CIA Resurfaces, in the Oval Office
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62277-2001Jul27.html
Tenet, Bush Develop Close Relationship
By Walter Pincus and Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, July 29, 2001; Page A05
The CIA and its director, George J. Tenet, have developed a close
relationship with President Bush over the past six months, rivaling the bond
between the agency and the first Bush White House, according to senior
administration officials.
Tenet meets several times a week with Bush, a sharp contrast to what former
CIA director R. James Woolsey recently called his "nonexistent" relationship
with former president Bill Clinton.
By most accounts, Tenet is not a policy player. Unlike Secretary of State
Colin L. Powell or Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, his official role
is not to set policy but to provide information to the government's top
policymakers, including Powell, Rumsfeld and other Cabinet members as well
as the president and vice president.
Still, Tenet is the sole holdover from the previous administration in Bush's
inner circle, and he has gained unusual access to the Oval Office.
The ties between the CIA and the White House vary from administration to
administration and generally reflect the importance that each president
places on the agency's reports.
Anxiety swept the executive offices on the CIA's seventh floor when stories
circulated early in the previous administration that Clinton had little
interest in intelligence, though that did not turn out to be true. Now, the
agency's access to the Bush White House is boosting morale at CIA
headquarters, which was renamed the George Bush Center for Intelligence two
years ago in honor of former president Bush, the only president to have
served as director of central intelligence.
Tenet and the current President Bush "have really hit it off," said a former
senior agency official. One reason, he added, is that Tenet's unpretentious
way of presenting serious material suits Bush's style.
"George is a very genial guy who a lot of people like, and he's doing a good
job, and the agency is doing a good job," Woolsey said. "And I think the
president senses that and finds it valuable. The director of central
intelligence is not a policymaker. His overall responsibility is to pull
intelligence and call it the way he sees it. He is the only adviser without
any incentive to make it seem that things are working out."
Tenet would not discuss his relationship with Bush. But unlike many of his
predecessors, the spymaster personally goes to the White House most mornings
to discuss the "President's Daily Brief," a top-secret, 10-page compendium
of reports and analysis that the agency prepares for the president and a few
other top officials.
After a formal, 10- or 15-minute presentation by senior CIA analysts who
regularly brief the president, Tenet or his deputy, John McLaughlin,
expounds upon aspects of the daily brief with Bush, Vice President Cheney,
national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and White House Chief of Staff
Andrew H. Card Jr.
Bush has also asked Tenet on several occasions to brief him at Camp David on
weekends. And, for the first time, the president has started taking CIA
briefers with him on international trips. In such instances, the President's
Daily Brief is encrypted and sent abroad over secure links.
The briefing "provides a very important opportunity for the president to
think about issues and ask questions," Rice said. "It also helps the
president to stay fully abreast of the most urgent matters."
One sign of Bush's trust was his decision in June to send Tenet to mediate a
cease-fire between the Israelis and the Palestinians, reviving a role the
CIA director had played during the Clinton administration.
Because their conversations center on intelligence matters that government
officials routinely decline to discuss, it is hard to measure Tenet's
influence on Bush. But on occasion, the president has sounded very much like
his CIA director.
For example, Tenet frequently uses the word "inches" to describe his view of
how to measure progress in the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. When Bush
emerged from a June 26 meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, he
said: "Progress is in inches, not miles, but nevertheless an inch is better
than nothing."
"The relationship between the president and the CIA director, if close, can
assist enormously in the creation of foreign policy," said Robert M. Gates,
CIA director under President George H.W. Bush from 1991 to 1992. But to be
effective, Gates added, "the director has to be in the innermost circle."
During the Reagan administration, Vice President Bush was briefed daily by
the CIA, while President Ronald Reagan was briefed by his national security
adviser. But the agency's lack of face time with the president was offset by
the fact that its director, William J. Casey, was Reagan's close friend.
When the first President Bush took office, the situation changed
dramatically.
Gates said he met with the president once or twice a week if "there was
something I ought to talk to him about. The best part about meeting face to
face with the president was to get instantaneous feedback on what his agenda
was. He asked questions and we would get answers to him, and thus had a
direct dialogue with the president that is most often missing in the normal
daily mix of things."
After Clinton's election in 1992, the president-elect began receiving
regular briefings in Arkansas by a senior CIA analyst, often the deputy
director for intelligence, "and was quite interested," according to a senior
agency official.
However, after Clinton moved to the White House and named Woolsey to head
the agency, his schedule became more haphazard. The intelligence briefing
often was pushed to the afternoon and occasionally did not take place.
Unlike most of his predecessors, however, Clinton did read the President's
Daily Brief each morning, and on occasion complained that there was nothing
new in it.
Making things worse was the president's weak relationship with Woolsey, a
Washington lawyer whom Clinton had never met before he named him agency
director.
"I saw the president very, very rarely, except at National Security Council
meetings, and only had two semi-private meetings in two years," Woolsey
said.
Clinton had three directors during his eight years in office. Woolsey
resigned in frustration at the end of 1994. John M. Deutch, a scientist and
veteran Pentagon official, left at the end of 1996 after Clinton passed him
over for the post of defense secretary.
At the start of his second term, the GOP Senate balked when Clinton
nominated Anthony Lake, his first national security adviser, to run the CIA.
Tenet, a former Senate aide who had served on the National Security Council
staff before becoming Deutch's deputy, took over on an acting basis and was
confirmed by the Senate in August 1997.
Before last fall's presidential election, Tenet's future seemed uncertain.
He was thought to have a shot at -- but by no means a lock on --
reappointment by either Bush or the Democratic nominee, Vice President Al
Gore.
After Bush's inauguration, Tenet had one key supporter in his camp, the new
president's father, for whom Tenet had rolled out the red carpet when the
CIA's headquarters was named in his honor in 1999 under legislation passed
by Congress. The elder Bush is said to have commended Tenet to his son.
C 2001 The Washington Post Company
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