# George Tenet **George Tenet** (b. January 5, 1953) was Director of Central Intelligence from July 11, 1997 to July 11, 2004, the second-longest tenure in the agency's history. He ran the [[CIA]] through the September 11 attacks, the launch of the torture program, and the intelligence case for the [[Iraq War]]. Few officials connect more of the Bush-era failures. ## "Slam dunk" At a December 2002 White House meeting, Tenet reportedly told [[George W. Bush]] that the case for Iraqi [[Weapons of Mass Destruction]] was a "slam dunk." The phrase became shorthand for the [[Iraq WMD Intelligence Failure]]. In his 2007 memoir *At the Center of the Storm*, Tenet said the line was taken out of context: it referred to how the case could be *presented to the public*, not to the strength of the evidence. Either reading is damning in its own way. The first means the intelligence was wrong. The second means the director was advising on marketing. ## The WMD case Under Tenet the CIA vouched for the claims behind [[Colin Powell]]'s February 2003 [[Powell UN Presentation]]. The mobile biological-weapons labs rested largely on a single fabricating source, codenamed [[Curveball]], whom the Germans handling him had warned against. In July 2003 Tenet took public responsibility for the "sixteen words" about Iraqi uranium purchases in Africa in Bush's State of the Union. No stockpiles were found. ## Torture and 9/11 - **Interrogation.** On Tenet's watch the CIA built its detention and interrogation program, including waterboarding. The Senate Intelligence Committee later found that CIA leaders, Tenet among them, gave Congress and the White House inaccurate accounts of what the program produced. - **Before 9/11.** A 2005 CIA Inspector General's report concluded that Tenet bore "ultimate responsibility" for the agency's failure to build an adequate plan against al-Qaeda before the attacks. Tenet disputed it. ## The exit Tenet announced his resignation on June 3, 2004, citing family reasons. That December, Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, along with [[Paul Bremer]] and General Tommy Franks. He then taught at Georgetown and became a managing director at the investment bank Allen & Company. ## Why he matters here Tenet is the intelligence half of the Iraq War's accountability gap, and a case study in how intelligence gets pulled toward a policy that has already been decided. That dynamic is worth keeping in mind whenever the vault tracks pressure on today's intelligence community to produce findings that suit the White House. ## See also - [[Iraq WMD Intelligence Failure]] · [[Curveball]] · [[Powell UN Presentation]] · [[Weapons of Mass Destruction]] - [[Colin Powell]] · [[Lawrence Wilkerson]] · [[Paul Wolfowitz]] · [[Iraqi History Hub]] · [[CIA]]