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137-148 Book Review -Eng.Qxd POLICY IN SLAM DUNK STYLE George Tenet, with Bill Harlow. At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA. New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2007, 832 p. Reviewed by Gennady Evstafiev I have in front of me a huge 2007published volume (832 pages with appendices) of recollec tions of George Tenet, exDirector of the CIA. The book contains his memories of seven years that he spent at the head of this notorious department. Strictly speaking, Mr. Tenet served in the agency for nine years – during the first two he was a deputy of notorious John Deutch, whose 18 months of disgrace in the CIA ended in 1997. However, this is a different instructive story. So George Tenet and his directorship of the intelligence occurred during, probably, the most aggressive years of U.S. foreign policy and arrogant selfconfidence of Washington in its unsurpassable global power. Decisions taken in these years by two American administrations shook the stability of the world and continue to have their destructive impact on the prospects of international cooperation and peaceful democratic development of many countries. Reliance on military power, neglect of the opinion of the majority of nations, armstwisting pol icy towards weak countries and U.S. allies, enlightened use of official lies – all this resulted in an unenviable situation, in which the United States finds itself now. George Tenet is a partici pant of this process and an executor of many acts that have nothing to do with international law, the commitment to which is a popular topic of propaganda for the fans of U.S. system of human values. One has to say outright that Mr. Tenet is not a professional spy. His book speaks about dozens of U.S. intelligence agents, but he himself is a typical representative of the U.S. ruling bureau cratic elite. He easily finds his way in the corridors of power and can sail well in the troubled waters of bureaucratic struggle between various power groups that replace each other in D.C. Tenet is a Democrat by origin, but he was inherited by Republicans and stayed for four years, meaning full confidence in his political views on the part of the Bush administration. Tenet’s resignation is a result of failures and mistakes that the CIA made under his leadership. We are not going to analyze the errors of the U.S. central intelligence – this job has been done by numerous commissions of the U.S. Congress and by American experts on secret services. By the way, this made the CIA lose its leading role in the giant structure of the U.S. secret servic es and led to the establishment of the so called National Intelligence, which is now at the top of the pyramid. So there is no need to comment the activities of the CIA as an organizing force of the American intelligence community – George Tenet’s deliberations are outdated. Book review A different issue is the attempt of Mr. Tenet to justify himself before the history and tell about the toughest specific episodes of his participation in setting and executing the orders of his employers. One can find here many curious revelations and characteristics of some acting political figures – and this has a serious practical importance. Taking into account the large amount of available material, I will comment only on a few significant episodes, the dark sides of which are described by George Tenet in detail. In some cases it is clear that Mr. Tenet tries SECURITY INDEX No. 2 (84), Volume 14 137 to find scapegoats to blame for failures, so I have to resort to the publications by other U.S. and foreign authors, in order to give the reader full and objective impression of the past. 9/11 – A TRAGEDY IN FIGHTING TERRORISM George Tenet’s description of a few months of work in the CIA that preceded astonishing air attack by Al Qaeda against the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon compound in Washington, clearly indicates – the agency had a dominating feeling that the catastrophe was on the way, but there was no idea when, where and in which form it might happen. As usually in such situation, there is an everyday flow of fragmented and con tradictory information from the agents and other sources and there is no indication of approx imate time and place of a terrorist attack. Nonetheless, such terribly huge organization as the U.S. intelligence community with dozens of thousands of employees and thousands of foreign agents around the world should have discovered the line of main attack by Al Qaeda and give approximate forecast about the means to be used. After all, one of Tenet’s best advisors on ter rorism Rich B. (see p. 241) firmly believed, “They come here”. The U.S. intelligence failed to give an adequate assessment of available information, including Osama bin Laden and Ayman alZawahiri statements to their close circle that something “very big” was prepared, such as a powerful blow against the U.S. and Israeli interests (June 2001, see p. 226). Americans underestimated such factors, as the ability of Al Qaeda to train and coordinate the use of several groups of kamikaze terrorists, who were psychologically ready to perform their deadly mission. In August 2001, the CIA lost control over two active terrorists from Al Qaeda – Khalid alMihdhar and Nawaf alHazmi –who by that time entered the U.S.A without any difficul ties and on September 11 changed the route of Flight 77 of American Airlines and attacked Pentagon. Instead George Tenet provides lengthy deliberations about his inability to use Predator unmanned aircraft (UMA), a popular gadget in the arsenal of the CIA and the U.S. mil itary that might have been used against Al Qaeda leadership. The book gives an honest descrip tion of hesitation and confusion of the U.S. ruling elite – a sudden, defiant and effective opera tion of international terrorists was a complete surprise for the secret services. As Americans normally do, the search for reasons of failure allowed them to kick even those terrible Russians, who had not provided on time the necessary information about Osama bin Laden, the man who was, by the way, so close to the CIA in the past. Meanwhile, our American partners took quite an ambiguous position with respect to Chechen terrorists and their sponsors from abroad. Anyway in the evening of September 11, 2001, at the bunker meeting under the White House, George Bush, who turned out to be calmer than many of his staff, proclaimed the famous Bush doctrine, “I’ve directed the full resources of our intelligence and law enforcement communities to find those responsible and to bring them to justice. We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.” (p. 261). George Tenet writes that for the CIA the new doctrine meant elimination of all restrictions – the agency had old plans to chase Al Qaeda and its sponsors – the Taliban movement in Afghanistan. The U.S. strike in Afghanistan was predetermined. The U.S. expedition corps was ready to deploy in southern parts of the country. The future ruler – Hamid Karzai – was also found, as he was well known to the U.S. secret services. Al Qaeda succeeded in its mission – global war with cru saders became a reality and caused many thousands of victims. The 9/11 terrorist attack gave birth to a link of dangerous developments – illegal prisons in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, CIA secret prisons in a few Western and Eastern European countries, political investigations per mitted to Pentagon on the U.S. territory. In my opinion, this was the start of decoronation of the CIA as a primary intelligence service in the United States and decrease in influence of George Tenet – the events that followed only gave additional impetus to this process. CIA AND WAR AGAINST WMD PROLIFERATION The issue of Al Qaeda’s access to the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) is always in the focus of attention of the leading secret services of the world. It is accounted for by Osama’s statement of December 24, 1998, “Acquiring weapons for the defense of Muslims is a religious 138 POLICY IN SLAM DUNK STYLE duty. If I have indeed acquired these weapons, then I thank God for enabling me to do so.” At the same time, the intelligence community and the U.S. Government in general was quite sure that people hiding in the caves could not get WMD. One has to pay tribute to the persistence of the CIA experts, who after a little while found a narrow and clandestine group in bin Laden’s entourage. The group was in charge of getting access to WMD – this was extremely important for Al Qaeda from the point of longterm prospects of struggle against crusaders and had lit tle possibility to be used in the immediate plans of terrorist operations. Nonproliferation experts would be excited to read pp. 394397. George Tenet mentions Pakistan there, which in 1998 conducted its nuclear tests. It was supposed before that notori ous international illegal proliferator of nuclear weapons technologies and the father of the Pakistani Abomb Abdul Qadeer Khan had contacts with Osama bin Laden to discuss nuclear matters. Mr. Tenet, however, points out that A.Q. Khan denied such contacts for the reasons unknown to the CIA. The reasons are known and they are evident – A.Q. Khan was overloaded with more reliable business for many years, as he was supplying nuclear weapons technologies to the so called rogue states.
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