That may not be possible. For Washington’s Great Survivor, the flak has never been heavier. Tenet has managed to survive the CIA’s failure to predict the 1998 Indian nuclear tests, the rocky transition from Bill Clinton to George W. Bush and two of the most disastrous dropped balls in CIA history: 9/11 and Iraq’s WMD program. But the cumulative toll of the recent 9/11 commission hearings may be more than Tenet can finesse. “I love George,” says a former senior counterterrorism official, “but of all the people who could have influenced [readiness for 9/11], he could have.” A White House official says there’s no talk of forcing Tenet out, not by this stubbornly loyal president. But few expect that Tenet will be around for a Bush II.
His job may not be around, either. The 9/11 commission criticized Tenet for confining himself to his own “stovepipe,” the CIA, even though, nominally, he’s head of the entire 15-agency intelligence community. But many intel experts say that’s unfair: Tenet has no budgeting or supervisory authority over other agencies. And now, in the wake of the 9/11 hearings, both the White House and Congress may get serious about reforming the nation’s intelligence apparatus. What’s needed, experts say, is a version of the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act, which created a strong Joint Chiefs chairman.
Administration officials are taking a fresh look at a plan by former national-security adviser Brent Scowcroft, the head of Bush’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, to pull many of these agencies under the command of a superpowerful director of National Intelligence. From the Democratic side, Rep. Jane Harman, ranking member of the Select Committee on Intelligence, has proposed a less dramatic–and more feasible–plan to leave the agencies intact but create a cabinet-level director who would have budgeting and “tasking” powers to direct them. “We have tried to learn the lessons of the Homeland Security Department,” says Harman, referring to the nightmarish task of creating a new bureaucracy.
But all this will take time–Tenet said during the hearings it will take the CIA five more years to reorient its current structure–and the political season is peaking, which means not much will get done anytime soon. “Now may be the time to revamp and reform our intelligence services,” Bush said last week. Why not two and a half years ago, after 9/11? Because intel reform has finally become a “hot” issue. And that means it could be time for George Tenet to get out of the kitchen.
