Customer Reviews

At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA

5 star:		(28)
4 star:		(31)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(10)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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.

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

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.

It does not take a very careful read of this book to infer that George Tenet loved his job as Director of CIA. He also, apparently, holds the men and women who work at CIA in very high regard. During his seven year tenure at CIA he unquestionably improved the morale of the CIA workforce. Unfortunately reading this book one also has to infer that he was not a very good director of that agency. Although he dealt with intelligence issues during his years as a congressional and National Security Council (NSC) staffer, he really had no experience in the actual processes involved in the collection of data and the production of intelligence. Further he had no management experience and never had to learn how to transform decisions into actions or ensure that subordinates did so. However, if one reads between the lines of this book one can see that what really did Tenet in as Director was that he was extremely ill-served by CIA's senior management.

For example there is the on going issue of the al Qaeda movement and Usama bin Ladin or Osama bin Laden. In the wake of the al Qaeda inspired attacks against the U.S. Embassies in East Africa, Tenet tells the reader he was frustrated with the "quality and depth of our intelligence regarding al Qaeda and Bin (sic) Ladin." Apparently as a result of this frustration, the Counter Terrorism Center (CTC) of CIA developed a so-called `operational plan' and the redoubtable CIA veteran Charlie Allen pushed the rest of the Intelligence Community, namely NSA and the NGA, to step up their collection and processing efforts to support that plan. Tenet was told that as a result the amount of data on al Qaeda and bin Ladin had `exploded' and many terrorists were identified and their linkages to other terrorists were documented. According to the head of the CTC of the plan had "damaged UBL's (sic) infrastructure and created doubt within al Qaeda...", although it is difficult to determine how he knew this. This of course was all prior to the events of 9/11. In point of fact, the result of all this effort was what one would get by kicking an ant hill and little substantive intelligence resulted from all the uproar. Indeed by 2004 CIA apparently was still uncertain if the al Qaeda movement should be treated as a transnational or geographic issue. After 9/11, the response by CIA to the Bush administration's interest in finding ties between al Qaeda and pre-invasion Iraq was a masterpiece of bureaucratic opaqueness. President Bush and Director Tenet both deserved better. The problem is that as Tenet stated in another context, "We are all prisoners of history" this could be the epitaph of his directorship and perhaps CIA itself.

This is a valuable book and an unprecedented account by a Director of the CIA. Tenet's tenure, with its overriding focus on the threat of terrorism, bridged both the Clinton and George W. Bush presidencies. Tenet is not kind to many in the Bush administration, particularly Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Feith, Cheney, and Libbey, whom he accuses of cherry picking intelligence and asserting as fact statements that could not be backed up in their determination to justify a war with Iraq, but does not criticize the President. In the face of so many controversies and White House efforts to put the blame on intelligence for the Administration's policy errors, the book is at times inevitably defensive in tone, but this does not detract from a remarkable account full of considerable detail on matters not usually revealed in public. The "afterword" at the end makes it clear that, in Tenet's view, the war on Iraq was launched with total failure to heed warnings about the problems of winning the peace or making any real preparation therefor. For the future this account is an important reminder of both the importance and limitations of intelligence and the necessity always to "speak truth to power."

I have mixed opinions about George Tenet and the book didn't really change that. His pre-9/11 career wasn't particularly distingished. However, after 9/11 he really stepped up in terms of the war in Afghanistan and rolling up portions of the Bin Laden organization. But then he reverted to his old style. Like Colin Powell, he allowed others with an agenda for Iraq to run all over him. He then allowed himself as an outsider in the administration to be blamed by almost everyone in washington for 9/11 and Iraq. Years later, he has written a very thoughtful book on events. But its years too later.

The biggest revelation in the book is confirmation of things that were suspected. The "slam dunk" comment about Iraqi WMDs wasn't what it seemed. Insiders at the top of the Bush Administration needed someone to blame for WMDs not being found in Iraq. And so one of them used Bob Woodward to get stories published in the Washington Post (and in books) putting all the blame on Tenet using the "slam dunk" quote. The incident actually says less about the white house than it does about Bob Woodward, his total lack of ethics and his series of so-called insider histories of post 9/11 events.

Those wanting a book hostile to the post 9/11 policies of the Bush Administration (detainee treatment, Iraq war) will not find that this book is what they wanted. Tenet believes in most of what he and the administration have done. His problems are more with the nature of how he was used and abused by a White House where loyalty is a matter of personal relationships rather than competence. This is a white house which will self-destructively try to hold on to failures (Rumsfeld, "Brownie", Gonzales) who have friends while throwing those without friends to the wolves.

The most useful part of the book is probably Tenet's account of the war in Afghanistan and the CIA's role in it. Its not that new information necessarly, but that its a useful view of what happened from one of the principals.

Tenet will disappoint some in not going after Bush. But in reading the book, you don't get the sense of a president who is really either leading or directing events. The impression that I get is of an administration where decisions are made in private, people unofficially go convince the president to go along with what they want and then it happens. Meetings exist only to confirm decisions that have already been made.

Tenet's failure was in not going to the president with a strong point of view at certain times. He was too timid in pushing the danger of terrorism as an issue before 9/11 and he seemed to avoid a frank discussion of Iraq after 9/11. Would his pushing harder have made a difference? Probably not. Colin Powell had both access and public prestige beyond Tenet but wasn't able to change the course of events as far as Iraq goes. And considering that he wasn't a "Bush" guy, his ability to go into the office and have it out over a fundemental policy would be limited anyway.

What Tenet perfect? No. But in an administration full of bad people and non-entities, he comes across as one of the better ones. He wasn't a great leader, but he was still better than Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rice, Cheney and General Tommy Franks). He certainly did not deserve to have his reputation trashed by various people over the past few years.

If nothing else, the initial war in Afghanistan as covered in the book should serve as an example to future leaders of how to fight a war in a bad place.
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A footnote:
At some point in 2008, all the positive feedback associated with the review was removed without explaination.

A well balanced and straightforward memoir that incorporates a contextual methodology to illuminate the seven challenging years Mr. Tenet faced as CIA Director. Of particular note is the reverence Mr. Tenet pays to his employees, whom he showers with praise and admiration. It is in many extents, a portrayal of the little known successes of the American intelligence community that he led.

The media hype has cherry picked the more controversial parts of the work (i.e. Agency torture allegations, and flawed intelligence for the Iraq war, etc.), but has failed to provide the contextual framework that answers and clarifies the mountain of myths that have surrounded the intelligence community for much of the past decade. For instance, Mr. Tenet clearly argues, and provides sound evidence, that his organization had been developing a strategy, albeit with meager funding and support from the Clinton and Bush Administration, to locate and neutralize the Al Qaeda network long before 9/11.

This work is well worth reading for those whom seek to understand the reality of intelligence collecting and analyzing, and to understand that policy makers are the ultimate decision makers for the American public. The "slam dunk" for the reader, is a better understanding of how the entire bureaucratic wheel (from the policy maker to the intelligence analyst) failed to serve the American public. The finger pointing, and blame game mentality, of the Bush Administration has left the brunt of the wave with the CIA - when in reality, the surf has touched all facets of the US government.

Contrary to what the book's back cover might have you believe, George Tenet does not use this book as a means to deflect criticism. Instead, he recaps his experience as DCI (1997-2004) in the most honest way that he can.

Tenet never criticizes President Bush (43) explicitly. At times, he paints him as a man with good intentions. However, through much of Part III, Tenet implies that the President delegated (and abdicated) too much authority to his staff. Tenet vilifies Douglas Feith (undersecretary of defense for policy (2001-2005)) for promoting war with Iraq in advance of adequate supporting intelligence. He places Feith as a man who wielded a disproportionate amount of influence in the White House. It is left as an exercise for the reader to consider why President Bush was so willing to accept Feith's ideas in lieu of other credible viewpoints.

As articulated in the `Afterword' [p. 490-491, 499], Tenet constantly reminds the reader of the CIA's role in government:

"Often, at best, only 60 percent of the facts regarding any national security issue are knowable... Intelligence alone should never drive the formulation of policy. Good intelligence is no substitute for common sense or curiosity on the part of policy makers in thinking through the consequences of their actions... Intelligence does not operate in a vacuum, but within a broader mandate of policies and governance."

Here are some other highlights of the book:

- The CIA told the White House that Iraq likely possessed WMD (Chapter 17), but it never established a link between Iraq and al-Qa'ida (p.307).

- "In Afghanistan, we had started from the ground up, allowing the various political groups to legitimize themselves, then building to a central, representational government. In Iraq, the process couldn't have been more different... We were in charge, and by God, we knew what was best." (p.439)

- "Although CIA came to take everything we heard from [Ahmed] Chalabi with a healthy dose of skepticism, others, such as the vice president, Paul Wolfowitz, and Doug Feith, welcomed his views." (p. 397)

- "On one of his trips to Iraq, Wolfowitz told our senior [CIA] man there, 'You don't understand the policy of the U.S. government, and if you don't understand the policy, you are hardly in a position to collect the intelligence to help that policy succeed.'" (p. 430)

- The CIA suggested ways that the United States could establish peace in Iraq, but these suggestions were ignored (Chapter 23 and p. 441, 446).

- Brent Scowcroft was the only administration official who expressed public disapproval of the White House's plan to go to war with Iraq (p. 315).

- After the attack on the USS Cole, the U.S. "...Didn't need any additional excuses to go after UBL or his organization. But simply firing more cruise missiles into the desert wasn't going to accomplish anything. [The U.S.] needed to get into the Afghan sanctuary." (p. 128-131)

- "For years, it had been obvious that without the cooperation of the Pakistanis, it would be almost impossible to root out al-Qa'ida... The Pakistanis always knew more than they were telling us, and they had been singularly uncooperative in helping us run these guys down." (p. 139)

- Al-Qa'ida planned to attack the New York City subway in the fall of 2003. The attack was cancelled during the last stages of preparation "for something better". (p.260-261)

- "When I was with King Hussein, I always felt that I was in the presence of wisdom and history... I've often wondered what impact his wisdom would have had in helping all of us avert the mess we find ourselves in today." (p.71-72)

At the Center of the Storm, by George Tenet, the Director of Central Intelligence from 1997 to 2004, describes his experiences in that role under the Clinton and Bush administrations along with his prior experience as Deputy DCI. As one might expect, there are elements of self-justification in Tenet's book. However, he does provide balance, taking the blame for some failures and offering credit to others for some successes. He also offers some interesting insights into recent events with a focus on three topics: (1) the quest for Israeli-Palestinian peace, (2) 9/11 and the Afghan War, and (3) Sadam, WMDs, and the Iraq War.

In his years as Deputy DCI, Tenet was thrust into a leading US official charged with facilitating the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, an unusual role for an intelligence official. A major part of his role was to help the Palestinians develop an effective security apparatus that would allow them to maintain some semblance of order in their territories and restrain Hamas and other violent elements from launching attacks on Israel. If these unlikely goals could be achieved, it might then have been possible to convince Israel to restrain its forces, another unlikely goal. Tenet met with some significant but temporary successes in this quest and summarizes the ultimate cause of failure in one word: Arafat.

Following 9/11, CIA was given the lead role in planning the war on terror, including the overthrow of the Taliban and destruction of al-Qa'ida in Afghanistan. The plan for the Afghan War was based on providing support to the Northern Alliance of Afghan tribes and building support in elements of the Pashtun tribe in the south. This plan provided a logical basis for a successor government by creating centers of power and influence among our Afghan supporters. A similar approach, using the indigenous population to provide the bulk military forces, was judged to be unworkable in Iraq due to Sadam's larger military forces and his eradication of opponents over his long years in power. Consequently, planning for Iraq was given to the US military which planned the war pretty effectively, but not the aftermath.

In the run-up to the Iraq war, Sadam was essentially bluffing when he refused to allow the UN inspectors full access to his alleged weapons programs. His bluff was aimed partly at the UN and US but also at any remaining Iraqi opponents and at Iran which he considered Iraq's primary enemy. His major mistake was in not appreciating that in the post-9/11 environment, the US and UK governments would take his bluff seriously. The facts appear to be that Sadam had lost any real WMD capability following the 1991 Gulf War. However, he had used chemical weapons against Iran and against the Iraqi Kurds and Shia in the 1980s, had developed missiles with ranges that exceeded those allowed by UN sanctions, and was judged to have the capability of producing operational WMDs within a year or two if sanctions were lifted. So, why didn't he just allow the UN inspectors free access, let them declare Iraq free of WMDs, and then ask that the sanctions be lifted, freeing him to resume WMD production? I guess we'll never know.

Following the military victory over Sadam's forces, Tenet cites two major policy blunders by the occupying forces that turned many Iraqis against the US. The first error was the de-Ba'athification policy, the removal from government positions of all members of Sadam's Ba'ath Party. As a one-party state under Sadam, many government employees had joined the party to further their careers rather than out of support for Sadam. Removing them from office simultaneously deprived Iraq of essential administrators and teachers and pushed a large body of the population into opposition to the US occupation. The second error was the disbanding of the entire Iraqi army rather than just the elite units that had been devoted to maintaining Sadam's rule. This mistake eliminated any effective Iraqi role in the initial pacification of the country and created yet another body of unemployed and hostile Iraqis with military training and weapons. (Caesar had shown the effective way to pacify the tribes in Gaul after his conquest was coopt as many as possible into the Roman army any let them fight any groups that still resisted conquest. [See my review of ASIN:0300120486 Caesar: Life of a Colossus by Adrian Goldsworthy.]

In what is probably the best Washington insider book of recent years, George Tenet documents the intelligence and policy screw-ups leading up to 9/11 and the invasion of iraq. The story has been told by others, but Tenet tells it especially well, spreading the blame widely for these awful fiascos, but accepting some himself.

The book is inadvertently revealing about the Tenet CIA's priorities and shortcomings. For instance, little mention is made of Russia and China and of the multiple challenges that these countries' emergent economic and military strength poses to U, S global leadership. Tenet stresses that CIA recruitment was expanded and democratized during his tenure, but intelligncee is not a numbers game--CIA doesn't need more analysts and spies as much as it needs smarter ones. The CIA and the intelligence community generally are consumed with short- range problems and success targets, while sometimes missing the bigger picture. On this latter point, Tenet portrays Afghanistan as a CIA success story, but modern-day Afghanisttan is a catastrophe in the making--comprising a patchwork of narco-principalities, a resurgent narco-funded Taliban and a government that can't exercise its writ much beyond Kabul. Of course, Tenet's CIA was a product of the times--an obsessive national focus on terrorism---but the Agency needs now to recalibrate its priorities and move on.