NYT: George Tenet's Leaving with His Reputation in Tatters ... Like a Long Line of CIA Directors

Philip Taubman, in the NYT (June 6, 2004):

It seems an immutable law of Washington: directors of central intelligence are better remembered for their failures than their successes. George J. Tenet joined the roll last week. Historians may someday credit him for rebuilding the marquee spy service at a dangerous hour in the nation's history, but for now his critics will consign him to the company of men like Allen W. Dulles, who was fired by President Kennedy after the disastrous 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, and William J. Casey, who died in office as the Iran-contra scandal engulfed the Reagan administration.

As he packs up his papers, Mr. Tenet is facing the sort of treatment Dulles was accorded after the Bay of Pigs debacle. Upon learning of the failed invasion, Dean Acheson, Harry Truman's secretary of state, acidly observed to his old boss,"Why we ever engaged in this asinine Cuban adventure, I cannot imagine.''

As Mr. Tenet bid a sad farewell to his colleagues at the Central Intelligence Agency last week, it was hard to recall the last time a Washington spy master stepped down in triumph - or, for that matter, the last time the nation celebrated the achievements of the C.I.A. The closest thing to a rousing success in recent years was the agency's clandestine role in the 1980's in evicting Soviet forces from Afghanistan - though that operation inadvertently laid the groundwork for the rise of Osama bin Laden - and the capture or killing of top Al Qaeda leaders since Sept. 11, 2001.

In recent decades, the most notable distinction of directors of central intelligence has been their limited tenure. Until Mr. Tenet's seven-year run, the turnover rate was dizzying. There were 10 directors from 1973 to 1997, when Mr. Tenet was appointed.

The casualty rate, and the C.I.A.'s reputation, were not always so dismal. Though the agency has courted trouble almost from the day it was born in 1947, there was a halcyon era: the 1950's.

It was a time of expanding ambitions for the C.I.A., when its founding generation - many from Yale, Princeton and other elite universities - came to Washington to serve secretly on the front lines of the cold war. Raw practices that the agency would later come to rue, including assassination plots and expedient alliances with repressive foreign security services, first appeared in the 1950's, but the small circle of people who knew about them ardently believed that the hard-boiled methods were justified by the need to contain the Soviet threat.

Before his unhappy departure in 1961, Dulles spent most of his nearly nine years as director building a first-class intelligence agency, a pioneer in espionage science and technology. At the direction of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, he reluctantly took the lead in developing exotic hardware that revolutionized the spy business, including highflying spy planes and satellites. Eisenhower's decision to turn the projects over to the C.I.A. instead of the Air Force - he thought the agency was more nimble and better at keeping secrets - gave it an important new role that produced some prized accomplishments, including the first photo reconnaissance satellite in 1960.

The C.I.A. prospered, in part, because Dulles operated in a freewheeling environment that most of his successors would have envied. Congressional intervention was almost nonexistent. Only a handful of House and Senate leaders were kept informed, and even those limited consultations were treated like chummy conversations at a well-heeled men's club.

The Washington press corps was much smaller and less aggressive than it is today. There were no embarrassing headlines about the agency's serial failures to get its first spy satellite into operation, for example, because reporters didn't know that the rockets blowing up on a launch pad in California were part of a secret project.

Even the most audacious covert operations - the installation of a pro-American leader in Iran in 1953 and a coup in Guatemala a year later - largely escaped public scrutiny and only enhanced the reputation of the C.I.A. in the classified corridors of Washington.

The turning point was the Bay of Pigs invasion, an improbable scheme cooked up in the final months of the Eisenhower administration that presumed that a small force of Cuban exiles trained by the C.I.A. would ignite an uprising against Fidel Castro, the Cuban leader. The failed attempt, just weeks after John F. Kennedy's inauguration, taught the new president and the nation about the dangers and embarrassments of misconceived covert operations. It has been mostly downhill ever since for the C.I.A., at least in terms of public esteem....