The Way of the Knife

by Mark Mazzetti

The strange new conflict had also upended how the United States waged war. The traditional wartime chain of command—passing from the White House to the secretary of defense to a four-star commander with a staff of hundreds to build and execute a war plan—had quietly been circumvented. The CIA director was now a military commander running a clandestine, global war with a skeleton staff and very little oversight.

Tenet began pushing aggressively to bulk up the CIA’s paramilitary teams in Afghanistan, and he sold the White House on a program to capture terrorists, hide them in secret jails, and subject them to an Orwellian regimen of brutal interrogation methods. Only Bush, Cheney, and a small group at the White House were overseeing decisions about who should be captured, who should be killed, and who should be spared. This was an abrupt change for Tenet, who in the years before the September 11 attacks had liked to tell his bosses at the White House that CIA officers should stay removed from the process of making policy. He evoked an almost monastic image of the spies at Langley producing intelligence assessments, while those “across the river,” at the White House and in Congress, made decisions based on these assessments. James Pavitt would later tell investigators from the 9/11 Commission that one lesson from the Iran–Contra scandal of the 1980s was that “we don’t do policy from [Langley] . . . and you don’t want us to.”