form of official brown folders from various parts of the organization asking the director for a formal judgment on a wide range of issues, informal questions to which someone needed an answer, and letters drafted by others for the director to sign and send. If I decided something was routine—if I was confident that I knew how Tenet thought about the issue—I could have a machine (called an autopen) sign it. I would then put a copy of what had gone out in the director’s name in his overnight reading materials. This autopen was to become the source of my first mistake as EA.
A senior Agency officer named Joan Dempsey—who had just finished a stint as Tenet’s chief of staff—handed me a letter that she said needed to be signed right away and sent to the secretary of defense. The subject, an intelligence community technical issue, was incomprehensible to me, but she assured me it was no big deal and I should simply have the guys down the hall crank up the machine and affix the “George J. Tenet” signature to the letter she had drafted. Trusting her judgment, I did just that and put a copy of the resulting letter in Tenet’s thick pile of materials to read athome that night, telling him in a note that I had sent the letter to the “SECDEF.” The next morning I got the letter back with Tenet’s distinctive scrawl all over it. At the top he had written, “Never ever, ever, ever…,” and the ever s continued across the top of the page… down the right side, upside down across the bottom, and up the left-hand margin. After the final ever , he’d written, “autopen a letter to a cabinet member!”
Properly chagrined, I affixed a Post-it note to the letter: “Your instructions are not clear to me. Would you please clarify?” I put it in the night’s reading file. He accepted my riposte in good humor, which tells you a great deal about the kind of boss he was.
My third responsibility was to make sure that when Tenet was scheduled to have a meeting he had everything he needed in advance. This was perhaps the toughest part of the job, because some materials that came forward from lower levels of the Agency and intelligence community were poorly written, badly argued, confusing, or just too long. So I would have to rewrite a lot of stuff on the fly—particularly talking points for his use at White House meetings. Often I did a good job, but sometimes not. Once he read a page of talking points and, not thinking much of it, asked, “Who was the idiot who wrote this?” I raised my hand and said, “That would be me.”
The final part of the job was to do whatever else he asked of me. I was a messenger, a deliverer of good news and bad, a source of information on morale in the building, a traveling companion, the butt of many jokes, and the participant in much humor. Tenet once threatened to give me as a gift to a world leader who had a special interest in young men, going so far as to quickly leave a dinner with the leader while I was visiting the restroom. Luckily I jumped into the last car as the director’s motorcade left the presidential palace. On another occasion, in a large meeting in the director’s conferenceroom, we were discussing a request from another foreign leader for six helicopters as “payment” for operational support that that country had just undertaken on behalf of the Agency. Tenet responded to the leader’s request by saying, “How about we give him three helicopters and Morell?” The room exploded in laughter.
But I had my moments. Tenet was in his office with his senior leadership team late one morning, just before leaving for a particularly important testimony in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee—to explain how CIA had failed to predict India’s May 1988 test of a nuclear weapon. Tenet asked for one piece of advice from everyone and started around the room. I quickly calculated that I would be last, but I didn’t know if Tenet planned to ask me, since I was the most