George J. Tenet served as Director of Central Intelligence from 1997 to 2004, the longest serving DCI since William J. Casey. His tenure spanned the September 11 attacks and the launch of the enhanced interrogation techniques program; in John Kiriakou’s account he is the figure most directly responsible for the agency’s early-2000s institutional posture, and the patron — the “rabbi” in agency parlance — of John Brennan’s subsequent rise.
The Brennan rabbi relationship
Per Kiriakou — who has known Brennan personally since 1990 — Brennan’s institutional advancement inside the CIA was structurally dependent on Tenet’s patronage. “He had a rabbi in George Tenet. And the next thing you know, he’s at the top of the heap.” The relationship is the institutional explanation Kiriakou offers for Brennan’s rise despite what Kiriakou characterizes as a clear personality profile — “the archetypal sociopath” — that the agency’s selection process should otherwise have flagged.[1][2]
EIT acceptance
In late October 2001 — at a cocktail party in the days following the September 11 attacks — Tenet personally accepted the pitch from contract psychologists Mitchell and Jessen for what became the enhanced interrogation techniques program. The agency signed the Mitchell and Jessen contract in January 2002. The first detainee on whom the program was applied was Abu Zubaydah, captured by John Kiriakou’s team in Pakistan in March 2002.[3][4]
The Five Eyes file-opening
In the early-2000s reorganization of relationships among the Anglosphere intelligence services after September 11, Tenet personally ordered that the Five Eyes — the U.S., U.K., Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand services — “literally open the files” to each other. The directive established the contemporary practice of Five Eyes liaison officers sitting at each other’s headquarters.[5][6]
The “prism of smoke” quote
Tenet’s memoir contains the paraphrased line cited repeatedly by Kiriakou in his characterization of the post-9/11 U.S. national-security mood: “All major foreign policy decisions after 9/11 were viewed through the prism of smoke from the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.” Kiriakou treats the line as accurate description — “absolutely true” — and applies it to his own framing of the moral conduct of senior CIA personnel of the period, including Jose Rodriguez, James Mitchell, and Bruce Jessen.[7]
Kiriakou’s broader assessment
In the Kiriakou framing, Tenet belongs to the senior-CIA-figures-of-the-post-9/11-period cohort — alongside John McLaughlin, Michael Morell, Jose Rodriguez, and Rick Pavitt — whom Kiriakou holds responsible for “a lot of crimes that were committed in the name of national security.” Kiriakou treats Tenet as categorically distinct from John Brennan, however: Brennan, in Kiriakou’s framework, “plotted against an elected president of the United States,” which is a different and more dangerous category of conduct than the EIT-era senior leadership’s failures.[8]