As he prepared his speech, Tenet returned to the CIA’s founding by Harry Truman. The agency’s purpose was to prevent another Pearl Harbor. The CIA was “an insurance policy” against that sort of strategic surprise. “It is clear to me that the potential for dangerous surprise is as great as ever,” he told Ford’s panel. “That is true whether I look at terrorist groups whose sole purpose is to harm American interests, the biological weapons that Saddam Hussein is still trying to build and to hide in Iraq, or the programs Iran has for building intermediate range missiles and nuclear weapons.”
