By Barbara Slavin
USA TODAY
LANGLEY, Va. -- Some of his employees call him ''Puff Daddy'' for the cigar he clenches between his teeth and the paternal feeling he has spread over one of Washington's most maligned agencies.
But George Tenet is no rap star. A longtime federal bureaucrat, he is an accidental spymaster, vaulted to the leadership of the CIA after the Senate objected to President Clinton's preferred candidate, Anthony Lake, three years ago.
Tenet has tried to make the most of his unexpected rise to the top of the intelligence community. He has quietly boosted morale inside an agency reeling from spy scandals, revolving-door leadership, recruitment woes and doubts about its purpose since the demise of the Soviet Union.
At the same time, Tenet has become a senior member of Clinton's foreign policy team with an unprecedented diplomatic role in Middle East peace talks. Last week, seeking to quell the worst violence in Israel in years, he slipped out of Washington to join Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in Paris and then visited several countries in the Middle East.
''We got lucky,'' says Sen. Bob Kerrey, D-Neb., the former top Democrat on a Senate committee on intelligence. ''George is an extraordinary manager.''
Nevertheless, even Tenet's many admirers say he has a long way to go to right an agency beset by problems that include major intelligence failures, trouble in setting post-Cold War priorities and a bureaucratic structure that puts most intelligence operations under the Pentagon. ''Tenet has become a booster in an intelligent way,'' says Vince Cannistraro, a former CIA counterterrorism chief, ''but it's essentially the same structure created in 1947.''
Tenet, in a rare interview recently in his seventh-floor office at CIA headquarters, not surprisingly disagreed. ''I know I will turn over an organization that is in better shape than I found it,'' he said. ''The whole ship has turned to the 'hard target' approach to life -- proliferation (of weapons of mass destruction), terrorism.'' Those have become his top priorities since the disappearance of a superpower foe.
Tenet has had, by Washington standards, a meteoric rise. A former staffer on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and a member of the National Security Council during Clinton's first term, he came to the CIA as a deputy to agency Director John Deutch in 1995 and became acting director after Deutch quit in 1996. Clinton appointed Tenet only after Lake, the president's national security adviser, fell victim to Republican opposition on Capitol Hill.
Tenet's nonpartisanship smoothed Senate confirmation. Former senator David Boren, D-Okla., who plucked Tenet from the chorus in 1989 and made him the intelligence committee director over more senior staffers, says he still does not know whether Tenet is a Democrat or Republican.
''I'm registered in one party but for the purposes of doing my job, no one should ever know because you have to serve everyone,'' Tenet says. That distinguishes him from Ronald Reagan's CIA director, William Casey, an active Republican who had been Reagan's campaign chairman and was known for fiercely partisan views.
Tenet also has benefited from shunning media attention, which spares him a lot of public finger-pointing when news on the intelligence front is bad. He declines to appear on Sunday talk shows and grants few interviews.
''I think a DCI (director of central intelligence) should keep a very low profile,'' Tenet says. ''The only reason the media would want me to appear is to figure out how to drive wedges between the intelligence community and policymakers, and I'm not going to let that happen.''
Instead, Tenet has focused his public relations skills on a more limited audience: his own agency . Veteran CIA officers were skeptical at first as to whether someone so junior -- Tenet, 47, is the second youngest CIA director -- could reinvigorate their workplace. Tenet seems to have quelled their doubts.
Like the military immediately after the end of the Cold War, the CIA downsized dramatically in the early 1990s, shrinking personnel by 25%. ''By the time we got to '95, the ranks were horribly thin,'' says Gil Medeiros, chief of recruitment. This year, he says, recruitment is at levels unseen since 1987.
Analysts are finally getting access to modern information technology, and a new sense of purpose seems to imbue the shadowy men and women who keep tabs on the world at this leafy campus across the Potomac River from Washington. ''George's ability to motivate a workforce that had been beaten down is one of his great strengths,'' says Jim Pavitt, director of Operations, the CIA's covert action side.
The son of a Greek immigrant who owned a New York diner, Tenet has a blunt but warm style that contrasts with that of his immediate predecessor. A brilliant scientist who began needed reforms, Deutch lacked Tenet's people skills and made no secret of his view that much of the CIA was second-rate.
Whereas Deutch was generally surrounded by a retinue of aides, Tenet wanders the building alone and once disguised himself with a receding hairline and glasses. He eats frequently in the cafeteria, plays basketball on an in-house team and shuns the limousine to which he is entitled to sit next to the driver in an SUV.
''The African-Americans here call him 'Puff Daddy,' '' says an employee who gave only her first name, Tina.
Tenet got the rapper's nickname because of his habit of chomping on an unlit cigar and the warm feeling he has spread among a workforce that had come to feel -- after five directors in 10 years -- as if they were foster children.
''It's a good news story,'' says Rep. Porter Goss, R-Fla., chairman of the House Select Intelligence Committee. ''Almost everywhere I go, I find young enthusiastic case officers doing innovative things.''
Despite such praise, there have been serious intelligence failures on Tenet's watch.
* Terrorists affiliated with exiled Saudi fundamentalist Osama Bin Laden bombed two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998, killing 12 Americans and more than 200 Africans.
* Earlier that year, the CIA failed to predict nuclear tests by India that sparked testing by rival Pakistan and dashed the administration's hopes of nonproliferation.
* During last year's Kosovo war, the United States bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade using targeting information provided by the CIA. Tenet later fired a midlevel officer. The United States apologized to China and paid more than $32 million in compensation.
Answering accusations
Tenet said that since the bombings in Africa, the CIA and FBI have had great success pre-empting other Bin Laden attacks, but he refused to provide details.
He also refused to discuss agency actions against Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, who, according to senior U.S. officials, is the CIA's other top target. ''I don't talk about Iraq. Period,'' Tenet said.
He denied that the CIA engages in ''economic espionage'' to steal secrets for U.S. companies.
''We do play defense'' if business secrets of U.S. companies are targeted by foreign countries, but ''we pass the information to the Department of Commerce and State Department,'' he said.
Within the agency, Tenet has beefed up the clandestine operations side in a manner unseen since the Casey days. The precise number of personnel assigned to the division is a secret. Pavitt says the figure has gone up by the ''hundreds'' but still represents ''way less than half'' of the agency's estimated 17,000 employees.
Critics say Tenet has been seduced by the people he was sent to lead. ''They're case officers,'' Cannistraro says. ''Their No. 1 job is to recruit the new director.''
Others fault Tenet for making the CIA more secretive again. Example: ending the agency's two-year experiment of publicizing the intelligence budget -- a figure that is believed to exceed $30 billion a year. Critics say he also has been slow to release files on past CIA scandals, and supports a Senate bill that would punish U.S. officials who release classified information.
''It serves his purpose to be perceived as a hard-liner,'' says Steven Aftergood, director of a project on government security at the Federation of American Scientists, a non-profit policy group in Washington. ''He does not need the support of the general public as much as his Directorate of Operations.''
Tenet, defending his record on openness, said the CIA now has more officers working on declassifying documents than it does on counterterrorism.
His chief struggle, he said, is to open the agency to the mushrooming outside sources of information and keep pace with change that makes commercial satellite imagery as good or better than that provided to policymakers. ''I have to make sure that the U.S. government is 10, 20 years ahead of what will be commercially available,'' Tenet said. ''I have to make sure that the (eavesdropping) capability can keep pace with the massive technological change that could deny us the ability to do our job.''
Aided by a splashy advertising campaign, a made-for-TV movie and new rules that permit hiring on the spot, CIA recruiters say they have met 95% of their targets for the past two years.
However, the agency still has difficulty attracting midcareer analysts and specialists in infrastructure technology.
Also, though attrition rates are low compared with the private sector -- 4% a year vs. 15%, according to Tenet -- retention is a major concern, especially considering that by the year 2005, up to 40% of the workforce will have been at the CIA for five years or less.
''My problem is Cisco's problem, is General Motors' problem, is Martin Marietta's problem, is a dot-com problem,'' Tenet said. ''We can't give you stock options and make you rich, but the psychic income here is terrific. Young people here are given more responsibility and greater access to big issues than anyplace else.''
When it comes to Tenet's own retention, he is less definitive. Some intelligence veterans -- including Goss and Pavitt -- say the next president should keep Tenet on for at least two more years.
Advisers to GOP nominee George W. Bush say Paul Wolfowitz, an ex-State and Defense Department official, has expressed interest in the CIA post, once held by Bush's father. Advisers to Vice President Gore say he has made no decision. Boren says Tenet would do well in a broader foreign policy position, in which he could draw on the skills he has honed in Mideast peace talks. Tenet helped develop a plan for a CIA-Israeli-Palestinian security cooperation and has been intensively involved this week in efforts to end the worst clashes in the Middle East in years. Tenet said he loves his job, but he also has thought about doing something less grueling so he can spend more time with his family, particularly his 13-year-old son.
''This is a 24-by-7 job,'' he said. ''You're never off, even on vacation. That's also the beauty of the job. The range of issues, the pace. You're never bored here.''