By: E&P Staff Bob Woodward, who has written three books about the Iraq war, each one more skeptical about it than the previous, takes a shot at former CIA director George Tenet's new volume in The Washington Post. Woodward calls "At the Center of the Storm" a "remarkable, important and often unintentionally damning memoir."
He adds: "A dedicated, often innovative and strong leader beloved by many at the CIA, Tenet nevertheless was hampered by a bureaucrat's view of the world, hobbled by the traditional chain of command, convinced that the CIA director's 'most important relationship with any administration official is generally with the national security adviser.'
"No. Your most important relationship is with the president."
Woodward criticizes Tenet for not coming clean with the president -- and now the readers -- about the intelligence failures in Iraq. He also offers a full disclosure: "In discussions with Tenet as a reporter for this paper, I many times urged him to write his memoir, and, after he resigned from the CIA, I even spent a day with him and his co-writer, Bill Harlow, in late 2005 to suggest questions he should try to address. Foremost, I hoped that he would provide intimate portraits of the two presidents he had served as CIA director -- George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Instead, he has adhered to the rule of CIA directors: protect the president at all costs."
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