In the Center of the Storm / My Years at the CIA
by George Tenet w/ Bill Harlow
publisher: Harper Collins
This book will be of interest to those who want an understanding of how the intelligence services of the United States government operate. Specifically under the leadership of George Tenet He was the leader of the CIA at the tail end of the Clinton Administration as well as at the beginning of the Bush administration. The book is broken down into several different sections. The first is the early years when he took the position of Deputy CIA chief. He then takes on the mantle of CIA chief and is responsible for the co-ordination all of the intelligence gathering for the United States government.
His first actions as chief of the CIA is the war on terror. This war on terror began earlier then the events of 9/11. Al Qaeda, then and now, are the central players that George Tenet was involved with bringing to justice. He also showed what the CIA could do against the Taliban in Afghanistan if given the resources to handle the problem. The opening of the war was very quick and very efficient. In a matter of months they overthrew the Taliban government and set up Karzai as the leader of the interim government.
Not all of the actions of the CIA were efficient. That became very evident during the war in Iraq. There the CIA was hamstrung by the DOD and the State Department and they could not fully implement the measures they wanted. Sadly it became a dark comedy of errors. In tandem with this was the search for weapons of mass destruction. The search for these weapons was not done diligently. Personally, I believe that some of these weapons are still located somewhere in the deserts of Iraq, but will probably never be found seeing that the governments that are taking part in the search were not willing to take whatever efforts were necessary to resolve the problem.
I found George’s book to be of some value in understanding the background of the CIA and other intelligence agencies. It was a somewhat interesting read. The many pictures that were included in the book were rather mundane and do not add to the value of the book itself. On a scale of four stars being the best I give this book two stars. For entertainment purposes this book has no value. For historical purposes, it has some value, but as with all autobiographies, what is written needs to be taken with a grain of salt.
Side note: I have just installed my “Dragon NaturallySpeaking” version 11 and set it up to operate on my computer. It is a word recognition program that changes what you speak into words on the page. This is the first thing I have dictated with it. Not bad, and it is a far improvement over version 6 that I had eight years ago. On a scale of four stars being the best I would, at this time, give the product a rating of three stars.