Out Of The Line Of Fire

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On the first floor of CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., below the seventh-floor office of Director George Tenet, there is a hallway lined with signed photo-graphs of all the Presidents who have served since the agency was established in 1947. The inscription from the first of them, Harry Truman, says it all: TO THE CIA, A NECESSITY TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, FROM ONE WHO KNOWS.

More than a half-century later, George W. Bush could sign a picture to the CIA with practically the same sentiment. In the world after 9/11, in which intelligence has an importance like never before, so does the CIA, and not just to the President. Nothing proved its significance like the invasion of Iraq, the first time the U.S. has gone to war largely on the basis of intelligence alone--much of it faulty, flimsy or grossly misread.

For months now the failures of U.S. intelligence have been at center stage as Congress has raked through the missteps that led to 9/11 and the misevaluation of intelligence on weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq. With Tenet and his CIA at or near the focus of every inquiry, most of Washington assumed that he would be out of a job after the election--but not before. Tenet took Washington by surprise last week. On Wednesday night, after conferring with White House chief of staff Andrew Card, he spent 45 minutes alone with Bush in the White House family quarters. What he brought to the President was his letter of resignation, effective July 11, his seventh anniversary as director.

White House officials insisted that they had no advance warning of Tenet's departure and had not pushed him out. "This was obviously not expected," said a senior Administration official. "The President was sorry to hear the news, but it was very clear that [Tenet] had made the decision." Friends say Tenet wanted to leave months ago but opted to wait until the 9/11 commission and the Senate Intelligence Committee looking into prewar intelligence had ended hearings. "I was the guy who was here for it all," he told them. "I thought it was my responsibility [to stay]."

In a tearful farewell address at CIA headquarters the next day, Tenet said the only reason he was leaving was to spend more time with his family. But no one was unaware of the reports from those two panels, both coming in the next few months, that are expected to skewer Tenet and the CIA. "Scathing" is how Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana, a member of the intelligence committee, describes its still classified draft report, although he refused to give any details. "It's going to say there were some real lapses."