George Tenet: "The Man And his Legacy - and a Look at his New Book"
By Antonis Diamataris
Special to The National Herald

George Tenet, the former Director of the CIA, makes no secret of his Greek background. He is so proud of it, in fact, that he refers to his being Greek at least five times in his new best-selling book, “At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA,” which was just released.
To his credit, perhaps no other Greek American who has acquired so much power and responsibility has proclaimed his ethnic heritage to the world as has Mr. Tenet, and perhaps no other Greek American with Mr. Tenet’s level of achievement would mistakenly call the Middle East “the cradle of civilization” instead of ancient Greece.


Sometimes, Mr. Tenet would use his Greek origin as way to make friends – like the time at the house of the “Greek Orthodox Archbishop” in Bethlehem, where he “sat next to Arafat. After dinner I happened to mention that I was Greek Orthodox, and with that news Arafat warmed up even more. Apparently he had some affinity for the Greeks.”
Tenet has an extraordinary amount of appreciation for his family, and he shows it. In his book, he is displaying a great and justifiable sense of reverence and indebtedness towards his parents: “Only in the United States of America the son of immigrants be given such a privilege. I will always be grateful that John and Evangelia Tenet, who left their villages in Greece to give me that chance… Even though I have met scores of presidents, kings, queens, emirs and potentates, the two people I still admire most are my mom and dad.”
Mr. Tenet is proud, even if somehow burdened by his humble beginnings: “Growing up in the New York City borough of Queens, the son of working-class immigrants, I never would have imagined I would find myself in such a position.”
His father “managed to do what so many Greek immigrants did: He opened a diner, the Twentieth Century Diner… When things got tough, my brother Bill would always say, just think about what the old man would do.”
To this writer, as well as to the thousands of Greek Americans who will be reading this book – and they should – we can definitely identify with Yiorgo when he talks about his upbringing and his family. We sense that, deep down, he is one of us.

Yet when he enters one of the most dramatic scene’s in the history of the Greeks in America – one which might well characterize the extraordinary heights the community reached during this period of our history – the day at the United Nations when then Secretary of State Colin Powel made the case for going to war against Saddam Hussein, interestingly enough, he fails to mention the obvious: that on the one side of Mr. Powell sat Mr. Tenet, and on the other sat John Negroponte, another Greek American, then the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., and now Deputy Secretary of State, the highest-ranking Greek American in the State Department. Surely it could no have escape him the obvious conclusion that the Greeks in the service of the Bush administration provided cover to the less than truthful statements made by Secretary of States. As for Mr. Negroponte, his position demanded that he sit next to his boss when Mr. Powell was speaking, and he bore no responsibility for the accuracy of the intelligence information Mr. Powell presented his speech.

For Mr. Tenet, however, it was an entirely different story – and a pretty unusual one.
Perhaps never before had the sitting Director of the CIA, by his sheer presence in public – at the U.N., no less – personally and institutionally certify the facts presented to the world by a Cabinet member upon which the case was built for going to war against a third-world country.
Realizing the weight of his actions, Tenet unapologetically, and in personal rather than institutional terms, explains how he found himself sitting right behind Mr. Powell at the U.N.:
“Late in the process, Colin asked me to sit behind him at the U.N. That was about the last place I wanted to be… but Powel and his deputy, Rich Armitage, were two of my closest colleagues in the Administration… Walking into the U.N. General Assembly on the morning of February 5, 2003 was a surreal moment for me. I sat next to John Negroponte…”

The problem was that, even though Mr. Powel gave “an extraordinary performance,” as Mr. Tenet describes it, much of the information presented to the U.N. and the world for going to war, information provided by the CIA, was “flawed… No one involved regrets that more than I do.”
And to think that we published that picture at the U.N., with two Greek Americans sitting directly behind the U.S. Secretary of State, on the top of our front page with such pride.
George Tenet, naturally, did not write his book to declare his pride in being Greek. That, to his eternal credit, came as a result of describing who he is.
Mr. Tenet wrote the book in an attempt to set the record straight, or at least to tell his side of the story. He feels wronged by those he trusted, and gave them his best. He feels betrayed. He is a wounded man. So he wrote a book demanding to restore his good name. He declares he is prepared to carry the entire burden, which he knows to be his for both the 9/11 attacks as well as the war in Iraq, on his shoulders. But he does not want to allow the blue-blooded children of non-immigrants to ruin his reputation for things he is argues he was not responsible for.

When it become painfully obvious that his job as the head of the CIA was coming to the end, Mr. Tenet went to the Jersey shore, by himself, to try and make sense of what was happening. From there, he phoned a man he trusted, Andrew Card, the White House Chief of Staff at the time: “Andy, I’m calling to tell you that I’m really angry… We were fairly strident about the fact that we believed Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. But what you guys have gone and done is make me look stupid, and I just want to tell you how furious I am about it. For someone in the Administration to now hang this around my neck is about the most despicable thing I have ever seen in my life.”
What they had hung around his neck was the infamous jock expression, “slam-dunk.”
During a meeting in the Oval Office in December 2002, the celebrated reporter of Watergate era fame, Bob Woodward, reported in his book, “Plan of Attack,” that Mr. Tenet had assured the President the case for Saddam having weapons of mass destruction at his disposal was a “slam-dunk.”

“Many people believe today that my use of the phrase, ‘slam-dunk,’ was the seminal moment for steeling the President’s determination to remove Saddam Hussein, and to launch the Iraq war. It certainly makes for a memorable sound bite, but it is belied by the facts… That decision had already been made,” Mr. tenet writes in chapter 19.
And he makes a convincing presentation of facts to prove that the “slam-dunk” phrase, beyond its “marketing” value to the Administration, played no role in Mr. Bush’s decision to launch the war.
Mr. Tenet makes it very clear that he wrote the book to refute those two words, in fact: “I was asked during that December 2002 meeting if we didn’t have better information to add to the debate, and I said I was sure we did… If I had simply said ‘I am sure we can do better,’ I would not be writing this chapter – or maybe even this book šnstead, I told them ‘slam dunk,’ a phrase that was later taken completely out of context and has haunted me ever since it first appeared in Bob Woodward’s book.”

A natural question to ask is, who leaked that phrase to the reporter? If Mr. Tenet knows, he doesn’t say. Judging by the jabs he takes at Vice President Cheney or then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, one is left with the distinct impression that they are his top suspects. But who can tell for certain? The only definitely conclusion Mr. Tenet draws is that “there are no private conversations, even in the Oval Office.”

Still, George Tenet is the ultimate stand-up guy who, no matter how much he is hurting, he protects his boss, the President of the United States: “In a way, President Bush and I are a lot alike. We sometimes say things from the gut, whether it’s his ‘bring ’em on’ or my ‘slam-dunk.’ I think he gets that about me, just as I get that about him. What’s more, I think each of us regularly factored that into his understanding of what the other was saying.”
And to make certain that this point was not missed by anyone, particularly by the President, Mr. Tenet writes on page 480, “I like the President, plain and simple. We had were bound together after 9/11 by a national trauma and a common purpose.”
But there is another reason, a very personal and powerful one, why Mr. Tenet likes Mr. Bush: Because of the loving, caring manner the President demonstrated towards the former CIA Director’s beloved son, John Michael.

When Mr. Tenet told his son about his decision to resign from his post, he said, “He was the main reason I was stepping down. I had missed too many good times with him.”
Upon hearing it, his son “expressed the fear that the President would be mad at him for causing my departure.” Mr. Tenet told the President that story, and Mr. Bush called John Michael from Air Force One “to assure him that he was not mad at him… That wasn’t the first time George Bush had gone the extra mile for my son… Back in February 2004… I had told the President that John Michael was having an especially rough time watching me get pummeled, and the President invited him down to the White House for a chat. John Michael never told us about the conversation, but he came home feeling a lot better about life.”

To a Greek father like George Tenet, the value of what President Bush did, and the gratitude he earned by taking the time to attend to his son’s issues, should not be underestimated.
Perhaps the most important chapter of the book is the last one, the one with the unfortunate title, “Afterthought.” It should be called the “Tenet’s Tenets.”
He points out that there are limits to power, even for the world’s only superpower, “there are some mountains too high for it to climb,” and that “military might alone can not solve the endemic political and social problems of other nations.”

As to how the war in Iraq is going , he gives one of the most pessimistic appraisals, so far: “,My fear is that sectarian violence in Iraq has taken on a life of its own and that U.S forces are becoming more and more irrelevant to the management of that violence.”
But where his assessment is downright scary is when he cites the possibility of a terrorist nuclear attack: “Terrorism is the stuff of everyday nightmares. But the added specter of a nuclear-capable terrorist group is something that, more than anything else, causes me sleepless nights.”
Intelligence has established, beyond any reasonable doubt that al Quaeda’s intent is to do precisely that, he adds. “There is an abundance of nuclear material in the world, some of which may already be within reach of terrorist groups.” Not a particularly reassuring thought.
Finally, after all is said and done, how is history going to remember George Tenet, the first Greek American Director of the CIA?

In his book, “State of War,” New York Times Reporter James Risen writes, “No other institution failed in its mission as completely during the Bush years as did the CIA.”
This might very well be an exaggeration. But the fact remains that, personal considerations aside, under George Tenet’s watch, the CIA failed to foil the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and failed to fully understand Saddam’s bluff, thus believing that the Iraqi dictator possessed WMD. And this assumption – “I believed he had WMD, and said so,” Mr. Tenet writes – provided the pretext for going to war in Iraq.

George Tenet, a personable, energetic man who reached the highest echelons of power and responsibility, obviously tried to serve the country the best he could, and that should be recognized. But judging from the facts, his best simply, and unfortunately, was not good enough. And that will continue to follow him, as it will follow our community, however unspoken the stigma might be.