Archives for June 2004

resignation story, and is the first (AFAIK) to suggest the obvious truth that Tenet’s resignation is the result of a lost pissing match between he and the administration.

I imagine it went something like this: Chalabi and other Iraqi expats had been discredited in the CIA for years, though there was a continued relationship. They worked with them, but the CIA likely had a very low confidence in what came from these folks. (Coincidentally, this would explain why information about WMD would not have provoked stronger action previously as well – it would have been irresponsible to “move” based on the information through discredited sources). When Bush and in particular Cheney, Perle, and Wolfowitz came to town, Chalabi gained a new status and all of a sudden information that was floating around but not enough to justify a US committment became the gold standard. The world also got a lot more binary at that time, and it is likely that the adminstration forced Tenet’s hand on this by saying “but he still works for you, right?” rather than understanding that in intelligence, you can have people you don’t trust on the payroll. This was probably always a source of tension between the CIA and the Bush admistration, and Tenet probably tried to put things right (according to the CIA point of view) now that it’s becoming clear that Chalabi’s interests have not been concurrent with US interests for some time. He lost.