Washington – George Tenet’s close friends said he anticipated criticism for some of the claims and anger he expressed in his new memoir about his former life as director of the CIA. He did not expect, they said, that his detractors would include former CIA and military officers.
As his book, “At the Center of the Storm,” debuted Monday, six former CIA analysts called on Tenet to donate a significant portion of royalties to families of service members killed or wounded in Iraq. They also called on him to return the Presidential Medal of Freedom he was awarded in December 2004.
The signed letter chastised Tenet for bottling up criticism of the Bush administration’s handling of the Iraq war for three years and then publicly focusing on how the White House may have sullied his reputation.
Much of the criticism centered also on an interview Tenet gave to CBS News’ “60 Minutes” Sunday night.
Tenet said there was never significant debate among President Bush’s top advisers about the threat Iraq posed before the invasion. He wrote that the White House had no strategy for after the invasion and that senior CIA analysts had warned Bush that a chaotic postwar situation would be exploited by al-Qaeda.
But Tenet did not say those things publicly at the time of his resignation, and he remained silent until he finished the book, which got a $4 million advance.
John Moseman, Tenet’s former chief of staff, said the book is “a valid attempt to balance a record that has been badly distorted.”
The CIA stayed out of the controversy Monday, issuing a statement that honored Tenet’s service and noting that his final years of leadership occurred during an intense and challenging time.
