George Tenet, At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 576 pp., $30.00.

Famous figures write memoirs for different purposes: some because they were always frustrated writers, others to settle old scores, still others to impart a bit of wisdom. George Tenet's memoir is an example of the defensive memoir, a book written to plead his case against the legion of accusations leveled against him.

And they are a multitude, from every direction and ranging from charges of incompetence to outright malevolence. The reader can sense Tenet's exasperation as he methodically lays out his side of the story on the talismanic controversies of the period during which he was Director of Central Intelligence (DCI): Did the intelligence community cook the books for the Bush Administration? No, the community just got the intelligence wrong. What about "slam dunk?" That was an ill-advised phrase that was not relevant to the decision to go to war against Iraq, which in any case did not result from the community's assessments about WMD. Was the CIA asleep at the wheel before 9/11? Far from it-the CIA and Tenet were pounding the table for action against Al-Qaeda before it was fashionable, but human error was not absent, as in the infamous watchlisting case. Why didn't Tenet push for the administration to take action against Al-Qaeda before 9/11? He did to some extent, but it was not his role to advocate policy. And so on. Tenet also addresses the Clinton Administration's negotiations with Israel and the Palestinians, the Sixteen Words incident¹, the hunt for WMD after the invasion of Iraq and the other usual suspects. Those who have followed the twists and turns of the more esoteric of these scandals, such as the 'Curveball' intelligence-source incident, will find more grist for the mill.

On the whole, Tenet's testimony is plausible but, unsurprisingly, biased. Some peers are pictured as political animals, scrambling for influence in the shark-infested waters of the Washington interagency world, but Tenet draws himself as an "aw-shucks" Greek guy from Queens, just trying to do his job. While there is certainly a good bit of truth in this, there is also a reason why Tenet owns a reputation as a skilled political infighter. He was no lamb among wolves.

Regardless of how precisely these fraught incidents actually transpired-a historical timeline even Patrick Fitzgerald could not conclusively reassemble-the more important point is that the main lines of Tenet's narrative are convincing and largely true. The book is basically about two stories: the fight against Al-Qaeda both before and after 9/11 and the Iraq War. And on these two matters, the defining events of his tenure, Tenet's story-if not always his performance-is basically on target.

The heart of his book is a description of how the CIA came to recognize the Al-Qaeda threat in the 1990s, reoriented itself to combat this new threat, consistently warned policymakers of the seriousness of the impending threat and was in a position to take immediate action after tragedy struck on 9/11. While Tenet's narrative will not add much to those already acquainted with this history, it does provide a reminder that, instead of condemnation, Tenet and the CIA generally deserve plaudits for pounding the table on terrorism well before policymakers, Congressmen or the American people at large took much notice of the threat of catastrophic terrorism. Tenet's exasperation at the tendentious criticisms of the 9/11 Commission and others who blithely argue that the "CIA should have done more" is well-justified. As he argues, the intelligence agencies can only do so much. They are not independent-let alone omnipotent-actors; they are, instead, the servants of the American people and their elected representatives. The CIA could and did warn both the Clinton and Bush Administrations, Congress and the American people of the threat Al-Qaeda posed and repeatedly asked for more resources and authorities to pursue the target. Indeed, it cut from its own funding and personnel elsewhere to go after Al-Qaeda, even during demanding crises in the Balkans and Middle East. The threat, however, remained too ethereal and distant for the nation until 9/11 drove its immediacy painfully home. And when that happened, the CIA stood ready with a plan of attack and a network of allies to depose the Taliban regime in Afghanistan-what Tenet without exaggeration calls the "CIA's finest hour."

Ultimately, charges that the CIA should have just "gone out and gotten the bad guys" are not fairly directed against the CIA, but must be shouldered by the American government and people as a whole. The CIA was telling us of the danger and was asking for more leeway and resources, but we and our representatives were not prepared to give them that. The threat just seemed too unreal, and what the CIA was asking for was not negligible. As Tenet fair-mindedly describes, the pre-9/11 problems of whether to launch missile or other strikes against Bin Laden that might involve killing innocent (and sometimes diplomatically important) people, how to deal with the truculent Pakistanis and so forth were profoundly difficult ones. These were not technical questions that simply demanded an assertion of will, but deeply political ones, involving complicated and risky tradeoffs. Anyone who remembers the atmospherics of 1998 and Wag the Dog will recall that the nation had not steeled itself to deal with the Al-Qaeda threat. The failure to "get Al-Qaeda" before 9/11 is therefore our collective responsibility, certainly not to be borne by the one group within the government who were actually calling for greater focus and more action.

Perhaps the most important part of the book, however, is what Tenet has to say about the struggle against Al-Qaeda and its allies going forward. A decade or more from now, the question of why the memo from the FBI agent in Phoenix did not receive more attention will likely seem as abstruse as the question of how much Admiral Kimmel and General Short knew before Pearl Harbor does to us now. But the question of how and with what fervor we need to combat our terrorist enemies will be just as salient-and may be more so-if Tenet's dark but reasonable predictions about the likelihood of further strike, including nuclear strikes, against the homeland are borne out.

Tenet is clear on one point: by far the most valuable intelligence-gathering techniques are also the most controversial. They have saved lives. Their cancellation will have real consequences and will likely directly result in the deaths of Americans. Tenet states unequivocally, for instance, that the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques" and aggressive interrogation of "high value detainees" "gave us . . . more [on Al-Qaeda and its plans] than the CIA, the NSA, the FBI and our military operations had achieved collectively." In other words, the use of harsh interrogation techniques was not only immensely valuable in the campaign against Al-Qaeda, but was actually more valuable than all the rest of the government's intelligence collection methods combined. As he notes, members-particularly senior members-of Al-Qaeda are fanatically dedicated and committed to deceiving or stonewalling their captors. Without the use of these techniques, Tenet argues, the United States would have "obtained none of the information [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, for instance] had in his head about imminent threats against the American people." Furthermore, Tenet contends that the other most important factors in preventing follow-on attacks after 9/11 were the president's Terrorist Surveillance Program and a highly classified program that tracked terrorist financial transactions. In other words, the most critical intelligence methods are precisely those that many seem eager to suspend.

Tenet's bugle-call defense of these efforts should serve as a reality check on current deliberations-in Congress, in the media and among the presidential candidates-about the necessity of these programs. As he states, "We must understand collectively that if we decide not to empower our intelligence-collection activities, we have to be willing to take the risk and pay the price." As a nation we may decide to do without these valuable but morally or legally troubling practices, but we should acknowledge the cost of so doing. As the candidates debate the boundaries of interrogation of detainees and as Congress considers the direction of national intelligence's proposed revisions to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Tenet's points should be kept very much in view. And these arguments should not be seen as partisan. If anything, the sense that comes out of the book is that Tenet was far more comfortable in the Clinton than in the Bush Administration. Tenet's own political views are nowhere very apparent, but, naturally, given his past experience working for Democratic Senator David Boren and his appointment by President Clinton, they seem to hover nearer to the left-of-center position. The very fact that a centrist Democrat so fervently takes these positions should give pause to those who associate interrogation, domestic surveillance and the like with President Bush and Vice President Cheney.

The other pillar of the book is the story of the lead-up to and conduct of the Iraq War and occupation. On this sad and sorry topic, Tenet's narrative is basically right, even though it inflates the CIA's prescience about the difficulties after the occupation and paints over the question of Tenet's own political calculus.

Fundamentally, Tenet's line is that the administration decided to go to war against Iraq based upon reasons other than Iraq's purported WMD programs and therefore, while the intelligence community was indeed wrong about Iraq's capabilities, that failure was not the cause of the war. As he argues, "The leaders of a country decide to go to war because of core beliefs, larger geostrategic calculations, ideology, and, in the case of Iraq, because of the administration's largely unarticulated view that the democratic transformation of the Middle East through regime change in Iraq would be worth the price. WMD was, as Paul Wolfowitz was quoted as saying in Vanity Fair in May 2003, something that ‘we settled on' because it was ‘the one issue that everyone could agree on.'"

The evidence supports Tenet's storyline that the war was undertaken for reasons broader than Iraq's alleged WMD programs. Whether or not Richard Perle did actually say to Tenet on September 12, 2001, that Iraq would pay for 9/11, it is well-established that Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and others of like mind were pushing this policy immediately after the attacks. After Afghanistan fell, these advocates grew stronger, so that by the middle of 2002-according to sources as diverse as Tenet, Bob Woodward and the British-the march towards war was well underway. Why was this? Certainly the almost universal conviction that Iraq was clandestinely rebuilding its WMD capabilities was a significant element. But it was not sufficient. War hawks weren't calling for action against North Korea, which had WMD programs that were clearly much further advanced. More important were the other factors: Iraq's alleged links to Al-Qaeda and even 9/11, Iraq's oppression of its own people, its resistance to U.S. and UN direction, its challenge to U.S. regional primacy, its opposition to Israel, its status as a counter-example to pro-Western movements in the Middle East, and so forth. Different war advocates proceeded from different premises: Wolfowitz and the neoconservative idealists from a desire to remake and modernize the Middle East, Rumsfeld and perhaps Cheney from a conviction of the necessity of demonstrating American supremacy and resolve, Feith and others in the Department of Defense from a belief that Iraq lay behind much of the anti-Western terrorism of the preceding decades.

This explains why, through much of 2001 and especially 2002, war advocates at the Pentagon pushed the intelligence community to sign off on the assessment that Iraq was cooperating with Al-Qaeda-a push that the intelligence community commendably resisted. Rebuffed there, however, war advocates coalesced around the one rationale that all could agree on-Iraq's pursuit of WMD. The intelligence community was already there, having for years judged Iraq to be working on reconstituting its banned capabilities. The hawkish types wouldn't have to rely on astonishingly liberal-sounding arguments for humanitarian intervention. And the American people and their representatives would surely understand the appeal of a war undertaken to stop a supposed madman from launching a nuclear or biological attack.

The irony of all this is that the intelligence community's very resistance to the push to associate Iraq with Al-Qaeda made the public case for war rest disproportionately on Iraq's alleged WMD programs. This reached its apotheosis with Colin Powell's speech to the UN, when the initial draft's sections on Iraq's violation of human rights and ties to terrorism were well-meaningly slashed, leaving the speech focused entirely on Iraq's purported WMD programs.

Of course the intelligence community was wrong about Iraq's WMD programs, which Tenet forthrightly admits. (He doesn't have much choice!) But the bottom line is that this error, while very serious and troubling, was not what actually drove the decision to go to war, and therefore should be kept in perspective. While it is likely true that the intelligence community's assessments on Iraq's WMD programs were a necessary cause of the war, it is also true that they were neither sufficient nor primary. Tenet and the CIA therefore deserve criticism for getting the intelligence wrong, but not for leading the country to war. Those were policy decisions made for much broader reasons.

And even the intelligence error should not be over-emphasized. The real fault of the intelligence community was in not making more clear the limited evidence underlying their assessments and in not being more skeptical about their own estimates. The error was in allowing a legitimate inference-that Iraq, a consistent defier of UN inspection resolutions, was attempting to preserve and expand its WMD capabilities-to harden into a practical certainty. Effectively no one thought Saddam Hussein had dispensed with all his WMD, and Saddam did everything he could to hide that fact. (He was a very talented deceiver.) But the intelligence community allowed its working hypothesis to become dogma. It is unrealistic to expect our intelligence services to penetrate and understand the WMD capabilities of a nation in which, according to Charles Duelfer's Iraq Survey Group Report, perhaps only Saddam himself knew the actual status of their programs. But it is very reasonable to demand that the intelligence services be forthright in what they know, what they don't know and what they can reasonably guess.

Tenet's memoir is not a work of great literature. Its merit is in its message, rather simply and earnestly delivered: that the United States faces a determined, fanatical, persistent, intelligent and implacable foe who is trying and will for the foreseeable future continue to try to kill as many Americans as possible. Our nation's response to this grave threat has not, cannot and will not be determined by the decisions and actions of a single U.S. government agency and its leaders. Rather, we ourselves, the citizens of the United States, along with and through our elected representatives and through our own day-to-day mindset and activities have determined and will continue to determine our nation's response. Is the threat severe enough to continue to use "enhanced interrogation techniques" and to overhaul our archaic Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act system? Are we willing to pay more in taxes to lessen our dependency on Middle Eastern oil? What is the proper balance of civil liberties and security in light of the terrorist threat? It is not simply George W. Bush and a few other convenient caricatures who will decide these questions. The decisions rest also in the hands of Congress, the media, the bureaucracy and, ultimately, with the citizenry itself.

The often puerile finger-pointing that has accompanied the release of this book therefore misses the main point. We can debate who should have known or said what when until we collapse from exhaustion. But the important questions of how we as a society and government are to confront the threat of catastrophic terrorism are staring us in the face. Tenet's book is a bracing reminder of the reality of this grave threat, of the ways and means needed to combat it and of our obligation to address these matters forthrightly and responsibly.

Elbridge Colby was a staff member in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and on the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction.  He is currently an adjunct staff member at the RAND Corporation.  The views expressed in this article are his own and do not reflect the views of the U.S. Government or the RAND Corporation.

¹ "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa" - Excerpt from President Bush's 2003 State of the Union.