Is the CIA in crisis with the resignations of top officials?

Producer: Yvonne Gomez
First broadcast: 4 June 04, Radio Singapore International

Less than a day after the resignation of George Tenet, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, or CIA, its deputy director of operations, James Pavitt has also announced his decision to leave the agency.

The CIA is the coordinating organization for American intelligence activities affecting national security, and was responsible for gathering intelligence in Iraq before the war.

Although Tenet has said that he s leaving the CIA for personal reasons, and Pavitt says he's retiring, how likely is it that they are simply scapegoats for the Iraq war's flawed intelligence?

A question Yvonne Gomez put to Associate Professor Brian Farrell from the National University of Singapore.

BF: Tenet is a very dedicated man. There is a bit of an ambiguity here, because he was a Clinton appointee whom Bush kept on, which I think suggests some larger loyalty and commitment to public service per se. I very much doubt he would bail out on the President in the middle of an election year, in the middle of a war, and walk away from his responsibilities which he seems to have taken seriously his entire career. I think he's being made a fall guy, and a fall guy is required. It's an easy target, to poke fun at intelligence agencies and say you got this wrong and you got that wrong after the fact. But the CIA has had a bad run in the last four or five years, and they have missed some things which, really it was their responsibility not to be so far away on. For me, the real clincher is the resignation of the deputy director of operations. Now, there is the man who really should've been more up on the operational side of going after Osama bin Laden and leading Taliban figures in Afghanistan, and on being more aware of exactly where in Iraq, weapons of mass destruction might be, not just found, but secured. To see them both go at the same time, really indicates to me that there is a political angle here.

You've brought up some very interesting points and one of them was that the resignations could point to the CIA suffering from a crisis at the moment. You also mentioned that, while Tenet might be a fall guy, Pavitt's resignation may have been justified. How do you think these two resignations are going to solve any crisis that the CIA is suffering from?

BF: It may actually make things worse in the short term. By all accounts, one thing that Tenet did very successfully was to restore morale at the CIA. He was well-liked by the rank-and-file who believed that he not only efficient, but that he genuinely cared about making them as effective as they could be, about listening to their concerns and trying to act on their suggestions about how they could do their work better. And they don't appear to be very happy about his resignation, and they all seem to believe that he's being made the sacrificial lamb. So in the short term, this may actually make the problem worse.

And what impact would Tenet's and Pavitt's resignations have on on-going investigations into the events of September 11?

BF: If you re talking about whether or not it'll make it harder to get at the so-called truth, I really doubt this will happen. Of course they are all liable to be subpoenaed and be required by law to testify in front of Congressional hearings. Whether they're still in office or not is irrelevant. They will be under oath and will have to disclose what they know what the law allows and compels them to tell, without violating oaths they took to preserve national security, or they could be charged. So I can t see that this will make it any less likely that the truth will come out.

But wasn t Tenet a major driving force behind these investigations? So with him gone, how motivated is the rest of the team going to be?

BF: Those investigations are due to end anytime now anyway. You may have noticed that the media hasn't been talking much about the scandal over the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners in Baghdad. The attention span and public opinion these days is only a couple of news cycles, and in this election year, that would have pushed these issues to the back burner, so I don't see that that's very relevant.

What kinds of reforms can we expect now at the CIA, with these resignations?

BF: None whatsoever, until after the election. I mean, Mr (John) Kerry would presumably have his own ideas about what needs to be done to make the CIA effective, and President Bush would be far too busy trying to win his re-election, to do anything substantial.