Tenet wages scandal on the White House

By James P. Pinkerton, 10/2/2003

GEORGE TENET, the CIA director, is a real piece of Washington work. He's done a terrible job in office, but he's got a firm grip on that office. Indeed, he's got the White House praising him for his bad performance, even as he, Tenet, is trying, as part of his survival strategy, to put a White House staffer or two in jail.

The immediate issue is Tenet's asking the Justice Department to investigate the leak, spilled by someone at the White House, of the name of an undercover CIA agent.

Such leaking is a felony. But now Tenet, who bungled the intelligence-gathering on Iraq, is safe in his job. Why? Because if President George W. Bush fired him, it would look as if the White House were retaliating, even covering something up. And so the director of central intelligence can sit in his Langley, Va., office, serene and secure despite his incompetence, as scandal cancer eats his masters across the Potomac River at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

A little background. On July 14, columnist Robert Novak reported that "two senior administration officials" had told him that the wife of a former ambassador to Iraq, Joseph C. Wilson, was a CIA operative. Since Wilson was a noisy critic of the White House's war policy, the leak was regarded as a petty act of vengeance.

But such leaks are not petty to the intelligence community. CIA operatives like their anonymity; they live longer that way. In 1975, a CIA operative was assassinated in Athens not long after his name was made public, whereupon Congress made it a felony to disclose covert identities, punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

OK, so who did the leaking? Novak isn't talking. But on Sunday, The Washington Post reported that "before Novak's column ran, two top White House officials called at least six Washington journalists" to leak the potentially deadly tidbit. For his part, the irate husband, Wilson, points to a suspect. His goal, he says, is to see "Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs." That would be Karl Rove, the senior adviser to the president, who guided Bush to the presidency.

So is Rove the one -- one of them, anyway? Now Tenet wants to know, too. Just days after the Novak leak story ran, Tenet referred the matter to the Justice Department. Now, more than two months later, Attorney General John Ashcroft is finally stepping on the investigatory gas.

And how long will the investigation last? That's probably up to Bush. If some White Housers did what they're accused of, Bush could fire the leakers, leaving them to a grim legal fate. But as history shows, White Houses rarely operate that quickly or smartly. Usually they wrangle over documents and testimony, the result of which is to stretch the process to the breaking -- even impeaching -- point. In the most extreme case, Richard Nixon's coverup of Watergate turned what he called a "third-rate burglary" into his own political demise. For as long as the investigation continues, Tenet is safe. Which is a shame, because he led his agency into debacle. On Feb. 5, he vouchsafed for Colin Powell as the secretary of state delivered his bill of particulars against Iraq to the United Nations -- which turned out, of course, to be a bill of falsehoods.

That reality -- that the "intelligence" that led the United States into Iraq was stupid -- has become obvious to all but True Bushers. Just over the weekend, the top Republican and the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee signed a letter complaining that the CIA had learned little about Iraq since 1998; Tenet took office in 1997. But bizarrely, Tenet still has defenders -- at the White House. On Sunday, Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, said, "The president believes that he had very good intelligence going into the war."

The White House must defend Tenet, of course, because to trash him would be to trash the rationale for war. Meanwhile, Tenet, playing all his cynical bureaucratic cards, has let loose the hounds of hellish scandal upon the Bush team. Ironically secure in his job, the CIA chief smiles and sits as some yakkety White House aide sits and sweats -- and picks up the phone, this time, to get a good lawyer.

James P. Pinkerton is a columnist at Newsday.