In recent days Bush has hired a private lawyer to represent him in a federal grand jury investigation into who at the White House may have leaked the name of undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame to conservative columnist Robert Novak. Plame's husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson, claims the apparently illegal leak -- which blew Plame's cover and ended her work on weapons proliferation issues -- was made in retaliation for his decision last summer to publicly expose the Iraq/uranium claim as a lie. The CIA had hired Wilson, who has served in Africa, to travel to Niger to investigate the information; he reported back that there was no evidence to support the story. Wilson, currently promoting his new book about the affair, "The Politics of Truth," declined through his publishing agent to comment on Tenet.

Then there is the issue of Chalabi's fall from grace. Iraqi and American forces recently raided the Baghdad home and office of the would-be leader of a free Iraq after the CIA said Chalabi tipped Iranian intelligence that the United States had broken their secret communications code. Chalabi has accused the CIA of conducting a "smear campaign" against him, but the Federal Bureau of Investigation is taking polygraph tests of senior Pentagon civilians to discover who may have passed the secret to the Iraqi National Congress founder.

Meanwhile, on May 22, two Chalabi allies -- Richard Perle, an influential neoconservative architect of the Iraq war; and James Woolsey, director of central intelligence under Clinton -- met at the White House with National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice to protest the administration's change of heart about Chalabi, the New York Times reported. All this adds up to more political and operational headaches for Tenet.

In a brief phone interview, Woolsey said he would not comment on Chalabi and insisted he took Tenet's explanation for his departure "at face value." Tenet, Woolsey said, "has been in the job seven years. That's a long time in that job. If he's going to leave before it gets into the election, it will have to be now." On Thursday Chalabi hailed Tenet's departure, blaming the director for the false intelligence about Saddam's WMD -- intelligence that the Iraqi exile himself is widely accused of providing.

Clearly the CIA director was coming under fire from many directions. The Senate Intelligence Committee is preparing to release a massive, negative report on the agency's mishandling of prewar intelligence. "There's nothing good in there for them," said a congressional aide who has read the report. At the same time, the independent 9/11 commission is finishing its own report, also expected to be an indictment of the intelligence community. Meanwhile, there are reports that Secretary of State Colin Powell, his legacy tarnished after making the case for war to the United Nations using similarly flawed intelligence, is looking to blame Tenet for the debacle.

But Tenet could never have survived in such a grueling job for seven years without well-honed political instincts. The second-longest serving intelligence director is a former White House and congressional aide who knows the importance of cultivating powerful friends: In 2000, he renamed CIA headquarters after Bush's father, the former president who served as CIA director in the Ford administration. Later, Tenet would become the only Clinton-era holdover to be admitted to Bush's inner circle, briefing the president almost daily on intelligence developments.

During his tenure, the CIA has had its successes. Its agents have broken up terror cells worldwide and have helped capture Saddam Hussein and top al-Qaida operatives Khalid Sheikh Mohammad and Abu Zubaydah. However, Osama bin Laden remains at large and the Justice Department is looking into the deaths in CIA custody of detainees in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, American soldiers continue to die daily in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the armed forces are increasingly anxious about the quality of intelligence in those theaters.

"For too long the search for blame over WMD has really clouded over a much, much larger issue of American intelligence in general," said former Army Maj. Gen. Bob Scales. "To my mind, soldiers getting ambushed and killed on roadways or in back alleys because of a misunderstanding of a particular Iraqi's affiliation or a misunderstanding of tribal relationships is just as much a failure as WMD, which is more of a political question."

Tenet's deputy, 32-year CIA veteran John McLaughlin, will become acting director after July 11. A Soviet and European specialist, McLaughlin is unlikely to be nominated as Tenet's successor. Senate members of the intelligence committee say he is part of the problem with the agency, which has failed to adapt quickly enough to the new realities of terrorism. Other names mentioned to succeed Tenet are former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Porter Goss, R-Fla., a former CIA officer.

Recent Stories