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Consummate "Team Player"
Two decades later, "team player" George Tenet (the team being George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld) stood this on its head. Nary a nose did timid, incurious George put out of joint.
But Tenet, who had mastered the skills of serving his "principal" as a staff aide to Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman David Boren, was so well-liked in Washington that even the 9/11 Commission was reluctant to offer pointed criticism of his gross misfeasance in his community role.
(At one hearing, commissioner Jamie Gorelick fawned over Tenet, noting with admiring wonderment what she said especially distinguished him; namely, that everyone in the Establishment simply called him "George," and all automatically knew to whom they were referring. Amazing!)
Instead of affixing blame for 9/11, co-chair Lee Hamilton, Gorelick and others kept wringing their hands, complaining, "no one was in charge of the intelligence community." True enough, but that was by no means solely due to the structural anomaly that gave the DCI responsibility for managing both the agency and the entire intelligence community.
It had much more to do with Tenet's
reluctance to give the needed time and attention to the rest of the
community and make it work together. George preferred to direct
his gaze upward, showing the bureaucratic skills he had learned as a
Capitol Hill aide, ingratiating himself with the powerful and never
putting them--or himself--in an uncomfortable situation.
You don't insinuate yourself into top jobs in Washington, or get to
stay in them, by knocking important noses out of joint, no matter how
badly such disfigurement is needed. No one ever needed plastic surgery
after an encounter with George Tenet.
On July 22, 2004, the day the 9/11 report was released, I had been asked to comment on it immediately at the BBC's studio in Washington. After expressing amazement at the report's bizarre bottom line, that the calamity seemed to be no one's fault, I emerged from the studio and promptly bumped into two commissioners, Jamie Gorelick and Slade Gorton. They had been waiting on deck in the outer room.
Gorelick went in first; I thought to myself, now's your chance, McGovern. I approached Gorton and said that I was bothered by the report's mantra that no one is in charge of the intelligence community and the commission's misguided notion that a new DNI superstructure should be placed atop it.
I said that I was sure he was aware that, by statute, Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet is supposed to be in charge of the community and to ensure that all agencies coordinate and cooperate. Gorton put his arm around me, as senior ex-senators are wont to do, and in an avuncular voice (as if explaining something pretty basic to a freshman), said: "Yes, of course I know that, Ray. But Tenet would not do it."
My follow-up question was to be: So you all are advocating an entirely new superstructure just because George Tenet "would not do it?" Unfortunately, the door opened, Gorelick walked out and Gorton escaped into the studio.
The year 2004 was an election year and, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and the commission report, members of Congress wished to be seen as doing something -- anything. So, they moved to enact many of the 9/11 Commission's "reforms."
By then, the CIA and the just-resigned Tenet had been completely discredited, not only for failures prior to 9/11 but also for the unconscionable cooking of intelligence to justify war on Iraq.
Yet, instead of focusing on individual responsibility for 9/11 and the politicization of the CIA's analytical division what might be called cultural failures Congress found it easier to diagram a new bureaucracy.
Protests from intelligence professionals were seen as self-serving. So, we got a new Director of National Intelligence ostensibly to preside over the whole enchilada, but WITHOUT the kind of authority and support Carter gave Turner.
Admirals and Admirals
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