June 4, 2004
INTELLIGENCE
Tenet Resigns as C.I.A. Director; 3 Harsh Reports on Agency Due
By ELISABETH BUMILLER and DOUGLAS JEHL

WASHINGTON, June 3 - George J. Tenet, the besieged director of central
intelligence who presided over a major expansion of American spy agencies
but also critical intelligence failures, abruptly resigned Thursday.

Both Mr. Tenet and President Bush said the resignation was for personal
reasons. But current and former intelligence officials noted that Mr. Tenet
was anticipating heavy criticism from three reports expected to assail the
agency either over its failure to detect the Sept. 11, 2001, terror plot or
the assessments that Iraq possessed unconventional weapons before the
American invasion last year.

Most damaging among them is a Senate Intelligence Committee report, due this
month, which is expected to single out errors made by the agency in its
prewar judgments.

Some Republican senators, including Pat Roberts of Kansas, the chairman of
the Senate Intelligence Committee, signaled to the administration in the
past two weeks that the report's conclusions would be so critical that it
would raise questions about who should be held accountable, an official
said. Another official said the highly critical nature of the report was
widely known at the White House.

Mr. Tenet is to be replaced by his deputy, John McLaughlin, who will serve
as acting director. Mr. Bush is unlikely to nominate a permanent successor
before the November election, Republicans said, because a confirmation
battle this summer would attract more attention to the agency's assessments
of Saddam Hussein's weapons.

In another resignation at the C.I.A., a senior intelligence official said
Thursday evening that James Pavitt, the head of the agency's clandestine
service, is to announce Friday that he is retiring. The retirement of Mr.
Pavitt, a C.I.A. veteran whose current title is deputy director of
operations, had been planned for some time and had nothing to do with Mr.
Tenet's resignation, the agency official said.

Mr. Bush, who had kept up a close bond with his C.I.A. chief through two
wars, unrelenting intelligence crises and internecine feuding, announced Mr.
Tenet's resignation in a two-minute statement late Thursday morning on the
South Lawn of the White House. Moments later, the president departed for a
trip to Europe.

"I met with George last night in the White House," Mr. Bush said. "I had a
good visit with him. He told me he was resigning for personal reasons. I
told him I'm sorry he's leaving. He's done a superb job on behalf of the
American people."

Mr. Tenet, in teary remarks to C.I.A. employees at the agency's headquarters
in Langley, Va., later in the morning, called his resignation "the most
difficult decision I have ever had to make" and added that it was for "the
well-being of my wonderful family."

Richard Kerr, a friend of Mr. Tenet's and a former deputy director of
central intelligence, said: "He may have believed that he was hurting the
president. He's an honorable person, and he may have had that as a
consideration."

The two other reports expected soon are from an independent commission
investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, due in late July, and from Mr. Tenet's
own weapons hunter in Iraq, Charles Duelfer, who is expected to issue a
progress report sometime this summer.

Mr. Tenet said he would step down on July 11, the seventh anniversary of his
taking charge, making him the second-longest serving director of central
intelligence, behind only Allen W. Dulles, who served eight years and nine
months in the 1950's and 60's. Mr. Tenet, a wily, highly political
Washington survivor and one of the few holdovers from the Clinton era to
serve in a senior position in the Bush administration, had made clear for
several years that he was eager to move on.

A number of Mr. Tenet's friends said that despite the looming critical
reports, the intelligence director was stepping down for the family reasons
he cited and because he was worn out from the relentless pressures of his
job since the attacks of Sept. 11. Under Mr. Tenet, the C.I.A. has been the
subject of blistering critiques for what its detractors have called the two
worst intelligence failures of the last 50 years: not anticipating Sept. 11
and exaggerating the threat of Iraq's unconventional weapons.

"If criticism either actual or anticipated was a factor, he would have left
a long time ago," said David Boren, the former Democratic senator from
Oklahoma and a mentor to Mr. Tenet who talked to the director on Thursday
afternoon. "It's been months of his desiring to leave."

Mr. Tenet had talked so often of leaving, friends said, that last December
Mr. Bush personally asked him to stay. Mr. Bush even appealed to Mr. Tenet's
wife, Stephanie Glakas-Tenet, telling her that her husband's service was
important to the country.

But last weekend, a person familiar with Mr. Tenet's thinking said, the
intelligence chief decided during discussions with his wife and
high-school-age son that he really was stepping down.

He informed the president in the family quarters of the White House on
Wednesday night, when the two men met alone for an hour. Mr. Bush asked Mr.
Tenet to stay through the end of the year, the person said, but Mr. Tenet
responded that summer was a natural break point and a good time to depart.

The person familiar with Mr. Tenet's thinking insisted that his leaving was
not prompted by the coming reports, and that he waited until all the recent
hearings on Iraq and Sept. 11 were completed before reopening the question
of when he should exit. Mr. Tenet does not deny, the person said, that his
relationships with some senior White House advisers have soured, but he
likes to say that "there's only one relationship that matters" - the one
with the president.

Mr. McLaughlin, a 32-year veteran of the C.I.A., is unlikely to have as
chummy a rapport with the president as did Mr. Tenet, who started most
mornings in the Oval Office in Mr. Bush's intelligence briefings. Off duty,
Mr. Bush and Mr. Tenet had a boisterous relationship, marked by a fondness
for sports and what Senator Bob Graham, Democrat of Florida and the former
chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, referred to as "male talk."

But Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill said that as the
criticism over the failure to find unconventional weapons in Iraq mounted,
Mr. Tenet was increasingly seen as a political liability for the president,
who is facing a tough re-election campaign.

For all of Mr. Bush's closeness to Mr. Tenet, Republicans noted that the
president spent only a few minutes praising the man who had been at his side
throughout the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Vice President Dick Cheney
issued a statement saying that he believed Mr. Tenet had done "a superb
job," but it was only three sentences long.

"I don't think there are any tears over there," said Senator Richard Shelby,
Republican of Alabama, a frequent critic of Mr. Tenet.

Mr. Graham, the former Democratic chairman of the Senate Intelligence
Committee, said he doubted that Mr. Tenet had departed as willingly as his
friends said. "I suspect there was some push out of the office," he said.
"This president has been enamored of George Tenet, and has been reluctant to
hold him or anyone else accountable, and that failure was becoming a bigger
and bigger liability."

In the end, Mr. Graham said, Mr. Bush announced Mr. Tenet's resignation for
his own political well-being "under circumstances where he is at the crime
scene as short as possible."

The timing of the announcement appeared to take even senior White House
officials by surprise. As one recounted the events, Mr. Bush had just walked
back into the Oval Office after finishing a morning news conference in the
Rose Garden with Prime Minister John Howard of Australia. At that point, Mr.
Bush informed a small group in the Oval Office that Mr. Tenet had resigned.
The group included Mr. Cheney; Secretary of State Colin L. Powell;
Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser; Andrew H. Card Jr., the
White House chief of staff; and Dan Bartlett, the White House communications
director.

Minutes later, Mr. Bush reappeared on the White House lawn to make the short
walk to Marine One, the presidential helicopter. En route, he stopped to
make the statement about Mr. Tenet's resignation to a group of reporters.

Mr. Tenet called at least two members of Congress on Thursday morning to
inform them of his decision. One was Representative Porter J. Goss,
Republican of Florida, the chairman of the House Select Committee on
Intelligence, and the other was Senator John Warner, Republican of Virginia,
the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Both praised Mr. Tenet's performance, and Mr. Warner said that Mr. Tenet put
his wife on the phone and that she told him the decision was "predicated on
carefully thought-through family considerations." Mr. Warner said that the
remark convinced him that Mr. Tenet was leaving of his own volition.

Sheryl Stolberg contributed reporting for this article.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

--
--
FAIR USE NOTICE: This post contains copyrighted material the use of which
has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. I am
making such material available in an effort to advance understanding of
environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and
social justice issues, etc. I believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any
such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright
Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107

"If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so
long as I'm the dictator." - GW Bush 12/18/2000.

"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that
we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic
and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public."
---Theodore Roosevelt

"For us to get bogged down in the quagmire
 of an Iraqi civil war would be the height of foolishness."
---Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, 1991