Out Of The Line Of Fire

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In intelligence circles the betting is that Bush will avoid tackling a contentious restructuring during an election year. But the Pentagon, CIA and FBI are positioning themselves to hold onto as much turf as they can in whatever reorganization may come after November. Toward that end, Rumsfeld named Stephen Cambone last year to the newly created post of Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence. And on the same day that Bush announced Tenet's resignation, FBI Director Robert Mueller announced the creation of a directorate of intelligence within the bureau to better co-ordinate its intelligence activities.

That Tenet survived in his job so long is testimony to his combination of people skills and peerless political instincts. The son of Greek immigrants who owned a diner in Queens, N.Y., Tenet is a gruff, backslapping master of Washington, a man famously prone to chew an unlit cigar in meetings and schmooze with underlings at headquarters. Adept at defusing tense moments with a wisecrack, he knows how to keep both his employees and his bosses happy.

And that's what he did with his boss in the White House. From their earliest encounters, Tenet and Bush hit it off. Bush liked Tenet's unpretentious style and his gift for breaking down complex matters into digestible morsels of information. And while Tenet had difficulty getting face time with President Clinton, he presented Bush with an early-morning security briefing daily.

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.