IT'S THE INSTITUTION:

It`s About Time: The Tenet resignation should come as a relief. (Frank J. Gaffney Jr., 6/04/04, FrontPage)

While George Tenet's political obituaries are full of shortcomings with which he can fairly be associated, four should long ago have been regarded as firing offenses:

1) The failure to change the CIA and intelligence community "culture" that has long deprecated the value of human intelligence. Such change requires not simply talking about it and adding funding, both of which Tenet (and, to varying degrees, his predecessors) did. It also requires an ability forcefully and credibly to shake things up, to challenge assumptions and to monitor and insist upon performance, even where that might erode one's popularity with subordinates. The extent of the shortfall in these areas to date can be gleaned from private comments by knowledgeable officials to the effect that the penetrations of target groups and various hostile intelligence services have declined precipitously during the Tenet years. [...]

2) The failure to comprehend the true character of American interests in Iraq. Going back to the early 1990s, the CIA's view was like that of its clients elsewhere in the Arab world: Democratizing Iraq was to be resisted at every turn. The Agency favored simply replacing Saddam Hussein with another tyrannical dictator, in the interest of promoting local and regional "stability." The virulent and ongoing effort to discredit Ahmed Chalabi springs forth from the systematic hostility George Tenet fostered, or at least tolerated, towards Free Iraq.

3) The tendency until fairly recently, to underestimate the danger posed by the radical subset of the Muslim faith known as Islamism. Once the artificial "Wall" that impeded information-sharing between U.S. intelligence and law enforcement was finally removed after 9/11 by the Patriot Act, it became easier to facilitate such "dot-connecting." (The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence will reportedly publish shortly a report that harshly criticizes Tenet for his failure to have done more to facilitate such info flows before the Fall of 2001. This incoming salvo is widely reported to have influenced the decision for Tenet to resign, voluntarily or involuntarily, at this particular juncture.)

Still, even now, Tenet's CIA is steadily resisting efforts to establish the connections between nominally secular organizations and rogue state regimes (notably, Saddam Hussein's Iraq) on the one hand, and, on the other, Islamist terrorist groups operating in Iraq. We simply can no longer afford such myopia.

4) An uncorrected institutional blind-spot about proliferation. Born in part, it appears, of an excessive CIA confidence in the effectiveness of various arms control regimes, George Tenet's agency had shown itself to have missed evidence of WMD-related developments in North Korea, India, Pakistan, Iran and the PRC. Given, in particular, the importance candidate Bush properly placed on ending America's vulnerability to missile-delivered WMDs, it should have been obvious that a new DCI was in order.

Number one is wrong--it's the spy novel version of intelligence gathering, when the better model for a CIA agent would be Robert Redford in Three Days of the Condor, a careful reader. But the other three are right.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 5, 2004 9:19 AM