OpinionJournal WSJ Online REVIEW & OUTLOOK A Better CIA Tenet's resignation gives Bush an opportunity. Friday, June 4, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT
We have no reason to doubt that CIA Director George Tenet did in fact resign for "personal reasons" yesterday, and President Bush duly praised his service. Once the departure pleasantries are over, however, we hope Mr. Bush will use this opening to reshape our broken intelligence services. It's a compliment to Mr. Tenet's political savvy that he was able to leave on his own terms despite the Agency's mistakes during his seven-year tenure. The largest was the failure to penetrate al Qaeda before 9/11, and more recently the many misjudgments about Iraq, which go well beyond whether or not Saddam Hussein had WMD. Mr. Tenet did inherit a demoralized agency in 1997, and since September 11 he has worked hard to revitalize human-intelligence gathering. Though it's impossible for outsiders to know, the CIA probably also deserves some credit for the lack of any further attacks on the U.S. homeland. For all of that, the CIA is still a long way from the anti-terror spearhead it needs to become. That's especially clear from its performance in Iraq, where the Agency has been consistently wrong since it told the first President Bush that Saddam would fall within two months of the Gulf War. The Agency has relied on a Sufi network of Iraqi agents that time and again proved inadequate. The CIA favored an anti-Saddam coup strategy it couldn't execute, predicted defections of Republican Guard units that never took place, and was twice wrong about having located and killed Saddam. It also failed to predict that the regime's strategy would be to melt away during the invasion and counterattack with a terrorist insurgency. We're more forgiving about Mr. Tenet's now famous statement to Mr. Bush that Saddam's possession of WMD was a "slam dunk." Every intelligence service in the world shared that belief, as did the United Nations. The big prewar intelligence dispute over Iraq concerned the link between Saddam and al Qaeda; everyone agreed about WMD, as the October 2002 "national intelligence estimate" stated. The U.S. has also since found plenty of signs in Iraq that Saddam retained a just-in-time production capability for biological and chemical weapons. What is unforgivable is the Agency's ex post facto attempt to blame its WMD errors on everyone else. Leak after media leak citing "intelligence sources" has blamed the Pentagon, Vice President Cheney's advisers and now Iraqi exiles. The most recent stories offer the amazing theory that the CIA, Colin Powell and the New York Times were all somehow gulled on WMD by one man--former exile Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress. We are apparently supposed to believe that our $40-billion-a-year intelligence services were duped by the same person our spooks have insisted could not be trusted ever since he called them out for a botched coup attempt in the middle of the 1990s. This is bad enough as political posterior-covering. But the blame-shifting has also done serious damage to U.S. policy in Iraq, by fanning internal warfare and unleashing prosecutors on colleagues. The Joe Wilson-Valerie Plame affair turned a trifling dispute over yellowcake uranium in Niger into a debilitating criminal hunt for "leakers." And the latest attacks on Mr. Chalabi have now led to an FBI investigation of Pentagon officials who have a war to win. Whether or not Mr. Tenet has participated in any of this, he has been unwilling or unable to stop it. For his successor, Mr. Bush needs someone willing to both discipline the CIA and shake it up so it can go on the anti-terror offensive. If it's true that the President intends to let current deputy John McLaughlin continue as acting director through the election, he will have missed an opportunity. Whatever his virtues, Mr. McLaughlin does not bring a fresh eye or the willingness to fire or replace career officers who are engaging in what amounts to an insurgency against the President's policy. We can think of several better choices, from former CIA Director (under Bill Clinton) and sometime Agency critic Jim Woolsey, to California Congressman Chris Cox (who led the China nuclear probe of the late 1990s), to Rudy Giuliani. The point is to appoint someone who won't be co-opted by the Agency's culture of caution and self-preservation. Former Reagan CIA official Herbert Meyer put it well in these pages shortly after September 11 when he wrote that "the CIA must be changed from a defensive agency into an offensive one." The World War II predecessor to the CIA, the famous OSS under "Wild Bill" Donovan, was a small outfit intent on defeating the enemy. Over the decades the CIA has evolved into a huge bureaucracy that values consensus over risk-taking. Mr. Meyer's suggestion that we need an OSS "within the CIA" makes eminent sense in this era of terrorists who have access to WMD but can't be deterred. If the White House is worried that its nominee will face a confirmation battle so close to Election Day, we'd say so much the better. Let Democrats explain why they are opposing a new intelligence chief in the middle of a war. Mr. Bush and his advisers could even use the debate to explain to the American people why the CIA needs to change, and why he and his nominee need a second term to do it.
