![]() Under questioning by Whipple, Tenet blames "policies" that "were out of date." Former Bush White House counterterrorism adviser Richard A. Years after the debacle, two FBI agents who had been stationed in the CIA's Osama bin Laden tracking unit came forward to say that the CIA knew two of the future hijackers were in the United States but-for reasons that remain unclear-forbade them from alerting their headquarters, which is responsible for preventing domestic attacks. Tenet and company are full of excuses, however, when it comes to the CIA's own failures to prevent the 9/11 attacks. ![]() ![]() "I mean, how is it that you could warn senior people so many times and nothing actually happened?" It was like " The Twilight Zone ," he says. "You know what pisses me off? When people call this an intelligence failure," he says on the show, nearly jumping out of his seat. Likewise, Tenet's former deputy Cofer Black is still livid about those White House meetings more than 14 years ago. He could "barely contain himself when talking about the unheeded warnings he says he gave the White House," says Chris Whipple, executive producer and writer of The Spymasters: CIA in the Crosshairs, a surprisingly riveting documentary premiering November 28 on Showtime. So naturally, when he sat down for his first on-the-record interview in more than eight years, Tenet tore into the failure of others to act on his warnings, from 1999 through the late summer of 2001, that Al-Qaeda was determined to strike targets in the United States. Bush's disastrous invasion of Iraq, which the CIA enabled with its false finding that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. After all, he was the nation's top intelligence officer during three of the nation's most troubling espionage failures: the 1999 bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, Serbia the September 11, 2001, attacks and George W. ![]() Whipple and Bird discussed the CIA's innerworkings, successes and failures, role in American history, and ultimately its fundamental purpose.George Tenet, the former CIA director, has been understandably reluctant about giving interviews since he resigned from the spy agency 11 years ago. Most important, in times of national crisis, including deadly pandemics, the CIA director must be the president’s, and the nation’s, honest broker of information.Ĭhris Whipple participated in The Spymasters: How The CIA Directors Shaped History & the Future on December 17, 2020. It was Director Richard Helms’s refusal to carry out the Watergate coverup that brought down Nixon in the scandal over President Trump’s shakedown of Ukraine’s president, it was a CIA whistleblower who brought Trump to the verge of being removed from office. It is the story of how CIA directors have stood up to rogue presidents, from Richard Nixon to Donald Trump. The Spymasters resonates with themes from today’s headlines. Friend of The Common Good and titan of TV and journalism, Tom Brokaw, described Whipple’s book, The Spymasters, this way: “Fascinating…Whipple parts the curtains on the dark arts to show the triumphs and failures, the personalities and rivalries of those who work in the shadows of espionage.” Whipple recently published his book “The Spymasters” which provided a remarkable, behind-the-scenes look at the world’s most powerful intelligence agency. His last book, Gatekeepers, on White House Chiefs of Staff was a NYTimes bestseller. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, Vanity Fair, Politico, the Daily Beast, and many other publications. Chris served as the executive producer and writer of Showtime’s 2015 documentary film The Spymasters: CIA in the Crosshairs. He is currently the chief executive officer of CCWHIP Productions and is a frequent guest on MSNBC and CNN. He is a multiple Peabody and Emmy Award–winning producer at CBS’s 60 Minutes and ABC’s Primetime. Chris Whipple is one of the most accomplished multimedia journalists of our era: a writer, documentary filmmaker, and speaker.
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