respects responsible for that destructive, dysfunctional climate.

In the spring of 1995, when Tenet was special assistant to the president and senior director for intelligence programs at the Clinton National Security Council, NSC director Anthony Lake sicced the FBI on a mid-level CIA officer named Robert Baer.  Baer was then in Kurdistan, running the Agency's second Northern Iraq Liaison Element, known as NILE-II.

After reading an unsubstantiated NSA intercept from an Iranian intelligence officer in Kurdish controlled Salah-al-Din to Iranian intelligence headquarters in Tehran, Lake jumped to the conclusion that Baer had unilaterally set in motion a covert rogue  plot to assassinate Saddam Hussein.  Baer was yanked back to Washington and subjected to a months-long murder investigation, even though the Iranian message proved to be based on a document-which turned out to be a fabricated document--the Iranian had been allowed to see on the desk of a high-ranking Iraqi dissident.

As head of NSC's intelligence programs, a job that required him to be in touch with CIA personnel on a regular basis, Tenet had to have known how destructive Lake's rash act was to the morale of CIA's already weakened clandestine service.  Moreover, he even knew Baer.  In fact, he and Baer had been undergraduate classmates at Georgetown University.  But Tenet did nothing.

Then, in the summer of 1995, Tenet was named DCI John Deutch's deputy director.  Deutch, an MIT chemistry professor and academic dean, came to CIA with a pronounced distaste for spying.

One of the first moves the new DCI made was to rewrite the Agency's rules of engagement for recruiting agents-the foreigners who spy on behalf of the United States.  Deutch's revised asset acquisition regulations forbade-on pain of dismissal-CIA officers from recruiting as agents anyone who might have any criminal activities, human rights violations, or other character flaws in their backgrounds.  The immediate result was that CIA officers simply stopped recruiting anybody, and something like fifty percent of  the agents on CIA's rolls were terminated because they were politically incorrect individuals.

Again, George Tenet was presented with an opportunity to help change CIA for the better by advocating on behalf of the Clandestine Service.  But once again, he chose to do nothing.

Then there's Tenet's take on battling al-Qa'ida.  "CotS" goes to great length to prove how effective Tenet was at recognizing the threat of and taking action against al-Qa'ida.  "On December 3, 1998, I sat at home and furiously drafted in longhand the memo I titled, 'We Are at War.'  In it, I told my staff that I wanted no resources or people spared in the effort to go after al-Qa'ida.  The 9/11 Commission later said that I declared war but no one showed up.  They were wrong."

I can see the scene in the Jerry Bruckheimer movie: 

INTERIOR, TENET HOME: NIGHT

GEORGE sits at the kitchen table, an unlit cigar clenched between his teeth, a cold cup of java at his elbow.  HE is scribbling furiously on a legal pad.

GEORGE:  This is personal.  I'm gonna get that Usama Bin Laden sumbitch.  Gonna wax his skinny ass.
Actually, a House-Senate joint inquiry report issued in September, 2002, set George Tenet's declaration of  war record straight long before any of the 9/11 Commission's often-fuzzy recriminations were released.

Here's the money quote, written by joint inquiry staff director Eleanor Hill. "Despite the DCI's declaration of war in 1998, there was no massive shift in budget or reassignment of personnel to counterterrorism until after September 11, 2001."  Full stop.  End of story.

Just by coincidence, Tenet conveniently omits any reference to Mrs. Hill or her devastating conclusions in "CotS".  But we know that in Intelligence there are no coincidences, don't we?.

Tenet also portrays himself in "CotS" as a morale-building, supportive-of-the-troops DCI.  "A long time ago in the Twentieth Century Diner [the restaurant Tenet's parents owned and operated in Queens, New York], I had learned from my dad that if you took care of people, they would take care of you.  And at CIA, if men and women believed that you cared about them and their families, there was nothing they would not do for you."

Tenet's father was right.  Pop Tenet understood that loyalty down the chain of command is just as important-perhaps even more so-that loyalty up the chain of command.  And from what Tenet writes, you'd assume he believes that too.

But you'd be wrong.  In CIA's unique culture, top-down loyalty has always been of paramount importance.  Spying is a risky business, and in order to do your job properly-you job being breaking the laws of the foreign country to which you have been assigned-you want to know that somebody at HQ is watching your back, and if something happens to you your wife and kids will be well taken care of.
So the example set by DCI Tenet in handling the case of Johnny Micheal Spann is illuminating.

Johnny Micheal Span-Mike, as he was known--was a former Marine who joined CIA's paramilitary branch and was one of the first to go to Afghanistan.  There, on November 25, 2001, Spann was killed during a prisoner uprising in the nineteenth century fortress called Qala-i-Jangi, which is located near Mazar-i-Sharif.

Almost immediately, word leaked to the press that Spann was a CIA officer.  Three days later, DCI Tenet confirmed Spann's status.  But Tenet's lack of judgment in doing so put the rest of CIA's paramilitary personnel in Afghanistan in danger.  There was, after all, a lot of video of non-uniformed Americans, some carrying arms, that had been taken in Afghanistan.  Mike Spann and his paramilitary colleagues appeared in some of it.  Al-Qa'ida had excellent sources in the media.  It wouldn't take them much of an effort to see with whom Spann was pictured, and then go hunting for them. Tenet seemed oblivious to the threat.

On the positive side, the DCI used his own plane to bring Spann's body back from Germany.  And he pulled strings to get the Marine buried at Arlington National Cemetery.  Tenet was prominent at Spann's funeral.  He spoke movingly about the young man's character and heroism, and was seen comforting Spann's young widow, Shannon.  "Mike Spann will forever be part of the treasured legacy of free peoples everywhere," Tenet said at Arlington.

There were some at the Agency who believed that Tenet was stoking coverage of  Spann's death to divert attention from CIA's pre-9/11 intelligence failure-a charge Tenet denies.  Indeed, Tenet writes: "Mike's is one of the many remarkable stories of heroism by CIA officers in the opening months of the Afghan campaign."

True enough.  The Afghan campaign was indeed a public triumph for CIA, and a high point for Tenet.  But what Tenet leaves out of "CotS" is the rest of the Johnny Micheal Spann story.

For that we have to go to "Denial and Deception," former CIA case officer Melissa Boyle Mahle's book about life in George Tenet's CIA.  "What the public did not get to see," Mahle writes, "was how Spann's death annuity was managed by the Agency.  The past practice toward the families of officers killed in the line of duty was that the widow would receive an annuity for life…."  But in Spann's case, "the annuity was limited to one year [emphasis added].  Details like that do not remain secret long within the halls of Langley.  Directorate of Operations officers were outraged by the new and previously unannounced policy."   So on George Tenet's watch, CIA personnel learned they...