"Greaseball" is an American expression that is used, among other things to describe a member of the Mafia or any other slippery or sleazy type. This was the term used at Mossad headquarters in Glilot to describe CIA director George Tenet. The nickname was used by members of the Cosmos unit of the Mossad's North American desk (which is responsible, among other things, for contacts with foreign intelligence services), because of his body language and his manner of speech.

Tenet was almost a regular visitor at Mossad headquarters and in Tel Aviv hotels during the second half of the 1990s. He came here when he was still deputy director of the CIA, as a peace broker and a coordinator of security arrangements between Israel and the Palestinians.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict preoccupied him to such an extent that he found it proper to devote a respectable place to it - over 10 percent of the 500 pages of his new book: "At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA," which was published at the beginning of the month.

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Tenet's book is causing an uproar in the corridors of power of President George W. Bush's administration. Tenet is very critical of all the president's men, especially the group of neocons that Vice President Dick Cheney gathered around himself. Tenet's principal arguments deal with the manipulative use that Bush and Cheney's people made of intelligence assessments, in order to initiate the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

George Tenet was born in New York in 1954. His father immigrated to the United States from Greece, his mother from southern Albania. They lived in Queens and ran a restaurant. During his childhood he was considered a kid with a "big mouth," who couldn't keep secrets, and he was therefore surprised when he was appointed to the lofty position. Tenet studied for his bachelor's degree at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. where he now teaches, and for his master's in international relations at Columbia University. After completing his studies he worked in Congress in various staff positions, until he was appointed to head the staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee. In 1995 John Deutsch tapped him for the CIA and appointed him his deputy. Two years later, at the age of 44, he was appointed CIA chief.

Tenet writes that at least 90 percent of his trips abroad during his seven years as director of the CIA were to the Middle East. He speaks mainly about the period following the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, at the height of the wave of Hamas attacks in February 1996. During those days then president Bill Clinton was afraid that the Oslo process would collapse, and in order to save it he asked the CIA to serve as a mediator, to build confidence and good communications, and to conduct the negotiations for achieving security arrangements between Israel and the Palestinians. Several senior officials at the agency argued that the request would damage the CIA, because it would place it at the center of a diplomatic-political process that is not part of its traditional role: "stealing" the secrets of others, gathering intelligence and writing assessments.

General Arafat

John Deutsch, the chief of the CIA at the time, who did not particularly hold a high regard for his agency workforce, acceded to the president's request. He volunteered his deputy, Tenet, for the assignment. Tenet writes that "these were not the "highbrow" trips in the style of Henry Kissinger, but rather quite a difficult combination of intelligence work and diplomacy. In the end Tenet fell in love with his assignment, but only after he discovered that his trips to Jerusalem, Ramallah, Bethlehem, Tel Aviv and Amman were not pleasant morning strolls in rose gardens. Because of his Mediterranean roots, Tenet may have felt at home in the Middle East, but there is no question he was "at home" with a dysfunctional family.

When one reads his book, one gets the impression that the man who interested Tenet most of all during his frequent trips to the Middle East was Yasser Arafat, to whom he devotes an entire chapter. "There were all the eccentricities, the unpredictability, the constant theater," he writes, but adds that he couldn't help liking him in spite of them. Tenet and his regular escort, head of the CIA station in Tel Aviv, Stan Moscowitz (who died a year ago), used to bet how much time would pass from the beginning of the meeting until Arafat would reply, "I'm still suffering," when someone asked him how he was feeling.

In October 2000, during a meeting at the residence of the U.S. ambassador to Paris, General Moshe Ya'alon, in the presence of then secretary of state Madeleine Albright, addressed Arafat as "rais" (leader). "Arafat went into a sudden rage: 'You will call me General Arafat. I was the greatest general in the Egyptian army.' I didn't even know he was in the Egyptian army, much less a general or a great one," writes Tenet, summing up the anecdote.

Tenet tells of another event that took place shortly afterward, at the summit conference in Sharm-al-Sheikh. Tenet found himself in the same room with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Arafat. His assignment was to brief the Palestinian leader about the efforts to reach agreements. Arafat pretended not to understand what the director of the CIA was saying to him. He writes that this was always Arafat's custom when he wanted to gain time, and adds: "From the corner of my eye, I saw Hosni Mubarak, the president of Egypt, host of the conference, and the closest thing Palestine had to a guarantor, looking at me and Arafat and twirling his finger beside his head, the universal symbol for: 'This guy you're talking to is nuts.'"

"To truly set Arafat off," writes Tenet, "all you had to do was say the word: 'Kuwaitis' and he would be gone. 'Ah, the Kuwaitis, they can go to hell,' he would say, 'but not with my money.' I never knew what they had done to offend him: Maybe he had an account frozen in some Kuwaiti bank."

In order to understand what Tenet really thinks of Arafat, one has to read his recollection of a conversation he had with Major General Shlomo Yannai at the Camp David summit in July 2000. Yannai tried to explain to Tenet that Arafat's choice was to be a David Ben-Gurion who would establish the Palestinian state, or to be Moses, who led his people to the Promised Land, but didn't enter it himself. "He would never lead his people to the Promised Land; he couldn't even walk out of the front door. In fact, he was neither Moses nor Ben-Gurion," says Tenet.

Barak went into seclusion

Tenet did not always have it easy with the Israelis, either. Regarding the behavior of prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu during the Wye talks in 1998, he writes that Netanyahu, for political reasons, demanded security arrangements for Israel that exceeded any logical criteria. Tenet was especially furious at Netanyahu's attempt to demand at the last moment of the talks, as a condition for any agreement with the Palestinians, the release of spy Jonathan Pollard. President Clinton was inclined to accede to the request, but Tenet, after consulting with Stan Moscowitz, presented an ultimatum of his own: "If that spy is released I won't be your CIA director in the morning," he said to his president, in a brief conversation in the middle of the night. He told Clinton that the subject had nothing to do with the negotiations.

Regarding Ami Ayalon, the former head of the Shin Bet security services, Tenet writes that he was direct and they could rely on him not to play games. Tenet believes this was the reason why Ayalon did not participate in the Wye summit, and was replaced by his deputy Yisrael Hasson (today an MK from the Yisrael Beiteinu party). "Netanyahu wanted to leave him at home, because Ami, like Rabin, couldn't lie. Physically, both men were incapable of it."

During one of his conversations with Meir Dagan, who was head of Netanyahu's Bureau of Counter-Terrorism at the time (and who now heads the Mossad), "I asked if he knew Gen. Amin al-Hindi, the head of the Palestinian external security service. Meir Dagan looked straight at me and said: 'I know Amin al-Hindi. I chased him around the West Bank for two years to put a bullet in his head.' 'Well,' I told him, returning his smile, 'he is on the other side of the room.' Happily, he understood that my suggestion was a rhetorical one only."

Tenet does not spare his criticism of the behavior of prime minister Ehud Barak during the July 2000 Camp David talks. He writes that they were surprised that Barak "had retreated to his cabin shortly after the first day of the talks and had not come out since, except for solitary walks." Tenet reveals that "the CIA assessment in advance of the summit was that while Barak was coming to Camp David to conclude a framework agreement for a permanent settlement, Arafat had no such intention. The chairman had come to the summit because he did not want to insult [then] president Clinton."

The author is not pleased with either side. He writes that during every meeting with the Israelis and the Palestinians they constantly repeated claims that they had made in the previous meeting. The Americans also knew that about 40 percent of what the Israeli and Palestinians were saying was not the truth. The Israelis and the Palestinians also had a habit of shouting at one another, and "nothing Anglo-Saxon" took place in the negotiations with them, as Tenet describes the situation, with arrogance bordering on disdain. Only a few pages earlier, he had written that he felt at home in the Middle East and that the conduct of the negotiations reminded him of the excitement of his Greek neighbors in Queens: "Perhaps it was my Greek ancestry, but I was used to people speaking emotionally, with lots of arm-waving and raised voices."

However, in spite of all his criticism of both sides, Tenet writes that he likes the Israelis: their passion for life, what they did to defend themselves and to establish their state. But he says that he also became close to the Palestinians, including Yasser Arafat.

It can be said that Tenet's book includes many anecdotes about Arab and Israeli leaders, and Tenet's personal opinion of them, but it is hard to find a clear statement regarding the strategy behind U.S. activities in the Middle East, and he does not supply a vision based on his experience in the intelligence and diplomatic spheres.

Self-righteous and whining

The overall tone of the book is self-righteous and whining. Tenet, who also headed the entire U.S. intelligence community, with its 17 branches, was for seven years the director of an organization that experienced bitter failures: In May 1998, it was surprised by the nuclear tests carried out by India and Pakistan, within three weeks of one another. About four months later, Al Qaeda terrorists blew up the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. At the same time, its main purpose was to track Osama bin Laden and foil his plots, but the CIA and Tenet failed, and reached their nadir on September 11, 2001.

Hovering above Tenet's career is also the dark cloud of the erroneous and "tailored" intelligence information that provided justification for the Bush administration to embark on the war against Saddam Hussein. The attack on Tenet and on his book came from the neocons and the liberals.

On the one hand, the neocons are trying to attack his credibility, and send Douglas Feith into the fray; he is the undersecretary of defense for policy, who in a critical article in The Wall Street Journal went over every paragraph in Tenet's book with a magnifying glass in order to discover inaccuracies, mistakes in dates and other marginal details. He succeeded in his mission. Tenet writes, for example, that Moshe (Bogie) Ya'alon was chief of staff in October 2000, although Ya'alon was appointed to the position in July 2002. One could have expected the director of the CIA to check and be more careful about details.

On the other hand, the liberals are attacking him for the fact that under his leadership, the CIA adopted unusual methods, including kidnapping terror suspects from the streets of cities worldwide, flying them to secret prison installations, which were dubbed "ghost prisons," and there using torture order to interrogate them. Tenet, laundering words - he calls torture "enhanced interrogation techniques" - rejects the criticism and justifies his actions with an explanation that is very familiar to the Israeli reader: "We're at war."