Good Riddance to Tenet

Farewell speeches by federal department heads are usually rather tame affairs. They thank the president, praise their employees and bow out quietly. Outgoing CIA Director George J. Tenet took a different approach Thursday.

He essentially urged agency employees to mutiny if his successor, or Congress, attempt to reform the agency. “If people want to take us back in the wrong direction,” Tenet declared, “then it is your voices that must be raised to say, ‘We know better and we will not stand for it.’ ” That statement seems particularly brazen in the face of a bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report released Friday that supplies damning new details about Tenet’s leadership failures.

As report after report, and committee after committee, has already shown, the CIA did not know better. It does not seem to have known anything, which explains why it repeatedly got snookered by bogus Iraqi defectors, including the aptly named “Curveball,” peddling nightmare scenarios about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.

After Tenet’s speech, a CIA spokesman said the director did not intend to suggest that employees should ignore future reform proposals -- he was referring to personnel practices. But the text shows that this is misleading: Tenet’s remarks were sweeping, including his self-congratulatory, “We have rebuilt every aspect of our business.”

Tenet’s petulant behavior reveals why his seven-year tenure hasn’t been as bad as many people thought; it’s been even worse. Certainly Tenet does not deserve sole blame for the Iraq fiasco, and the Senate Intelligence Committee will focus on the delicate topic of the administration’s politicizing of intelligence when it issues a second report, probably after the November election.

But Tenet’s remarks Thursday underscore that his priority has never been improving the performance of the CIA. It’s been protecting the CIA’s access and influence by any means necessary, whether it required cozying up to President Bush about Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction, sitting behind Secretary of State Colin L. Powell during his bogus address to the United Nations Security Council or now steadfastly denying that anything is amiss.

The Senate’s intelligence report, some of which remains classified, shows that the agency saw what it wanted to see in Iraq. Tenet cannot dodge culpability for that failure. He elbowed out rival State Department intelligence assessments that were more provisional in tone, failed to review Bush’s 2003 State of the Union assertion that Iraq was trying to purchase uranium in Niger and fostered an atmosphere of “group-think” among analysts who stopped analyzing and simply provided skewed reports to the White House.

The Tenet era has mercifully come to an end, but the problems he created have not. In the past, it was rogue operations and assassinations that tainted the agency’s record; today’s woes stem from a paucity of analytical rigor. Setting up competing teams of analysts inside the agency should be considered. But restoring intellectual honesty will require acknowledging that a problem exists in the first place.