The director of the CIA, George Tenet, resigned abruptly on Thursday after months of intense criticism for intelligence failures in the run-up to the September 11 attacks and the invasion of Iraq.
Tenet cited personal reasons for stepping down. President George Bush said he had accepted Tenet’s decision with regret.
However, the CIA director’s departure, after seven years on the job, will help direct fire away from the White House just over a month before a national inquiry into September 11 publishes its report, which is expected to be highly critical of the CIA. Other commissions are investigating why the US accepted bogus intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Some observers on Thursday described Tenet as a convenient scapegoat for administration hawks.
Tenet insisted that his decision had nothing to do with politics.
”This is the most difficult decision I’ve ever had to make,” he said on Thursday, in an emotional farewell speech to CIA workers at its headquarters in Langley, Virginia. ”And while Washington and the media will put many different faces on the decision, it was a personal decision and had only one basis in fact: the well-being of my wonderful family, nothing more and nothing less.”
Tenet broke down as he pointed to his teenage son in the audience. ”You have just been a great son, and I’m now going to be a great dad,” he said.
The resignation was first announced on the White House lawn by President Bush, who said Tenet had informed him of the decision the night before. White House officials insisted it had come as a complete surprise. ”I told him I’m sorry he’s leaving. He’s done a superb job on behalf of the American people,” Bush said. ”George Tenet is the kind of public servant you like to work with. He’s strong. He’s resolute. He has been a strong and able leader at the agency. He’s been a strong leader in the war on terror. And I will miss him.”
The president said that Tenet would stay on until mid-July and then his deputy, John McLaughlin, would take over as acting director.
Tenet’s departure went mostly unlamented in Congress where he had few supporters. Trent Lott, a senior Republican, said: ”I do view it as an opportunity to look for some new blood at the head of the CIA and to look at some improvements or some reforms in the intelligence community.”
Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, did not quarrel with the resignation, but questioned its timing.
”We’re within a few months of a presidential election. We’re in the middle of a major alert with respect to the anticipation that there might be another attack on our own country” Senator Feinstein said. ”And to have the head of the intelligence community resign at this particular point in time is very unusual.”
”I was surprised by the timing, but I was not surprised by the action,” said Vincent Cannistraro, a former head of CIA’s counterterrorist arm. ”He’s got some health problems and there is no prospect of this relentless job easing up. We all knew he wanted to leave on a high note but there’s not going to be a high note.”
Tenet has been bitterly criticised for the CIA’s failure to prevent the September 11 attacks. Two of the hijackers had been under CIA surveillance and then lost. The September 11 commission report, due to be delivered by the end of July, is likely to include a litany of intelligence lapses.
Other congressional committees are examining why false intelligence claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, many made by Iraqi defectors, found their way into the official national intelligence estimate in 2002, and into the president’s 2003 state of the union address, putting the case for invasion of Iraq. Tenet took responsibility for both documents. Stansfield Turner, a former CIA director, told CNN: ”I think he’s being pushed out and made a scapegoat. I think the president needed to have someone to blame and he’s doing it indirectly by asking Tenet to leave. I don’t think he would pull the plug on the president in the middle of an election cycle, without being asked by the president to do that.”
Tenet leaves in the midst of a bitter battle within the administration over responsibility for twin intelligence debacles of September 11 and Iraq.
In 2001, the Pentagon set up its own intelligence collection unit that bypassed the CIA and channelled intelligence direct to the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, much of it provided by the Iraqi National Congress, despite CIA warnings that the INC and its leader, Ahmad Chalabi, were unreliable. The CIA has accused Chalabi of tipping off Iranian intelligence that the US had broken its codes and was eavesdropping on its communications. On the request of the CIA, the FBI has begun an investigation to find who passed the secrets to Chalabi, and was on Thursday reported to be carrying out lie detector tests on senior civilian officials at the Pentagon.
Tenet, the second longest serving director of central intelligence, yesterday rebuffed criticism of the CIA. ”The Central Intelligence Agency and the American intelligence community are stronger now than they were when I became DCI seven years ago, and they will be stronger tomorrow than they are today,” he said in a speech repeatedly interrupted by sustained applause.
”We’re not perfect, but one of our best-kept secrets is that we are very, very, very good.” – Guardian Unlimited Â