In much more vivid and emotional detail than previously reported, Tenet writes that he had received intelligence that day, July 10, 2001, about the threat from al-Qaeda that "literally made my hair stand on end."

According to At the Center of the Storm, Tenet picked up the phone, insisted on meeting with Rice about the threat from Al Qaeda, and raced to the White House with his counterterrorism deputy, Cofer Black, and a briefer known only as "Rich B."

"There will be a significant terrorist attack in the coming weeks or months," Rich B. told Rice, and the attack will be "spectacular." Black added , "This country needs to go on a war footing now." He said that President Bush should give the CIA new covert action authorities to go after Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda organization. After the meeting, Tenet's briefer and deputy "congratulated each other," Tenet writes. "At last, they felt, we had gotten the full attention of the administration."

Though Tenet was meeting almost daily with President Bush to give him an intelligence briefing and an update on threat reports -- "extraordinary access," he labels it -- by his own account he did not take the request for action "now" directly to the president.

During a CBS "60 Minutes" television interview that aired April 29, correspondent Scott Pelley nailed the crucial question that Tenet leaves unanswered in his book "Why aren't you telling the president, 'Mr. President, this is terrifying. We have to do this now'? " Pelley asked Tenet.

"Because the United States government doesn't work that way," Tenet replied. "The president is not the action officer. You bring the action to the national security adviser and people who set the table for the president to decide on policies they're going to implement."

Whoa! That's a startling admission. I'm pretty certain that President Bush or any president, for that matter, would consider himself or herself the action officer when it comes to protecting the country from terrorism. I can already see the 2008 presidential candidates promising, "I will be your action officer on terrorism and security."

To be fair to Tenet and the CIA, they had been working their tails off for years, often successfully, to thwart terrorists around the globe. But Tenet should have been the instant messenger to the Oval Office in the summer of 2001. His lapse and apparent decision not to carry the request for action to the president himself doesn't mean that the 9/11 attacks might have been averted. But the failure does reveal Tenet's limitations. He was the president's intelligence officer, the top man responsible not only for providing information, but also for devising possible solutions to threats.

A dedicated, often innovative and strong leader beloved by many at the CIA, Tenet nevertheless was hampered by a bureaucrat's view of the world, hobbled by the traditional chain of command, convinced that the CIA director's "most important relationship with any administration official is generally with the national security adviser."

No. Your most important relationship is with the president.

How he rose to his position is telling. The staff director of the Senate Intelligence Committee, then the Clinton White House NSC intelligence director and then deputy CIA director, he became CIA Director in 1997 basically because President Clinton's first choices could not be confirmed. A strong people person, Tenet did much to improve CIA morale and lay out a rebuilding program, but in this memoir of his seven-year tenure as CIA director, he wonders whether he was up to the job. "No previous experience had prepared me to run a large organization," he writes. "I was no Jack Welch and I knew it."

Nonetheless, Tenet oversaw significant successes, most notably planning and executing the paramilitary assault to dislodge al-Qaeda from its Afghanistan sanctuary in the weeks and months after 9/11 -- essentially the action he had proposed to Rice in the meeting of July 10, 2001.

Full disclosure: In discussions with Tenet as a reporter for this paper, I many times urged him to write his memoir, and, after he resigned from the CIA, I even spent a day with him and his co-writer, Bill Harlow, in late 2005 to suggest questions he should try to address. Foremost, I hoped that he would provide intimate portraits of the two presidents he had served as CIA director -- George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Instead, he has adhered to the rule of CIA directors: protect the president at all costs.

That said, several chapters by themselves are worth the price of the book: Chapter 14, "They Want to Change History," lays out al-Qaeda's and other terrorist groups' persistent efforts to obtain strategic weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear devices. Reading it is scary, and Tenet makes a compelling case that terrorism inside the United States is not over. Chapter 15, "The Merchant of Death and the Colonel," is an insider's chilling summary of the dismantling of the secret nuclear proliferation network run by A.Q. Khan, the father of the Pakistani nuclear program.

Tenet is candid about how the CIA regularly dispensed money to assist in the capture of al-Qaeda figures. "We would show up in someone's office, offer our thanks, and we would leave behind a briefcase full of crisp one-hundred-dollar bills, sometimes totaling more than a million in a single transaction."

He also provides further documentation that the Bush national security team was dysfunctional and members didn't communicate among themselves very well or at all. This lack of communication becomes apparent in his own understanding of crucial decisions: "One of the great mysteries to me is exactly when the war in Iraq became inevitable," he writes. He doesn't know when Bush decided to go to war. But he writes that in September 2002, "there was no decision to go to war yet" and that by December 2002 the war "decision had already been made." He provides no evidence or statements to support these claims, and I think he is wrong about the latter date. (From my reporting and interviews with Bush and the other key players, I believe Bush finally decided to go to war in early January 2003.)

On Aug. 26, 2002, seven months before the invasion of Iraq, Tenet says he was totally surprised when Vice President Cheney said during a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars that "there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction." Cheney was effectively issuing his own National Intelligence Estimate -- he was treading on Tenet's territory. "The speech also went well beyond what our analysis could support," Tenet writes, and he acknowledges that he should have privately told Cheney so.

In truth, Tenet should have raised hell on such a critical issue -- privately and publicly. He writes that his silence implied agreement. But five weeks later Tenet issued the famous 90-page National Intelligence Estimate that essentially reached the same wrong conclusion: "Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons."

One of Tenet's most baffling fixations has to do with his assertion to the president and the administration's war cabinet on Saturday, Dec. 21, 2002 (three months before war), that Iraq's WMDs were "a slam dunk case." This was first reported in my 2004 book, Plan of Attack.

Tenet disputes the version I reported, acknowledging now that he said "slam dunk," but denying that he rose from the couch in the Oval Office and threw his arms in the air. The gathering was "essentially a marketing meeting," he writes, to decide what intelligence could be made public to prove Iraq had WMDs. He says my recounting "ignited a media bonfire, and I was the guy being burned at the stake."

Over the years, Tenet has been all over the lot on this "slam dunk" comment, first denying he ever said it, then later saying he did not recall it but would not dispute that it happened. In 2005, I participated in a public forum in Los Angeles with Tenet before an audience of 5,000 people. Asked about "slam dunk," he replied, "Those are the two dumbest words I ever said." He does not include that in his book.

Instead, he recounts how he called Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff, and complained that the leak of the "slam dunk" story "made me look stupid, and I just want to tell you how furious I am about it. For someone in the administration to now hang this around my neck is about the most despicable thing I have ever seen in my life."

Tenet incorrectly suggests that I had one source for this report. There were at least four firsthand sources. When I interviewed President Bush in December 2003, he quoted the "slam dunk" phrase four times, and then in a fifth citation the president said, "And Tenet said, 'Don't worry, it's a slam dunk.' And that was very important." I provided this portion of the transcript to Tenet.

"I truly doubt President Bush had any better recollection of the comment than I did," Tenet writes in At the Center of the Storm, "Nor will I ever believe it shaped his view about either the legitimacy or timing of waging war." Tenet could be right about that, but he keeps trying to get himself off the hook for that comment. "In a way President Bush and I are much alike," he writes. "We sometimes say things from our gut, whether it's his 'bring 'em on' or my 'slam dunk.' I think he gets that about me, just as I get that about him."

But 10 weeks after the "slam dunk" comment, Tenet and the CIA provided Secretary of State Colin Powell with the intelligence he used in his famous Feb. 5, 2003, presentation to the United Nations and the world, arguing that Saddam had WMD. Tenet writes that he believed it was a "solid product." That, of course, is a less memorable and less colorful way of saying "slam dunk."

Of Powell's U.N. speech, Tenet writes, "It was a great presentation, but unfortunately the substance didn't hold up. One by one, the various pillars of the speech, particularly on Iraq's biological and chemical weapons programs, began to buckle. The secretary of state was subsequently hung out to dry in front of the world, and our nation's credibility plummeted."

In truth, Powell blames Tenet for hanging him out to dry. Though Tenet takes some responsibility for his and his agency's mistakes, he often dodges it in his book. "Maybe it's just the way Washington works," he laments when he gets blamed for intelligence failures. Or maybe it's just accountability.

He spends nine pages dissecting how a senior CIA officer, Tyler Drumheller, and the German intelligence service didn't alert him to the fabrications of a source (code-named, appropriately enough, Curve Ball) who alleged that Iraq had mobile biological labs. This was a centerpiece of Powell's U.N. presentation, yet Tenet offers no apology to Powell.

But the other critical intelligence assessment he didn't carry to the Oval Office -- surely the most critical of his career -- was his misgivings about invading Iraq. As I reported in my third book on Bush, State of Denial, in the months before the invasion in the fall of 2002, Tenet confided to one of his top aides, John O. Brennan, that he thought it was not the right thing to do. "This is a mistake," Tenet told Brennan.

But he never said as much to the commander in chief. And he doesn't say it to readers of his memoir.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 576 pages
• Publisher: HarperCollins; 1 edition (April 30, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0061147788
• ISBN-13: 978-0061147784
• Product Dimensions: 6.9 x 4.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (77 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #241,135 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

201 of 242 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Scary State Of Our World, April 30, 2007

By	Penny Dreadful (Under Your Skin) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

Like I imagine so many thousands of others, I spent the last month counting down the days till the release of this book, contenting myself alongside everyone else with the tidbits revealed in the media. Ultimately, like some sort of hard-core Harry Potter fan, I used a connection at a local bookstore to get a copy at five AM, and spent this morning reading five-hundred of the most disturbing pages of revelations I've seen since the publication of Bob Woodward's State of Denial last year.

Anyone who claims this book is former CIA director George Tenet's self-exonerating backlash against his former agency or his one-time boss, President George W. Bush, has not yet read At the Center of the Storm, and is in for a surprise. If no other part of this book is read, I'd urge anyone to turn to the chapter entitled "They Want To Change The World" and then defy anyone to walk away without feeling slightly less secure. Yes, Tenet does give his side of the story for his now-infamous "slam dunk" remark, and has select critical words for the current administration, particularly Secretary of State Rice, and Vice President Cheney, but instead of using this work as a vituperous denunciation of Washington insiders, he makes what I found to be a responsible criticism of exactly what was mishandled in the time between September 11, 2001, and the period that followed the end of the (first stage of the) Iraq War, and what has come to be termed the occupation of that country.

Still, what kept me glued to these pages, what frightened and disturbed me, and what is sure to outshine the revelations on the conduct of the Bush administration and be most discussed in weeks ahead, is Tenet's revelations on the tenacity of the west's greatest foe, al-Quida (to use this book's spelling), its murderous ambitions, and the scope of what he maintains are some of its plots for mass-homicide. In At the Center of the Storm, Tenet writes of al-Qaida's 2003 plans for a gas attack on New York City's mass transit system. He tells of that organization's efforts to persuade scientists in Pakistan to sell it nuclear materials, and Tenet writes with a chilling detachment as he tells of bin Laden's meetings with Pakistani leaders with a goal of attaining that same technology. Most disconcerting of all is Tenet's statement that these meetings, including a face to face session between bin Laden and the Pakistani president, took place in the summer of 2001, mere weeks before 9-11, leading to the conclusion that things could actually have been so much worse than they were.

Tenet also has a mixed opinion on the Saudis as partners in the fight against global terrorism. On one hand he is critical of Prince Naif's frequent unwillingness to provide names of suspects, and accuses him of indifferent vacillation, and yet Tenet also has praise for (now) King Abdullah, and writes that without Saudi cooperation, US efforts to defend itself would be greatly hampered, perhaps past the point of effectiveness.

At the Center of the Storm is an engrossing read written by a credible source who one feels is coming clean here, as well as telling his side of things. Part insider's take on recent politics and policy, part revelation of the state of danger in our tumultuous world, it will become a best seller, and deserves to be.

56 of 67 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Deceptive Beginning, Vital Middle, Disappointing End, May 5, 2007

By	Robert D. Steele (Oakton, VA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)

This is a very good book. There are some extremely important nuggets in here that essentially put the final nail in Dick Cheney's coffin while certifying the importance of holding Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, and Cambone accountable for their high crimes and misdemeanors. Condi Rice continues to be depicted, in this book and others, as a zero in the sense of having been ignored, sidelined, or run over by Dick Cheney and his minions.

The book loses one star for a lack of prior context. George Tenet was Staff Director of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) for many years, and then Intelligence Director for Bill Clinton. He avoids any mention of his long-standing role in helping dismantle the very IC he ended up leading, and he is terribly deceptive when he says he asked for more funding for anti-terrorism, but fails to mention his inability to redirect funds within the $35-40 billon he had at the time. Today the IC has $60-70B and we are no safer--these clowns cannot even put together a consolidated accurate terrorist watchlist five years after 9/11.

The bottom line on the author is that he is a big-hearted staffer, not a leader and not a strategic thinker. He was a place-holder in a job that two presidents saw fit to relegate to losers--a mouse, a pit-bull, and a turtle.

He takes credit for months of redesign dialog but fails to point out that there was no substantive contact with iconoclasts, published author-practitioners. I am especially angry that he placed Buzzy Krongard in as Executive Director. In my view, Krongard was there to look out for Wall Street interests and ensure Brown and Root did not get caught smuggling drugs into the USA through New Orleans and heavy equipment being returned to the USA "for repairs." I've come to the conclusion, after thirty years in this business, that there are four CIA's: 1) White House sychophants; 2) Wall Street support via Carlyle Group and a small network of retired intermediaries; 3) the "front" of earnest people working out of official installations, incapable of actually doing serious spying (I was part of this group); and finally, a multinational "dirty deeds" arm that does terribly immoral and illegal things with Saudi money, Egyptian sodomy of children (photographed so as to force them to spy on their fathers), and so on.

In many ways, this book is a capstone account of the death of US secret intelligence. It's gone. The DNI, DCI and USDI are earnest men, but they will fail because they simply do not comprehend the "paradigms of failure" (essay online) and are not willing to contemplate a clean-sheet fresh-start. On page 26 the author confirms that "time and technology [have] passed us by."

As fascinating as his claims are of ramping up on Bin Laden, I go with Michael Sheuer's damnation as published by the Washington Post. Condi Rice blew off warnings, Dick Cheney focused on energy conspiracies with Enron and Exxon, and the plain truth is that the CIA refused to read the book by Yossef Bodansky or view the PBS broadcast in 1994 by Steve Emerson. They closed themselves off from open sources (called "Open Sores" within the now near-moronic secret world).

The middle of the book is sensational. Chapter Thirteen on "The Threat Matrix" and the succeeding chapters in Part II of the book are superb and contain many nuggets that restored much of my respect for the author.

The author damns Cheney on page 138 for taking over the National Security Council and it is clear that if there is one person to be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors, it is not the President, but rather the Vice President.

On page 317 he tells us that "Policy makers have a right to their own opinions but not their own set of facts."

He slams Rumsfeld for blocking several 737's full of State people and language-qualified individuals specifically trained and organized to get the post-war reconstruction off to a good start. He does not mention Rumsfeld's idiocy in allowing Pakistan to evacuate 3,000 Taliban and Al Qaeda people from Tora Bora, but he does mention that General Tommy Franks refused to put the Rangers in Bin Laden's path, claiming he needed weeks to set it up (this is of course baloney, they could have been air-dropped in 24 hours with a 3-day resupply 24 hours after arrival).

He defends himself on the "slam dunk" as applying to the presentation plan for the UN, not the intelligence. I want to believe this, but the fact that he took imagery and other materials to the first NSC meeting, significantly on Iraq rather than terrorism, gives me pause. I certainly do believe that Dick Cheney hijacked the White House and closed out the entire policy process, but George Tenet, Colin Powell, and our generals all failed us by not resigning and screaming out at the top of their lungs against the high crimes and misdemeanors they witnessed Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, and Steve Cambone commit, day after day.

He lays bare Cheney's misbehavior in stating on 26 August 2002 that "there is no doubt" on Iraq's having weapons of mass deception but very strangely does not mention that both Hussein's son-in-law who defected to the US, and every one of the 25+ line crossers that Charlie Allen sent in, all said the same thing: kept the cook books, destroyed the stocks, bluffing for regional ego's sake.

He slams Paul Bremer for de-Bathification and confirms that "Iraq came at exactly the right time for Al Qaeda."

The author avoids major criticism of Stephen Cambone, Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, but he reveals the DoD operations against Iran. He tells us about Chalabi hoaxing DIA for millions, and that President Bush ordered Chalabi off the payroll.

He confirms Paul William's view on Al Qaeda having nuclear capabilities.

Pre 9/11 air travelers believed "be calm, see Cuba" when hijacked. Pre 9-11, and today still, our senior government executives are still confusing loyalty with integrity. We can do better. We need, right now, a "Smart Nation."

On Intelligence: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World
Intelligence Failure: How Clinton's National Security Policy Set the Stage for 9/11
Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America
First In: An Insider's Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan
Jawbreaker: The Attack on Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda: A Personal Account by the CIA's Key Field Commander
A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies
Osama's Revenge: THE NEXT 9/11 : What the Media and the Government Haven't Told You
The True Cost of Conflict/Seven Recent Wars and Their Effects on Society
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project)
THE SMART NATION ACT: Public Intelligence in the Public Interest

30 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Don't Judge This Book From Talking Heads or Dust Jacket Blurbs~~Read It!, May 2, 2007

By	Frederick S. Goethel "wildcatcreekbooks" (Central Valley, CA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Having spent the last 2 ½ days reading this book, I have a completely different prospective on the war on terror, on how the CIA functions (and sometimes doesn't) and how the Bush Administration views 9/11. The book is fascinating, goes into much more depth than expected and isn't the "blame game" book that people are being lead to believe.

To be sure, this is not any easy book to read. It is certainly long, and at times tedious, but that is the nature of this type of book. The names of the al-Qa'dia (as spelled in the book) members alone are enough to twist the brain, however those names are important to understand how the organization moved people through and around the world.

Two chapters that were fascinating to me were "They Want to Change History" and "Casus Belli". They contained information that changed, in some ways, how I perceive just what has happened, and how what happened did happen. I won't reveal more, as I think it is important for people to read the actual book.

Unlike so many people that are condemning the book before reading it, I found it to be as well balanced as any autobiography is. Mr. Tenet spreads blame to himself, as well as to a number of other people for failures that occurred. And it is important to realize that, while he made mistakes, others made larger and more costly mistakes, including Saddam himself.

This book has good information that will be helpful to the historians that will eventually write the entire story of this administration and the history of the world after 9/11. I realize this review won't change the minds of most people, but to condemn the book without reading it would be a shame.