Out Of The Line Of Fire

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But Bush and Tenet also reinforced each other's shortcomings: Tenet, the overeager underling, played into Bush's need for clarity. Before going to the CIA as deputy director in 1995, Tenet had been head staff member of the same Senate Intelligence Committee that is about to issue that blistering report on his skills. There he became a specialist in two things: arms negotiations and the importance of pleasing his powerful superiors. Meanwhile, Bush, new to the complex world of intelligence, where there are always gambles but rarely unqualified answers, looked to Tenet as a guide.

It was President Clinton who brought Tenet to the CIA. When Tenet arrived, the agency was adrift. The years right after the collapse of the Soviet Union had been hard ones. With no clear adversary any longer, the CIA suffered massive budget cuts and a sharp downturn in recruitment of spies, infiltrators and informants. "When [Tenet] came in, there were literally just a handful of people being trained in clandestine service," says a senior CIA official. "Funding levels were untenable; we didn't have the support necessary for our analysts."

Tenet turned the mood around. Within the directorate of operations, which oversees human intelligence, he brought back an esprit de corps and a modicum of the adventurousness that is necessary to get useful information. "He has, through the force of his personality, boosted morale," says Steven Aftergood, a secrecy expert at the Federation of American Scientists.

At the same time, the threats the CIA faced had changed radically. The Soviet Union, its old adversary, was monolithic and dependent on conventional weaponry. Al-Qaeda was stateless and fluid, taking on expensive, high-tech American defenses with homemade devices and fanaticism. When it came to counting missile silos in Siberia, the CIA was first rate. It was far less adept at getting inside the operations, let alone the minds, of poor, isolated religious zealots around the world.

Tenet saw the danger of transnational terrorism earlier than most and established operations in Afghanistan and around the world that would make possible the post-9/11 success against al-Qaeda. In the hours after the attack, Tenet created key elements of the novel and successful plan that married CIA officers and agents on the ground in Afghanistan with special-forces soldiers and the Northern Alliance. "There's no question the CIA, as a result of prior experience there, brought a lot of knowledge not just to me, but to the whole war council early on," said Bush in late 2001 in an interview with TIME. "They were very impressive: impressive in their briefing; impressive in their knowledge."

All the same, things changed with the CIA's handling of prewar intelligence in Iraq. At the time, Tenet was constantly defending his agency against attacks by Defense Department hawks like Douglas Feith, a Pentagon under secretary who established a small operation that re-examined intelligence reports, some of them from the now discredited Iraqi exile leader Ahmad Chalabi, a Pentagon favorite whom the CIA deeply distrusted. Feith's purpose was to look more aggressively for any sign of links between Saddam and al-Qaeda.

That was a connection that Tenet never ceased to doubt. He was stunned to discover later that without his knowledge, Feith's group had briefed senior aides in the National Security Council and Vice President Dick Cheney's office, all the while disparaging the quality of CIA intelligence and analysis. But when it came to WMD, Tenet felt comfortable offering assessments to Bush that were more incriminating for Saddam. (So comfortable that before the war Tenet even made a closed-door appearance before the Senate Intelligence Committee in which he was asked if he would stake his life on the existence of WMD in Iraq. According to a U.S. official familiar with the matter, he said he would.) It was the CIA that provided the information that two trailers found in Iraq were probably mobile biological-weapons laboratories and that aluminum tubes discovered there were likely to have been centrifuges for enriching uranium. Both claims found their way into Colin Powell's February 2003 presentation before the United Nations of the intelligence case against Iraq. One year later, in a speech at Georgetown University, Tenet admitted to doubts on both claims.