Tenet and Pavitt

I spent the day instead of reading theories online watching TV news coverage of Tenet's resignation. It seemed to me, oddly, that a lot of people on both sides of the fence had a lot of nice things to say about him. And his speech, when he mentioned his son, was very nice as well.

I've been asking everyone I know what they think about it, and most of them, well perhaps not well steeped in policy and politics, think there is something more going on. And that tends to make me less skeptical that there really is, for some reason.

I think the guy felt hamstrung by the Bush administration for a while now. Take this excerpt from a New York Times article.

At the core of the criticism of Mr. Tenet — and by extension Mr. Bush — are two central arguments. One is that Mr. Tenet failed to exercise the proper skepticism about what capabilities Saddam Hussein had in hand. But the second, perhaps more damaging one, is that he acquiesced to a White House that wanted a certain type of evidence about Iraq and was surprisingly less concerned about evidence that North Korea and Iran were making far more progress toward nuclear weapons than Mr. Hussein was.

On the first issue, there is little question that at times, Mr. Tenet was a restraining influence on a White House that often seemed inclined to turn tips into facts, and theories into evidence.

In the fall of 2002 he called Mr. Bush's deputy national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, to warn that Mr. Bush could not state in a forthcoming speech that Mr. Hussein had tried to purchase uranium in Africa. He succeeded in having that sentence struck. But it re-emerged in the president's 2003 State of the Union speech. After Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, told reporters that Mr. Tenet had never read the State of the Union script, Mr. Tenet had to take much of the blame for what became the first of a series of Iraq-related embarrassments.

He tells the president not to use the uranium thing. Bush at first agrees. Then without Tenet's knowledge, it ends up in the State of the Union. Then Tenet is left to take the blame for it.

This is a cribbed version of the Juan Cole article I linked below. I will pause while you go read it.

As far as the whole slam dunk thing goes, how many times does a boss or a supervisor tell you "that's not what we are looking for" before you expressly give them what they are looking for. While Tenet probably should not have fallen prey to this ideology, I think he did. And now he has seen what it cost him. Even Powell, one of his better friends in the White House has questioned why he was hung out to dry in front of the UN. And I think that from a friend would hurt even more.

Another reason I think he left was got tired of the work. The man has twice submitted his resignation to Bush since 2001, and been rejected both times. I take that as a sign he has been ready to go for a while. Seven years in the second longest tenure in CIA history, and even still he says it would be at least five more years before things were at the level they should be. And the place was still poorly funded and short on agents, although getting better.

Surely this supposed "firestorm of reports" that will rain down on him and his failures will sting. But that will be true even if he is not working for the CIA.

So I guess that's not the nothing I initially said, but something. I don't think he was "pushed out by Bush," and if he was, what does he gain by not coming out and saying that's what happened?

Of course, I came to this conclusion before Deputy director for operations James Pavitt announced his resignation as I began to type. Supposedly this was a planned resignation, which is odd in context of this quote from a May 12th news article:

Pavitt says, "I'm not going to succeed against terrorism unless I recruit terrorists. I'm not going to succeed in terms of the tough issues in this business unless I'm right in the middle of it."

Sounds like he still has a lot of fight in him as of a month ago.

So with this announcement, I think that Bush knew he was going to have to shake things up in the CIA to turn down the heat as he campaigns. He's let some folks know changes are coming, and when they do, a few jobs will be gone. So you can leave now with dignity, or get dragged down publicly for the sake of the campaign. But it's just the latest in a series of hunches. Until the book comes out, only two people will know for sure.