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CNN Newsnight Aaron Brown

George Tenet Resigns; Remembering Tiananmen Square

Aired June 03, 2004 - 22:00 ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

AARON BROWN, CNN ANCHOR: Good evening again.
It was announced almost as an afterthought. Oh, by the way, the director of the CIA is quitting. We feel some sympathy for George Tenet. In his business, the successes often go unreported and unnoticed outside of government. Its failures become the stories that dominate our lives and our destinies. We don't know about the successes, though logic tells us there have been many.

The failures, well, that is something we all know about; 9/11 was a failure. How much could be laid at the doorstep of the CIA is something for the 9/11 Commission to sort out. The prewar Iraqi intelligence was also clearly a failure. And it is a failure that has damaged the reputations of the country and the agency.

History will sort through all of this, as history should. We suspect history will also ask this question: Did Mr. Tenet simply tell his bosses what they wanted to hear? And, if he did, that would be the biggest failure of all. History later. The headlines first.

"The Whip," beginning in Washington with CNN's David Ensor -- David, a headline.

DAVID ENSOR, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT: Aaron, it is not really a surprise that George Tenet wants to leave his job as director of central intelligence. He's been looking for an exit strategy for about a year. The surprise is the timing. And it is raising questions, like why now and was it entirely his decision? -- Aaron.

BROWN: David, thank you. We'll get to you at the top tonight.

Next to Rome, where the president arrived tonight, along with our senior White House correspondent, John King.

John, a headline from there.

JOHN KING, CNN SR. WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Aaron, administration officials insist that George Tenet's decision to resign caught them by surprise and that Mr. Tenet was not pushed out by the White House. Still, the officials say his resignation could quiet the campaign-year calls back in the United States for someone to be held accountable for major intelligence failures.

BROWN: John, thank you.

Finally, the war and the consequences of fighting it with a scarcity of troops, some would say. Our senior Pentagon correspondent, Jamie McIntyre, on that tonight.

Jamie, the headline.

JAMIE MCINTYRE, CNN MILITARY AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT: Aaron, the Army's latest stop-loss order is starting a debate over whether the U.S. military is too small and whether the nation's all-volunteer Army is all that volunteer.

BROWN: Jamie, thank you. We'll get back to you and the rest coming up in a bit.

Also coming up on the program on this Thursday night, we look back at what really happened 15 years ago in Tiananmen Square and what happened because of it. Also tonight, how a horse has become the pride of a city, Philadelphia, that needs and wants very much a champion. And what has not happened yet, but will, because it will be in tomorrow morning's papers. That's coming up, too. All that and more in the hour ahead.

We begin tonight with the resignation of George Tenet. He is the first and so far the only big name in the president's national security team to step down since Iraq and 9/11. His departure comes, he says, at his own initiative on his own timetable. A cynic would say that might even be true. A mere skeptic would note that the announcement came in advance of two potentially devastating reports on Mr. Tenet's leadership and just in time to allow a president running for reelection to move on. Safe to say the skeptics have plenty of questions tonight.

We'll start, however, with the facts and CNN's David Ensor.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ENSOR (voice-over): George Tenet says it was he who told the president that he wants to leave office in mid-July after 7 years as director of central intelligence.

GEORGE TENET, CIA DIRECTOR: While Washington and the media will put many different faces on the decision, it was a personal decision. And had only one basis in fact, the well-being of my wonderful family. Nothing more and nothing less.

ENSOR: Tenet is likable and politically astute. But the 9/11 attacks by al Qaeda came on his watch, by definition an intelligence failure. So was the case at the U.N. for going to war to stop Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, weapons that have yet to be found. It was, after all, Tenet quoted in Bob Woodward's book saying it was a slam dunk case.

SEN. RICHARD SHELBY (R) ALABAMA: The record is there that there have been more failures on his watch as director of CIA, massive failures of intelligence, than anybody I know.

BOB KERREY, 9/11 COMMISSION MEMBER: He did a terrific job as DCI and I'm sad to see that there's so many people sort of gunning for him, trying to run him out of that position. TENET: We're not perfect, but one of our best-kept secrets is that we are very, very, very good.

ENSOR: Tenet's deputy John McLaughlin, a career CIA man, will take over in July as acting director. Some are calling for the job to be redefined with more powers, before a new director is selected.

REP. JANE HARMAN, (D) CALIFORNIA: I think before we replace him, we should replace his job.

ENSOR: Tenet says, despite some disappointments, he's proud of his record. A senior intelligence official points to the quick war in Afghanistan, to Libya giving up weapons of mass destruction, to rolling up the nuclear black market of Pakistan's A.Q. Khan and to two thirds of al Qaeda's leaders having been killed or captured, though Osama bin Laden is still out there.

Some are suggesting that Tenet may want to go before the 9/11 Commission report comes out this summer and reports from Hill committees on Iraq WMD that sources say are highly critical of the intelligence community and of Tenet.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ENSOR: But stressing the personal nature of his decision to go, a very senior intelligence official says that in August Tenet hopes to be looking at colleges with his high school senior son -- Aaron.

BROWN: Well, I think the question that will dominate much of the program tonight and there's lots of people are thinking about it and reporting on it, was he pushed or did he jump?

ENSOR: Yes, we're all wondering about that.

And I guess the best I can do to contribute to that is to say this. A year ago, George Tenet says he went into the president and offered his resignation. The president said: I need you. Don't leave. Stay. And Tenet did so. Yesterday, George Tenet went in again, said the same thing, and the president said, fine, let's announce it right away.

BROWN: David, thank you -- David Ensor in Washington tonight.

We mentioned at the top the announcement of Mr. Tenet's resignation may go down as one of the greatest, oh, by the way, moments in recent history. The president worked it in at the end of a quick session with reporters, then left town, which in Washington practically guarantees you'll be hearing plenty of buzz for quite some time to come.

Again, traveling with the president, our senior White House correspondent John King.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: He served his nation as the director...

KING (voice-over): The president tried to make clear Director Tenet was not forced out by the White House.

BUSH: He has been a strong and able leader at the agency. He's been a -- he's been a strong leader in the war on terror and I will miss him.

KING: Administration officials say Tenet delivered the news in a private White House meeting Wednesday night. Mr. Bush said he would make the announcement, and did so Thursday morning just before leaving for Europe, when Mr. Bush's major goal is to use the political transition in Iraq to turn a new page in relations with France and other Iraq war opponents.

BUSH: A sovereign Iraq deserves the full support of the international community.

KING: While insisting the timing is coincidental, some administration officials say the Tenet resignation fits with the goal of moving past the bitter debate over war and whether Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. But Bush critics say it will only serve as a reminder.

JOHN PODESTA, FORMER CLINTON WHITE HOUSE CHIEF OF STAFF: And I think this certainly steps on it and it kind of reinforces the fact that in essence the intelligence case that he made to go in to Iraq was faulty and flawed. And he had no plan for getting us out of there.

KING: And while stressing Mr. Bush wanted Tenet to stay, administration officials say the resignation should quiet campaign year demands that home that someone be held accountable for intelligence failures in Iraq and before the 9/11 attacks in the United States. Presumptive Democratic nominee John Kerry, for example, called for tenet's resignation months ago, but some leading Democrats made clear it's not enough.

REP. NANCY PELOSI (D-CA), MINORITY LEADER: I think that many more people are responsible for the mess that the Bush administration has gotten us into.

KING: Others were alarmed at the timing.

SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN (D), CALIFORNIA: We're in the middle of a major alert with respect to the anticipation that there might be another attack on our own country.

KING: Administration officials say there is no timetable for picking a new CIA chief and that Tenet deputy John McLaughlin will run the agency in the meantime.

(on camera): Some leading Republicans suggest the president wait until after the November election to name a new CIA chief to avoid what could be a contentious preelection confirmation debate. But others say leaving the job vacant for several months could undermine Mr. Bush's constant promise to wage a relentless war on terrorism.

John King, CNN, Rome.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: A quick note on Mr. McLaughlin's resume. John King mentioned him briefly. He's been George Tenet's deputy for the last four years, with the agency for 32. He specialized, as many of them did, with European and Soviet issues during the '70s and '80s and focused mainly on the Baltic states and later North Korea.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ROBERT BAER, FORMER CIA OFFICER: John McLaughlin is a good analyst. He's very popular inside the CIA. He's obviously not going to take the CIA over. I don't think he will. But he certainly doesn't carry any baggage with him and he's probably been a good deputy to Tenet.

I think he'll do just fine as interim director. But if you're going to take the CIA into reforms, you're going to need somebody with a lot of political clout in this town. And a senior analyst is not the guy to do it.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BROWN: Well, we'll see.

In his remarks today, Director Tenet referred to Mr. McLaughlin by his agency nickname, Merlin, remarks, by the way, that included only the barest mention of shortcomings over the last seven years -- unfair to expect otherwise, perhaps.

This was after all as much a pep talk as anything else, aimed at colleagues, not critics. All the same, it has also left those very same critics with plenty to say about accountability and responsibility and where the buck ought to stop.

With that, CNN's Barbara Starr.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BARBARA STARR, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Washington began buzzing as soon as CIA Director George Tenet resigned. Was he being held accountable for intelligence failures ranging from 9/11 to Iraq? Officially, the resignation was Tenet's idea, but many immediately looked for indications that Tenet and perhaps others were finally being taken to task.

PELOSI: If Mr. Tenet thinks there should be a change of leadership at the CIA, for whatever reason, including taking it -- taking one for the administration, then so be it. But I think that the responsibility goes far beyond George Tenet.

STARR: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld also is facing questions of accountability, in his case for the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal and the war itself.

SEN. TOM HARKIN (D), IOWA: Mr. Rumsfeld, because of his actions and his statements and his policies during his tenure as secretary of defense, is ultimately responsible.

STARR: Holding senior leaders accountable is rooted in deep tradition.

JAMES WEBB, FORMER NAVY SECRETARY: There is an old saying in the military that you can delegate authority, but you can't delegate responsibility. And so as a result, you are in a technical sense traditionally responsible for everything that goes on under your command.

STARR: Early on, Rumsfeld drew his own line in the sand and it appears to be working.

DONALD RUMSFELD, SECRETARY OF DEFENSE: Needless to say, if I felt I could not be effective, I would resign in a minute. I would not resign simply because people try to make a political issue out of it.

STARR: Even the "Military Times" newspaper, which called for Rumsfeld to go, thinks his job is safe for now after President Bush's strong endorsement.

TOBIAS NAEGELE, "MILITARY TIMES": I don't see Don Rumsfeld going anywhere.

STARR (on camera): It was, of course, Harry Truman who said the buck stops here. President Bush often speaks of accountability, but in Washington, it is also a question of effectiveness. Some now say that ended for George Tenet and wonder if it is still possible for Donald Rumsfeld.

Barbara Starr, CNN, the Pentagon.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: It is fair to say we would miss a good deal of the texture of this and just about any other Washington story without the reporting of "Newsweek" magazine's Michael Isikoff and Walter Pincus of "The Washington Post."

And we're pleased to have them both with us tonight.

Michael, you want weigh in on what -- did he jump or was he pushed?

MICHAEL ISIKOFF, "NEWSWEEK": It looks like this is more sort of a wink, wink, nod, nod situation.

It is very clear -- the White House knew that this -- that the Senate Intelligence Committee report is coming very soon, next few weeks. Senator Pat Roberts, the chairman of the committee, has been keeping the White House apprised of what the report is going to say. It is expected to be this stinging indictment of the CIA.

And it is an exhaustive report that is going to refocus attention on all the multiple intelligence failures that led up to the invasion in Iraq. So that was sort of one thing coming down the pike that was going to refocus attention on the CIA and George Tenet's leadership. As a sort of footnote to that, the CIA had been contesting many of the findings of the report until recently, when I'm told that they sort of threw in the towel and said, look, we don't really have much of a -- we can't really challenge much of what you've finally said here.

And Director Tenet, who had earlier been asked the opportunity to rebut the report, had gone up in March. Then he got the report and he kind of sort of said, I'm not going to come up there and defend this anymore. So that was one thing. And then you also have the September 11 commission report coming out next month. And that, again, is going refocus attention on the intelligence failures that preceded the September 11 attacks.

BROWN: Walter, a couple of areas here. Obviously, there were significant problems with the prewar Iraqi intelligence. As far as you know, was the agency off on the postwar intelligence, how the postwar period would go?

WALTER PINCUS, NATIONAL SECURITY REPORTER, "THE WASHINGTON POST": I think you'll find that not only the agency, but Defense intelligence and the State Department all warned that postwar Iraq would be a tougher fight than prewar Iraq. It is one of the reasons why General Shinseki wanted 200,000 or 300,000 troops. They saw it coming, but it was ignored.

BROWN: And on the question of timing, obviously, there is some political benefit to the president for Mr. Tenet to leave now. Do you have any sense that the election campaign played any role in Mr. Tenet's thinking?

PINCUS: He doesn't say so.

But I have talked to friends of his, Governor Boren, Senator Boren, one of his closest friends, told me today that he was concerned that if he stayed, it is clear, not just the reports, but the famous remark in Bob Woodward's book that WMD was a slam dunk would be a campaign issue. Intelligence would be a campaign issue. He would be caught in the middle. His agency would be caught in the middle. And he didn't want to be set up so that he would have to in effect defend the administration, defend a candidate running for president, appear to be partisan.

And that's -- it may not be the first reason, but nothing is ever done here for one reason. There are a lot of things that came together.

BROWN: Yes.

Michael, is there any sense that Mr. Tenet was a political animal in this sense? He's obviously a political animal. You can't survive in the city without being one. But that he tailored his message to what he believed his bosses in the White House wanted to hear?

ISIKOFF: Well, you know, he was a very shrewd bureaucratic infighter and schmoozer.

Remember, this is a Clinton appointee who flourished as part -- as a member of the Bush inner circle. Famously, in the fall of 2000, he presides over the ceremony at CIA headquarters renaming it after George W. Bush's father. So that was one way of currying favor from the beginning. He bonded with the president. The president clearly liked him.

And getting back to your question about sort of pushed or left on his own, I think it was pretty clear that from the White House's point of view -- and Tenet knew this -- it would be better for him to leave before the intelligence failures reached critical mass with the upcoming reports. He kind of read the tea leaves and sort of took preemptive action.

BROWN: Gentlemen, good to have you with us tonight. Thank you. Appreciate it a lot.

Ahead on the program tonight, remember wild Bill Donovan? Well, don't worry. We'll remind you who he was and we'll take back -- take a look back at the history of American spying, which isn't all that old, really.

Also tonight, we'll see what or rather who is turning Philadelphia into a city of winners, at long last.

From New York, this is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: If we widen the lens a bit, George Tenet's departure marks another turning point in an agency that has seen and made its share of history.

Mr. Tenet was the latest in a long list of spymasters, a job born in the wake of another war more than a half a century ago.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN (voice-over): The agency was born in the turbulent days immediately following the end of World War II, created originally as the Office of Strategic Services, the OSS, by FDR at a time when at least some of the world was still adhering to the maxim, gentlemen, don't read each other's mails.

Its first director was William Donovan, "Wild Bill" Donovan he was called. He had been in charge of the wartime OSS. By the time John Kennedy became president, Allen Dulles was the CIA director, his brother, the secretary of state. But Allen Dulles lost his job after the fiasco at the Bay of Pigs.

Throughout the late '60s and into the '80s, the CIA's principal focus was the Soviet Union, the Cold War. But when that problem went away, many feel that the agency lost its focus.

PETER EARNEST, DIRECTOR, INTERNATIONAL SPY MUSEUM: Many of them at end of it were tired. And I think that with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the war in '91 in a formal sense, the country itself in some ways was tired of maintaining that intelligence capability around the world.

BROWN: There certainly have been controversial directors of the CIA, Richard Helms, for one, who headed the agency during the right- wing coup that overthrew Salvador Allende in Chile. Ultimately, Helms pleaded no contest to charges that he failed to tell Congress everything about the CIA in Chile and received a suspended sentence.

William Colby was well regarded, but his role in the CIA's so- called Phoenix program of assassinations in Vietnam was always brought up. And William Casey, who worked for Ronald Reagan, ended up playing a leading role in the arms-for-hostages drama. And when Bill Clinton became president, he cut the CIA budget.

RON KESSLER, AUTHOR, "INSIDE THE CIA": Instead of decreasing, it should have been increased tremendously given the threat that we're under.

BROWN: George Bush the elder was a director of the CIA as well. In fact, the CIA building today is named after him. George Tenet served two presidents, lasted for seven years. That is longer than every other director, except one.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Since the beginning, the CIA's basic mission, spying, has stayed the same, even as the world has changed enormously. Put another way, viewed from the war on terror, the Cold War seems lightyears away; 9/11 made it patently clear how much catching up the CIA had to do.

Suddenly, everyone was focused on the obstacles that some in the intelligence community had been bemoaning for year, too few Arab- language-speaking agents and a general lack of cultural understanding of the new enemy.

Robert Gates joined the CIA in 1966, spent nearly 27 years as an intelligence pro, serving six presidents. And he ran the agency from '91 to '93. He's now the president of Texas A&M University and we spoke with him late this afternoon.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Are you surprised, given all that has happened in last two and a half years and even in the years before that, that Mr. Tenet lasted as long as he did?

ROBERT GATES, FORMER CIA DIRECTOR: Yes, frankly. He is the first director of CIA to survive a change of presidents that involved change of party in over 30 years. So that in itself tells you how rare his long tenure is. BROWN: Has the job itself changed because the world itself has changed significantly because of 9/11 or because of anything else?

GATES: I think it is fair to say that the role of CIA has changed dramatically since September 11 and most particularly because of the president's adoption of a strategy of preemption. That puts a premium on intelligence that is accurate, that is timely, that is precise that frankly has never been required before in American history.

In the Cold War, when we were waging the Cold War, when we would make a mistake in intelligence, we often had quite some time to try and remedy the situation or to recover from the mistake. And now with the threats facing us every single day, there really is no room for any mistakes. And that is unrealistic.

BROWN: Well, it is unrealistic and I think critics looking at the prewar intelligence here would say the first major test of it was a failure.

GATES: I think that that is true, but I think you also have going to have to -- these things are going to have to be looked at with a little more time between and a little more perspective.

For example, CIA -- I retired in 1993 and three years later CIA had 25 percent fewer people. In the spring of 2002, CIA got the first major budget increase since 1986, all at a time when they were being asked to do more and more. So how much was an intelligence failure and how much was a policy failure or a failure of leadership over a period of years in providing the resources necessary to do their jobs?

BROWN: Well, let me ask this question slightly differently, then. Taking what you've said about the need now for the agency to perform differently than it did before because of 9/11 and preemption and the rest, are you concerned that there might be pressure on the agency to err -- to respond too quickly and in doing so make mistakes?

GATES: I think there is that pressure.

The other side of it, though, is that, if on September 12, 2001, someone had predicted that almost three years later there would not have been another successful terrorist attack on the mainland United States, I think people would have thought you were weren't right in the head. The fact is, I think CIA and the FBI and others have done a better job in protecting us than they've been given credit for, particularly subsequent to September 11.

BROWN: It is a good and positive note to end on. It's nice to see you again, sir. It has been a while. We appreciate your time on an important day.

GATES: You bet.

BROWN: Thank you, sir.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK) BROWN: Robert Gates. We talked to him late this afternoon.

One other note from Washington tonight. A spokesman for the vice president said today, Mr. Cheney will consult his personal lawyer, Terrence O'Donnell, if needed in an investigation of the CIA leak. The case dates back to last year, when someone revealed the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame to reporter Bob Novak after her husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson, wrote critically of the administration's case against Iraq.

Yesterday, the White House confirmed the president had consulted a private attorney about the case as well.

Still to come on NEWSNIGHT tonight, the Army calls it stop-loss. Others call it involuntary conscription. Either way, it means a lot of soldier won't be coming home when they planned.

And Tiananmen Square, the massacre, what really happened, and in the last 15 years, what has really happened in China and how are they related? A break first. From New York, this is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Iraq's new government won the cautious endorsement of the Grand Ayatollah Al-Sistani today. In a handwritten statement, he said it lacked the legitimacy of being elected, but called it a step in the right direction. The statement also took note of the mammoth job the government has, security being the top priority now.

For the eighth straight day, there was fighting in the streets of Kufa. Today's battle erupted when troops of the Army's 1st Armored Division pursued a band of militiamen into the center of town. In the shooting that followed, American officials say about 30 insurgents were killed.

The continued fighting has given rise to what are called stop- loss orders. This is the military's way of keeping troops who volunteered for service from leaving it. Unlike the Vietnam era, there is no draft to fill the pipeline. Critics say a draft by any other name is still a draft and a stop-loss order amounts to just that.

Here is our senior Pentagon correspondent, Jamie McIntyre.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MCINTYRE (voice-over): The Army's blanket order standardizes what it has been doing for two years now, mandating soldiers assigned one-year tours in Iraq or Afghanistan serve the full year with their unit even if their enlistment is up before then. It is called stop- loss and can add as much as 18 months to a soldier's time in uniform.

The Army insists it is just common sense to keep combat units that trained together fighting together.

BRIG. GEN. SEAN BYRNE, U.S. ARMY: One of the worst things that we can do -- and we have learned this from previous conflicts -- is to basically, sometime during that unit's deployment, part of the team leaves. We want to make sure these teams are trained together, so the person knows what the person on the right, what the soldier on the left is going to do.

MCINTYRE: But critics, including some soldiers and their families, argue, extending the time volunteers have to serve in a war zone is unfair and evidence today's Army is too small. It is becoming an issue in the presidential campaign.

SEN. JOHN KERRY (D-MA), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Our soldiers are stretched too thin. The administration's answer has been to put a band-aid on the problem. They've effectively issued a stop-loss policy as a backdoor draft.

MCINTYRE: Kerry says, if elected, he'll add 40,000 more troops, roughly two Army divisions. But the Army argues that even if it had more divisions, it would still want to use stop-loss orders to delay the routine retirement of soldiers who are in the middle of a war.

And the Army says reorganizing its current 10 divisions into as many as 48 smaller, more deployable brigades will spread the burden more evenly. Converting some underused units such as air defense into high-demand specialties like military police will also help the Army end overreliance on the National Guard and Reserve.

(on camera): No one here argues the U.S. military isn't stretched or that soldiers and their families aren't making big sacrifices. But amazingly there seems to be no mass exodus from the all-volunteer Army. Army officials say so far this year they've met 100 percent of their recruiting goals and 99 percent of their retention goals. But those are numbers they watch carefully.

Jamie McIntyre, CNN, the Pentagon.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Still to come on NEWSNIGHT tonight, on June 4, 1989, an experiment in Chinese democracy ended violently. We'll look back what the happened then and what's happened since.

And later still, can a horse turn around an entire city? If it is Smarty Jones, it just might.

Around the world, this is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Fifteen years ago, Americans were about to become riveted to a major news story in another far-off place.

In China, unarmed pro-democracy demonstrators, many of them students, were about to face off with tanks. Tiananmen Square was about to become part of the lexicon.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) BROWN (voice-over): The pictures, of course, endure, thousands of Chinese students filling the august Tiananmen Square during their struggle for democracy in a communist state. Many Americans barely remember it now. There was that styrofoam Statue of Liberty surrounded by milling students.

There were the stretchers and the ambulances lined up for the casualties. And on the night itself, armored personnel carriers and tanks of the People's Liberation Army arrived, some of them soon to be in flames, and that instantly famous image, a single Chinese student standing in the way of an advancing tank.

Fifteen years later, there is still considerable debate about what happened when Chinese soldiers surrounded the square. Many say that few if any students were actually killed there. The dead -- and nobody seems to know the real number for certain -- may have been mostly citizens of Beijing, killed as the Army swept through city neighborhoods in the hours and days after the students left Tiananmen.

The street battle for democracy in China was over in weeks, the protest crushed. And even now in China, the debate goes on, quietly, in the ways of the Chinese government, about whether what it did 15 years ago was right.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: In the years since Tiananmen, economic growth has given millions of Chinese new power, but not full power over their lives. Those who led the protests are now in their 30s. A fitting question tonight on the eve of the anniversary, what difference did they make by taking a stand in Tiananmen?

Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl Wu-Dunn won a Pulitzer Prize for their reporting on the massacre at "The New York Times." They're a husband-and-wife team as well. And we're pleased to have them with us tonight.

Good to see you.

You were there on the edge of the square that day. First of all, it seems like 15 years ago. What is the most vivid memory of the day?

NICHOLAS KRISTOF, AUTHOR, "CHINA WAKES": I think my most powerful memory is of the rickshaw drivers, who were these uneducated people who you don't associate with fighting for democracy.

And when we were all just terrified and cowering in the background and there were students being shot and dying out there in the area between us and the troops, those rickshaw drivers were the ones who had the guts to go out there and pick up the bodies of the kids who had been killed or injured. And these were people who couldn't articulate what democracy was, but they risked their lives for it.

BROWN: You made the point the other day in a piece that the rickshaw drivers in a fundamental way argue against the government's position that democracy breaking out would have been dangerous in China, in somewhat the way it has evolved in Russia.

KRISTOF: Yes. I mean, clearly, there is an argument that a country like China can't sustain modern democracy. It's too poor. It is not educated enough. But I don't think anybody who was there that night and saw what the rickshaw drivers did would argue that.

BROWN: As we look at it now, did the government win the battle and lose the war?

SHERYL WU-DUNN, "THE NEW YORK TIMES": Oh, absolutely, and in many ways.

If you look at what has happened, Tiananmen has not been forgotten, no nor will it be forgotten. But in many ways, if you look back at what the students were hoping for, what they were clamoring for, there was openness. There was idealism. There was hope and sacrifice.

And now we look back, they have -- they have that now. They have achieved what they were hoping to get back then. But it is just has taken a long time, 15 years of economic reform.

BROWN: But they don't have, do they, political freedom, political power, political choices?

WU-DUNN: Not yet. Not yet.

But it is not to say that China is democracy right now. There is no way one can say that. But it is not a communist China either. And there are many civil liberties, civil rights that people have that they didn't have back then. And also back then, what the students were asking for, what they were demanding, they really didn't have a concept of what they were. And, actually, they're very happy with what they have now and all they want now is money, just to make money.

BROWN: And a lot of it.

Was it Tiananmen that created this or was it the fact that China was too big for the Americans to ignore, that the Americans and the world really had to engage China, had to engage in commerce and the rest? Is that what changed China?

KRISTOF: I think it is.

There was a fundamental debate within the Chinese leadership about what direction to go in. And there were hard-liners saying, oh, we can't let in foreign investment and the like. But partly because the Communist Party had no legitimacy, it felt it had to make people richer. And the way it did that was to bring in foreign investment to promote trade. And that led to kind of the rising market economy.

BROWN: Go back 15 years. When it was happening, almost two months, did you think it would end well or end badly?

WU-DUNN: It was really hard to say. I think, for the longest time, people were saying, oh, there is going to be bloodshed. Deng Xiaoping himself said that they're willing to shed blood. But no one really believed it until it happened. And I remember the first night, April 15, when Hu Yaobang died, Wang Dan, the student leader, who, at the time, he's just some kid, 19-year-old kid, he said, this say turning point in a very dramatic way.

He sort of said this is going to be a turning point in China. No one believed him. But looking back, that was the turning point.

BROWN: And it's 15 years ago. In some ways, it is one of those things that seems like yesterday. Nice to see you both. Nice to meet you finally.

(CROSSTALK)

WU-DUNN: Thanks.

BROWN: Come back soon.

KRISTOF: We'll do that.

BROWN: I suspect you will. You'll write something and we'll call. Thank you.

Ahead on the program, how can any horse win a race with an entire city riding on its back? Philadelphia's love affair with Smarty Jones and our love affair with the smell of newsprint in the evening. Morning papers still to come.

From New York, this is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Fans have always burdened their sports heroes with huge expectations. Usually, the athletes understand. That's just part of the deal. But we suspect Smarty Jones is blissfully free of all that pressure. He is a horse, after all, a remarkable animal, though, to be sure, undefeated heading into Saturday's Belmont Stakes here in New York, the odds-on favorite now to win the Triple Crown. So can he? Will he give his home town back its good name?

Here is CNN's Josie Burke.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JOSIE BURKE, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): When Smarty Jones enters the starting gate at Belmont Park Saturday to try to win horse racing's Triple Crown, the thoroughbred will truly be saddled with expectations.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It would break a drought, I think, in terms of morale.

MIKE LIEBERTHAL, PHILADELPHIA PHILLIES: Does that count? Does that count as like a sports championship? If it does, then I'll be rooting for him.

BURKE: Smarty hails from Philadelphia, the home of some sport's greatest athletes, most storied franchises, and lately biggest disappointments.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It is a lift from the Flyers, the Sixers, the Eagles losing three years in a row. And Smarty Jones is bringing the life back to Philadelphia.

IKE REESE, EAGLES LINEBACKER: I'm like everybody else in the city of Philadelphia. We're pulling for him. We need a champion here. We need something to hang our hat on and say, this is a winning town.

BURKE: In January, the Eagles came up one win shy of the Super Bowl for the third straight season. And when the Flyers were recently knocked out a win away from the Stanley Cup Finals, it marked the ah time in 21 years that a Philadelphia playoff team failed to win a championship. It is a drought that the City of Brotherly Love has begun to hate.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He'll be another Philly horse if he doesn't win the Triple Crown.

RANDY WOLF, PHILADELPHIA PHILLIES: Chicago has the goat, which is the animal that caused the cure. So maybe a horse can reverse Philadelphia's curse.

LIEBERTHAL: As a horse, I don't know if he knows he's from Philly. So maybe he's got that going for him.

BURKE: But could winning the first Triple Crown in 26 years be enough to satisfy the city's championship desire?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: By asking that question, you probably just jinxed us.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I'm hoping it is the Phillies a little bit over the horse. But it may take a horse. It may take a filly.

(LAUGHTER)

BURKE: Alas, Smarty is a Philadelphian, not a filly. But should he realize the hopes of a title-starved town, it seems anything might be possible.

JIM O'BRIEN, 76ERS HEAD COACH: Well, if he wins the Triple Crown, I'm going to have him talk to my team in training camp.

BURKE: That would be winning advice straight from the horse's mouth.

Josie Burke, CNN.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: The race is Saturday.

Morning papers are next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(ROOSTER CROWING)

BROWN: I don't usually get nervous about doing morning papers. I'm a little nervous tonight. Time to do morning papers from around the country and around the world. I have no idea what that is about.

We'll start with "The Christian Science Monitor." All the expected suspects on the front page, say, for one, Tenet and an Iraq story on the Ayatollah Al Sistani. This is a good story, a good political story. "Bush, Kerry in the Battle for Catholics. As Bush Meets the Pope, the Once Democratic Bloc is Fluid Despite Kerry's Catholicism."

This is a story over here I love. "Love Forged In The Heat Of World War II; 6,000 French women fell in love with I guess 6,000 American G.I.s when they liberated France. And this is one of those stories. Back in 1944, it all happened. That's your "Christian Science Monitor."

"The Washington Times" of course leads with the news in Washington. "Tenet Steps Down as Director of CIA." They also put former President Clinton on the front page. "Clinton Back in Spotlight to Hawk Tome, Vows Not to Overshadow Kerry." President Clinton was in Chicago tonight doing a speech before publishers in anticipation of his book coming out. And we'll be dealing with that I assume much of the summer.

"The Moscow Times," this is the big story in Russia. It's a huge country with a gazillion problems. Here is the lead story. It's a tennis story. It's an all Russian-French final. The two finalists in the women's side of the French Open are both Russian and you can imagine the executives at NBC, who have the French Open television rights, are really thrilled to hear, that that no American made it.

"The Chattanooga Times Free Press," Chattanooga, Tennessee, leads local. "Thundering Into The City, 35 Harley-Davidson Enthusiasts Roll into Chattanooga for Three-Day Hog Fest." Good time to get out of town maybe.

"Cincinnati Enquirer" leads local, too, pretty much a sports story. "Will It Be Here?" That's Ken Griffey Jr., who has returned home, as Griffey closes in on 500. He's a Cincinnati kid who wanted to go back there, but there is talk now that he won't end his career there. And so they put it on the front page.

How we doing on time? Thirty-five seconds? Oh, my goodness.

"Philadelphia Inquirer," the Tenet story of course, an analysis piece on that. But down in the corner, "Smart Money at Belmont Goes Beyond just Smarty." Every day on the front page I think of "The Philadelphia Inquirer," probably both Philadelphia papers, there's been a Smarty Jones story.

And let's just go to "The Chicago Sun-Times" right now. Oh, yes. Well, no, actually, there's something I wanted to say about this.

"Boston Herald," "No Escape For Our Logan Delays During the Democratic National Convention. We Can't Even Fly Out." The paper has been complaining about this for a while. "O.J. Juiced For Reality TV Show." Man, what is going on? OK, think about that for a minute.

The weather in Chicago tomorrow is "high res." I don't know what that means either, but it looks like a nice day. We'll wrap up the day. Last night, it was grammar. What will it be tonight?

We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: At first at the National Spelling Bee, there were 265 contestants. By today, many had fallen by the wayside, including one who fell not by the way side, but literally crumbled.

Anyway, talk about your D-R-A-M-A.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN (voice-over): It was the third and final day of the 77th Scripps National Spelling Bee, 46 spellers still in the running. And it was a nerve-wracking day. One speller fainted, but recovered quickly and managed to make it to the last round. In the end, 14- year-old David Tidmarsh from Indiana was the last speller standing.

The final word:

DAVID TIDMARSH, CONTESTANT: I'll talk through this. A-U-T-O-C- H-T-H-O-N-O-U-S. Autochthonous.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You are the champion.

BROWN: And if any of you don't know that word...

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Oh, my goodness, that poor kid. And he's going to up on "AMERICAN MORNING" tomorrow.

We'll see you tomorrow night. Good night for all of us.

TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com

Aired June 3, 2004 - 22:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
AARON BROWN, CNN ANCHOR: Good evening again.
It was announced almost as an afterthought. Oh, by the way, the director of the CIA is quitting. We feel some sympathy for George Tenet. In his business, the successes often go unreported and unnoticed outside of government. Its failures become the stories that dominate our lives and our destinies. We don't know about the successes, though logic tells us there have been many.

The failures, well, that is something we all know about; 9/11 was a failure. How much could be laid at the doorstep of the CIA is something for the 9/11 Commission to sort out. The prewar Iraqi intelligence was also clearly a failure. And it is a failure that has damaged the reputations of the country and the agency.

History will sort through all of this, as history should. We suspect history will also ask this question: Did Mr. Tenet simply tell his bosses what they wanted to hear? And, if he did, that would be the biggest failure of all. History later. The headlines first.

"The Whip," beginning in Washington with CNN's David Ensor -- David, a headline.

DAVID ENSOR, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT: Aaron, it is not really a surprise that George Tenet wants to leave his job as director of central intelligence. He's been looking for an exit strategy for about a year. The surprise is the timing. And it is raising questions, like why now and was it entirely his decision? -- Aaron.

BROWN: David, thank you. We'll get to you at the top tonight.

Next to Rome, where the president arrived tonight, along with our senior White House correspondent, John King.

John, a headline from there.

JOHN KING, CNN SR. WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Aaron, administration officials insist that George Tenet's decision to resign caught them by surprise and that Mr. Tenet was not pushed out by the White House. Still, the officials say his resignation could quiet the campaign-year calls back in the United States for someone to be held accountable for major intelligence failures.

BROWN: John, thank you.

Finally, the war and the consequences of fighting it with a scarcity of troops, some would say. Our senior Pentagon correspondent, Jamie McIntyre, on that tonight.

Jamie, the headline.

JAMIE MCINTYRE, CNN MILITARY AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT: Aaron, the Army's latest stop-loss order is starting a debate over whether the U.S. military is too small and whether the nation's all-volunteer Army is all that volunteer.

BROWN: Jamie, thank you. We'll get back to you and the rest coming up in a bit.

Also coming up on the program on this Thursday night, we look back at what really happened 15 years ago in Tiananmen Square and what happened because of it. Also tonight, how a horse has become the pride of a city, Philadelphia, that needs and wants very much a champion. And what has not happened yet, but will, because it will be in tomorrow morning's papers. That's coming up, too. All that and more in the hour ahead.

We begin tonight with the resignation of George Tenet. He is the first and so far the only big name in the president's national security team to step down since Iraq and 9/11. His departure comes, he says, at his own initiative on his own timetable. A cynic would say that might even be true. A mere skeptic would note that the announcement came in advance of two potentially devastating reports on Mr. Tenet's leadership and just in time to allow a president running for reelection to move on. Safe to say the skeptics have plenty of questions tonight.

We'll start, however, with the facts and CNN's David Ensor.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ENSOR (voice-over): George Tenet says it was he who told the president that he wants to leave office in mid-July after 7 years as director of central intelligence.

GEORGE TENET, CIA DIRECTOR: While Washington and the media will put many different faces on the decision, it was a personal decision. And had only one basis in fact, the well-being of my wonderful family. Nothing more and nothing less.

ENSOR: Tenet is likable and politically astute. But the 9/11 attacks by al Qaeda came on his watch, by definition an intelligence failure. So was the case at the U.N. for going to war to stop Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, weapons that have yet to be found. It was, after all, Tenet quoted in Bob Woodward's book saying it was a slam dunk case.

SEN. RICHARD SHELBY (R) ALABAMA: The record is there that there have been more failures on his watch as director of CIA, massive failures of intelligence, than anybody I know.

BOB KERREY, 9/11 COMMISSION MEMBER: He did a terrific job as DCI and I'm sad to see that there's so many people sort of gunning for him, trying to run him out of that position. TENET: We're not perfect, but one of our best-kept secrets is that we are very, very, very good.

ENSOR: Tenet's deputy John McLaughlin, a career CIA man, will take over in July as acting director. Some are calling for the job to be redefined with more powers, before a new director is selected.

REP. JANE HARMAN, (D) CALIFORNIA: I think before we replace him, we should replace his job.

ENSOR: Tenet says, despite some disappointments, he's proud of his record. A senior intelligence official points to the quick war in Afghanistan, to Libya giving up weapons of mass destruction, to rolling up the nuclear black market of Pakistan's A.Q. Khan and to two thirds of al Qaeda's leaders having been killed or captured, though Osama bin Laden is still out there.

Some are suggesting that Tenet may want to go before the 9/11 Commission report comes out this summer and reports from Hill committees on Iraq WMD that sources say are highly critical of the intelligence community and of Tenet.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ENSOR: But stressing the personal nature of his decision to go, a very senior intelligence official says that in August Tenet hopes to be looking at colleges with his high school senior son -- Aaron.

BROWN: Well, I think the question that will dominate much of the program tonight and there's lots of people are thinking about it and reporting on it, was he pushed or did he jump?

ENSOR: Yes, we're all wondering about that.

And I guess the best I can do to contribute to that is to say this. A year ago, George Tenet says he went into the president and offered his resignation. The president said: I need you. Don't leave. Stay. And Tenet did so. Yesterday, George Tenet went in again, said the same thing, and the president said, fine, let's announce it right away.

BROWN: David, thank you -- David Ensor in Washington tonight.

We mentioned at the top the announcement of Mr. Tenet's resignation may go down as one of the greatest, oh, by the way, moments in recent history. The president worked it in at the end of a quick session with reporters, then left town, which in Washington practically guarantees you'll be hearing plenty of buzz for quite some time to come.

Again, traveling with the president, our senior White House correspondent John King.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: He served his nation as the director...

KING (voice-over): The president tried to make clear Director Tenet was not forced out by the White House.

BUSH: He has been a strong and able leader at the agency. He's been a -- he's been a strong leader in the war on terror and I will miss him.

KING: Administration officials say Tenet delivered the news in a private White House meeting Wednesday night. Mr. Bush said he would make the announcement, and did so Thursday morning just before leaving for Europe, when Mr. Bush's major goal is to use the political transition in Iraq to turn a new page in relations with France and other Iraq war opponents.

BUSH: A sovereign Iraq deserves the full support of the international community.

KING: While insisting the timing is coincidental, some administration officials say the Tenet resignation fits with the goal of moving past the bitter debate over war and whether Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. But Bush critics say it will only serve as a reminder.

JOHN PODESTA, FORMER CLINTON WHITE HOUSE CHIEF OF STAFF: And I think this certainly steps on it and it kind of reinforces the fact that in essence the intelligence case that he made to go in to Iraq was faulty and flawed. And he had no plan for getting us out of there.

KING: And while stressing Mr. Bush wanted Tenet to stay, administration officials say the resignation should quiet campaign year demands that home that someone be held accountable for intelligence failures in Iraq and before the 9/11 attacks in the United States. Presumptive Democratic nominee John Kerry, for example, called for tenet's resignation months ago, but some leading Democrats made clear it's not enough.

REP. NANCY PELOSI (D-CA), MINORITY LEADER: I think that many more people are responsible for the mess that the Bush administration has gotten us into.

KING: Others were alarmed at the timing.

SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN (D), CALIFORNIA: We're in the middle of a major alert with respect to the anticipation that there might be another attack on our own country.

KING: Administration officials say there is no timetable for picking a new CIA chief and that Tenet deputy John McLaughlin will run the agency in the meantime.

(on camera): Some leading Republicans suggest the president wait until after the November election to name a new CIA chief to avoid what could be a contentious preelection confirmation debate. But others say leaving the job vacant for several months could undermine Mr. Bush's constant promise to wage a relentless war on terrorism.

John King, CNN, Rome.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: A quick note on Mr. McLaughlin's resume. John King mentioned him briefly. He's been George Tenet's deputy for the last four years, with the agency for 32. He specialized, as many of them did, with European and Soviet issues during the '70s and '80s and focused mainly on the Baltic states and later North Korea.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ROBERT BAER, FORMER CIA OFFICER: John McLaughlin is a good analyst. He's very popular inside the CIA. He's obviously not going to take the CIA over. I don't think he will. But he certainly doesn't carry any baggage with him and he's probably been a good deputy to Tenet.

I think he'll do just fine as interim director. But if you're going to take the CIA into reforms, you're going to need somebody with a lot of political clout in this town. And a senior analyst is not the guy to do it.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BROWN: Well, we'll see.

In his remarks today, Director Tenet referred to Mr. McLaughlin by his agency nickname, Merlin, remarks, by the way, that included only the barest mention of shortcomings over the last seven years -- unfair to expect otherwise, perhaps.

This was after all as much a pep talk as anything else, aimed at colleagues, not critics. All the same, it has also left those very same critics with plenty to say about accountability and responsibility and where the buck ought to stop.

With that, CNN's Barbara Starr.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BARBARA STARR, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Washington began buzzing as soon as CIA Director George Tenet resigned. Was he being held accountable for intelligence failures ranging from 9/11 to Iraq? Officially, the resignation was Tenet's idea, but many immediately looked for indications that Tenet and perhaps others were finally being taken to task.

PELOSI: If Mr. Tenet thinks there should be a change of leadership at the CIA, for whatever reason, including taking it -- taking one for the administration, then so be it. But I think that the responsibility goes far beyond George Tenet.

STARR: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld also is facing questions of accountability, in his case for the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal and the war itself.

SEN. TOM HARKIN (D), IOWA: Mr. Rumsfeld, because of his actions and his statements and his policies during his tenure as secretary of defense, is ultimately responsible.

STARR: Holding senior leaders accountable is rooted in deep tradition.

JAMES WEBB, FORMER NAVY SECRETARY: There is an old saying in the military that you can delegate authority, but you can't delegate responsibility. And so as a result, you are in a technical sense traditionally responsible for everything that goes on under your command.

STARR: Early on, Rumsfeld drew his own line in the sand and it appears to be working.

DONALD RUMSFELD, SECRETARY OF DEFENSE: Needless to say, if I felt I could not be effective, I would resign in a minute. I would not resign simply because people try to make a political issue out of it.

STARR: Even the "Military Times" newspaper, which called for Rumsfeld to go, thinks his job is safe for now after President Bush's strong endorsement.

TOBIAS NAEGELE, "MILITARY TIMES": I don't see Don Rumsfeld going anywhere.

STARR (on camera): It was, of course, Harry Truman who said the buck stops here. President Bush often speaks of accountability, but in Washington, it is also a question of effectiveness. Some now say that ended for George Tenet and wonder if it is still possible for Donald Rumsfeld.

Barbara Starr, CNN, the Pentagon.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: It is fair to say we would miss a good deal of the texture of this and just about any other Washington story without the reporting of "Newsweek" magazine's Michael Isikoff and Walter Pincus of "The Washington Post."

And we're pleased to have them both with us tonight.

Michael, you want weigh in on what -- did he jump or was he pushed?

MICHAEL ISIKOFF, "NEWSWEEK": It looks like this is more sort of a wink, wink, nod, nod situation.

It is very clear -- the White House knew that this -- that the Senate Intelligence Committee report is coming very soon, next few weeks. Senator Pat Roberts, the chairman of the committee, has been keeping the White House apprised of what the report is going to say. It is expected to be this stinging indictment of the CIA.

And it is an exhaustive report that is going to refocus attention on all the multiple intelligence failures that led up to the invasion in Iraq. So that was sort of one thing coming down the pike that was going to refocus attention on the CIA and George Tenet's leadership. As a sort of footnote to that, the CIA had been contesting many of the findings of the report until recently, when I'm told that they sort of threw in the towel and said, look, we don't really have much of a -- we can't really challenge much of what you've finally said here.

And Director Tenet, who had earlier been asked the opportunity to rebut the report, had gone up in March. Then he got the report and he kind of sort of said, I'm not going to come up there and defend this anymore. So that was one thing. And then you also have the September 11 commission report coming out next month. And that, again, is going refocus attention on the intelligence failures that preceded the September 11 attacks.

BROWN: Walter, a couple of areas here. Obviously, there were significant problems with the prewar Iraqi intelligence. As far as you know, was the agency off on the postwar intelligence, how the postwar period would go?

WALTER PINCUS, NATIONAL SECURITY REPORTER, "THE WASHINGTON POST": I think you'll find that not only the agency, but Defense intelligence and the State Department all warned that postwar Iraq would be a tougher fight than prewar Iraq. It is one of the reasons why General Shinseki wanted 200,000 or 300,000 troops. They saw it coming, but it was ignored.

BROWN: And on the question of timing, obviously, there is some political benefit to the president for Mr. Tenet to leave now. Do you have any sense that the election campaign played any role in Mr. Tenet's thinking?

PINCUS: He doesn't say so.

But I have talked to friends of his, Governor Boren, Senator Boren, one of his closest friends, told me today that he was concerned that if he stayed, it is clear, not just the reports, but the famous remark in Bob Woodward's book that WMD was a slam dunk would be a campaign issue. Intelligence would be a campaign issue. He would be caught in the middle. His agency would be caught in the middle. And he didn't want to be set up so that he would have to in effect defend the administration, defend a candidate running for president, appear to be partisan.

And that's -- it may not be the first reason, but nothing is ever done here for one reason. There are a lot of things that came together.

BROWN: Yes.

Michael, is there any sense that Mr. Tenet was a political animal in this sense? He's obviously a political animal. You can't survive in the city without being one. But that he tailored his message to what he believed his bosses in the White House wanted to hear?

ISIKOFF: Well, you know, he was a very shrewd bureaucratic infighter and schmoozer.

Remember, this is a Clinton appointee who flourished as part -- as a member of the Bush inner circle. Famously, in the fall of 2000, he presides over the ceremony at CIA headquarters renaming it after George W. Bush's father. So that was one way of currying favor from the beginning. He bonded with the president. The president clearly liked him.

And getting back to your question about sort of pushed or left on his own, I think it was pretty clear that from the White House's point of view -- and Tenet knew this -- it would be better for him to leave before the intelligence failures reached critical mass with the upcoming reports. He kind of read the tea leaves and sort of took preemptive action.

BROWN: Gentlemen, good to have you with us tonight. Thank you. Appreciate it a lot.

Ahead on the program tonight, remember wild Bill Donovan? Well, don't worry. We'll remind you who he was and we'll take back -- take a look back at the history of American spying, which isn't all that old, really.

Also tonight, we'll see what or rather who is turning Philadelphia into a city of winners, at long last.

From New York, this is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: If we widen the lens a bit, George Tenet's departure marks another turning point in an agency that has seen and made its share of history.

Mr. Tenet was the latest in a long list of spymasters, a job born in the wake of another war more than a half a century ago.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN (voice-over): The agency was born in the turbulent days immediately following the end of World War II, created originally as the Office of Strategic Services, the OSS, by FDR at a time when at least some of the world was still adhering to the maxim, gentlemen, don't read each other's mails.

Its first director was William Donovan, "Wild Bill" Donovan he was called. He had been in charge of the wartime OSS. By the time John Kennedy became president, Allen Dulles was the CIA director, his brother, the secretary of state. But Allen Dulles lost his job after the fiasco at the Bay of Pigs.

Throughout the late '60s and into the '80s, the CIA's principal focus was the Soviet Union, the Cold War. But when that problem went away, many feel that the agency lost its focus.

PETER EARNEST, DIRECTOR, INTERNATIONAL SPY MUSEUM: Many of them at end of it were tired. And I think that with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the war in '91 in a formal sense, the country itself in some ways was tired of maintaining that intelligence capability around the world.

BROWN: There certainly have been controversial directors of the CIA, Richard Helms, for one, who headed the agency during the right- wing coup that overthrew Salvador Allende in Chile. Ultimately, Helms pleaded no contest to charges that he failed to tell Congress everything about the CIA in Chile and received a suspended sentence.

William Colby was well regarded, but his role in the CIA's so- called Phoenix program of assassinations in Vietnam was always brought up. And William Casey, who worked for Ronald Reagan, ended up playing a leading role in the arms-for-hostages drama. And when Bill Clinton became president, he cut the CIA budget.

RON KESSLER, AUTHOR, "INSIDE THE CIA": Instead of decreasing, it should have been increased tremendously given the threat that we're under.

BROWN: George Bush the elder was a director of the CIA as well. In fact, the CIA building today is named after him. George Tenet served two presidents, lasted for seven years. That is longer than every other director, except one.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Since the beginning, the CIA's basic mission, spying, has stayed the same, even as the world has changed enormously. Put another way, viewed from the war on terror, the Cold War seems lightyears away; 9/11 made it patently clear how much catching up the CIA had to do.

Suddenly, everyone was focused on the obstacles that some in the intelligence community had been bemoaning for year, too few Arab- language-speaking agents and a general lack of cultural understanding of the new enemy.

Robert Gates joined the CIA in 1966, spent nearly 27 years as an intelligence pro, serving six presidents. And he ran the agency from '91 to '93. He's now the president of Texas A&M University and we spoke with him late this afternoon.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Are you surprised, given all that has happened in last two and a half years and even in the years before that, that Mr. Tenet lasted as long as he did?

ROBERT GATES, FORMER CIA DIRECTOR: Yes, frankly. He is the first director of CIA to survive a change of presidents that involved change of party in over 30 years. So that in itself tells you how rare his long tenure is. BROWN: Has the job itself changed because the world itself has changed significantly because of 9/11 or because of anything else?

GATES: I think it is fair to say that the role of CIA has changed dramatically since September 11 and most particularly because of the president's adoption of a strategy of preemption. That puts a premium on intelligence that is accurate, that is timely, that is precise that frankly has never been required before in American history.

In the Cold War, when we were waging the Cold War, when we would make a mistake in intelligence, we often had quite some time to try and remedy the situation or to recover from the mistake. And now with the threats facing us every single day, there really is no room for any mistakes. And that is unrealistic.

BROWN: Well, it is unrealistic and I think critics looking at the prewar intelligence here would say the first major test of it was a failure.

GATES: I think that that is true, but I think you also have going to have to -- these things are going to have to be looked at with a little more time between and a little more perspective.

For example, CIA -- I retired in 1993 and three years later CIA had 25 percent fewer people. In the spring of 2002, CIA got the first major budget increase since 1986, all at a time when they were being asked to do more and more. So how much was an intelligence failure and how much was a policy failure or a failure of leadership over a period of years in providing the resources necessary to do their jobs?

BROWN: Well, let me ask this question slightly differently, then. Taking what you've said about the need now for the agency to perform differently than it did before because of 9/11 and preemption and the rest, are you concerned that there might be pressure on the agency to err -- to respond too quickly and in doing so make mistakes?

GATES: I think there is that pressure.

The other side of it, though, is that, if on September 12, 2001, someone had predicted that almost three years later there would not have been another successful terrorist attack on the mainland United States, I think people would have thought you were weren't right in the head. The fact is, I think CIA and the FBI and others have done a better job in protecting us than they've been given credit for, particularly subsequent to September 11.

BROWN: It is a good and positive note to end on. It's nice to see you again, sir. It has been a while. We appreciate your time on an important day.

GATES: You bet.

BROWN: Thank you, sir.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK) BROWN: Robert Gates. We talked to him late this afternoon.

One other note from Washington tonight. A spokesman for the vice president said today, Mr. Cheney will consult his personal lawyer, Terrence O'Donnell, if needed in an investigation of the CIA leak. The case dates back to last year, when someone revealed the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame to reporter Bob Novak after her husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson, wrote critically of the administration's case against Iraq.

Yesterday, the White House confirmed the president had consulted a private attorney about the case as well.

Still to come on NEWSNIGHT tonight, the Army calls it stop-loss. Others call it involuntary conscription. Either way, it means a lot of soldier won't be coming home when they planned.

And Tiananmen Square, the massacre, what really happened, and in the last 15 years, what has really happened in China and how are they related? A break first. From New York, this is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Iraq's new government won the cautious endorsement of the Grand Ayatollah Al-Sistani today. In a handwritten statement, he said it lacked the legitimacy of being elected, but called it a step in the right direction. The statement also took note of the mammoth job the government has, security being the top priority now.

For the eighth straight day, there was fighting in the streets of Kufa. Today's battle erupted when troops of the Army's 1st Armored Division pursued a band of militiamen into the center of town. In the shooting that followed, American officials say about 30 insurgents were killed.

The continued fighting has given rise to what are called stop- loss orders. This is the military's way of keeping troops who volunteered for service from leaving it. Unlike the Vietnam era, there is no draft to fill the pipeline. Critics say a draft by any other name is still a draft and a stop-loss order amounts to just that.

Here is our senior Pentagon correspondent, Jamie McIntyre.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MCINTYRE (voice-over): The Army's blanket order standardizes what it has been doing for two years now, mandating soldiers assigned one-year tours in Iraq or Afghanistan serve the full year with their unit even if their enlistment is up before then. It is called stop- loss and can add as much as 18 months to a soldier's time in uniform.

The Army insists it is just common sense to keep combat units that trained together fighting together.

BRIG. GEN. SEAN BYRNE, U.S. ARMY: One of the worst things that we can do -- and we have learned this from previous conflicts -- is to basically, sometime during that unit's deployment, part of the team leaves. We want to make sure these teams are trained together, so the person knows what the person on the right, what the soldier on the left is going to do.

MCINTYRE: But critics, including some soldiers and their families, argue, extending the time volunteers have to serve in a war zone is unfair and evidence today's Army is too small. It is becoming an issue in the presidential campaign.

SEN. JOHN KERRY (D-MA), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Our soldiers are stretched too thin. The administration's answer has been to put a band-aid on the problem. They've effectively issued a stop-loss policy as a backdoor draft.

MCINTYRE: Kerry says, if elected, he'll add 40,000 more troops, roughly two Army divisions. But the Army argues that even if it had more divisions, it would still want to use stop-loss orders to delay the routine retirement of soldiers who are in the middle of a war.

And the Army says reorganizing its current 10 divisions into as many as 48 smaller, more deployable brigades will spread the burden more evenly. Converting some underused units such as air defense into high-demand specialties like military police will also help the Army end overreliance on the National Guard and Reserve.

(on camera): No one here argues the U.S. military isn't stretched or that soldiers and their families aren't making big sacrifices. But amazingly there seems to be no mass exodus from the all-volunteer Army. Army officials say so far this year they've met 100 percent of their recruiting goals and 99 percent of their retention goals. But those are numbers they watch carefully.

Jamie McIntyre, CNN, the Pentagon.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Still to come on NEWSNIGHT tonight, on June 4, 1989, an experiment in Chinese democracy ended violently. We'll look back what the happened then and what's happened since.

And later still, can a horse turn around an entire city? If it is Smarty Jones, it just might.

Around the world, this is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Fifteen years ago, Americans were about to become riveted to a major news story in another far-off place.

In China, unarmed pro-democracy demonstrators, many of them students, were about to face off with tanks. Tiananmen Square was about to become part of the lexicon.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) BROWN (voice-over): The pictures, of course, endure, thousands of Chinese students filling the august Tiananmen Square during their struggle for democracy in a communist state. Many Americans barely remember it now. There was that styrofoam Statue of Liberty surrounded by milling students.

There were the stretchers and the ambulances lined up for the casualties. And on the night itself, armored personnel carriers and tanks of the People's Liberation Army arrived, some of them soon to be in flames, and that instantly famous image, a single Chinese student standing in the way of an advancing tank.

Fifteen years later, there is still considerable debate about what happened when Chinese soldiers surrounded the square. Many say that few if any students were actually killed there. The dead -- and nobody seems to know the real number for certain -- may have been mostly citizens of Beijing, killed as the Army swept through city neighborhoods in the hours and days after the students left Tiananmen.

The street battle for democracy in China was over in weeks, the protest crushed. And even now in China, the debate goes on, quietly, in the ways of the Chinese government, about whether what it did 15 years ago was right.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: In the years since Tiananmen, economic growth has given millions of Chinese new power, but not full power over their lives. Those who led the protests are now in their 30s. A fitting question tonight on the eve of the anniversary, what difference did they make by taking a stand in Tiananmen?

Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl Wu-Dunn won a Pulitzer Prize for their reporting on the massacre at "The New York Times." They're a husband-and-wife team as well. And we're pleased to have them with us tonight.

Good to see you.

You were there on the edge of the square that day. First of all, it seems like 15 years ago. What is the most vivid memory of the day?

NICHOLAS KRISTOF, AUTHOR, "CHINA WAKES": I think my most powerful memory is of the rickshaw drivers, who were these uneducated people who you don't associate with fighting for democracy.

And when we were all just terrified and cowering in the background and there were students being shot and dying out there in the area between us and the troops, those rickshaw drivers were the ones who had the guts to go out there and pick up the bodies of the kids who had been killed or injured. And these were people who couldn't articulate what democracy was, but they risked their lives for it.

BROWN: You made the point the other day in a piece that the rickshaw drivers in a fundamental way argue against the government's position that democracy breaking out would have been dangerous in China, in somewhat the way it has evolved in Russia.

KRISTOF: Yes. I mean, clearly, there is an argument that a country like China can't sustain modern democracy. It's too poor. It is not educated enough. But I don't think anybody who was there that night and saw what the rickshaw drivers did would argue that.

BROWN: As we look at it now, did the government win the battle and lose the war?

SHERYL WU-DUNN, "THE NEW YORK TIMES": Oh, absolutely, and in many ways.

If you look at what has happened, Tiananmen has not been forgotten, no nor will it be forgotten. But in many ways, if you look back at what the students were hoping for, what they were clamoring for, there was openness. There was idealism. There was hope and sacrifice.

And now we look back, they have -- they have that now. They have achieved what they were hoping to get back then. But it is just has taken a long time, 15 years of economic reform.

BROWN: But they don't have, do they, political freedom, political power, political choices?

WU-DUNN: Not yet. Not yet.

But it is not to say that China is democracy right now. There is no way one can say that. But it is not a communist China either. And there are many civil liberties, civil rights that people have that they didn't have back then. And also back then, what the students were asking for, what they were demanding, they really didn't have a concept of what they were. And, actually, they're very happy with what they have now and all they want now is money, just to make money.

BROWN: And a lot of it.

Was it Tiananmen that created this or was it the fact that China was too big for the Americans to ignore, that the Americans and the world really had to engage China, had to engage in commerce and the rest? Is that what changed China?

KRISTOF: I think it is.

There was a fundamental debate within the Chinese leadership about what direction to go in. And there were hard-liners saying, oh, we can't let in foreign investment and the like. But partly because the Communist Party had no legitimacy, it felt it had to make people richer. And the way it did that was to bring in foreign investment to promote trade. And that led to kind of the rising market economy.

BROWN: Go back 15 years. When it was happening, almost two months, did you think it would end well or end badly?

WU-DUNN: It was really hard to say. I think, for the longest time, people were saying, oh, there is going to be bloodshed. Deng Xiaoping himself said that they're willing to shed blood. But no one really believed it until it happened. And I remember the first night, April 15, when Hu Yaobang died, Wang Dan, the student leader, who, at the time, he's just some kid, 19-year-old kid, he said, this say turning point in a very dramatic way.

He sort of said this is going to be a turning point in China. No one believed him. But looking back, that was the turning point.

BROWN: And it's 15 years ago. In some ways, it is one of those things that seems like yesterday. Nice to see you both. Nice to meet you finally.

(CROSSTALK)

WU-DUNN: Thanks.

BROWN: Come back soon.

KRISTOF: We'll do that.

BROWN: I suspect you will. You'll write something and we'll call. Thank you.

Ahead on the program, how can any horse win a race with an entire city riding on its back? Philadelphia's love affair with Smarty Jones and our love affair with the smell of newsprint in the evening. Morning papers still to come.

From New York, this is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Fans have always burdened their sports heroes with huge expectations. Usually, the athletes understand. That's just part of the deal. But we suspect Smarty Jones is blissfully free of all that pressure. He is a horse, after all, a remarkable animal, though, to be sure, undefeated heading into Saturday's Belmont Stakes here in New York, the odds-on favorite now to win the Triple Crown. So can he? Will he give his home town back its good name?

Here is CNN's Josie Burke.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JOSIE BURKE, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): When Smarty Jones enters the starting gate at Belmont Park Saturday to try to win horse racing's Triple Crown, the thoroughbred will truly be saddled with expectations.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It would break a drought, I think, in terms of morale.

MIKE LIEBERTHAL, PHILADELPHIA PHILLIES: Does that count? Does that count as like a sports championship? If it does, then I'll be rooting for him.

BURKE: Smarty hails from Philadelphia, the home of some sport's greatest athletes, most storied franchises, and lately biggest disappointments.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It is a lift from the Flyers, the Sixers, the Eagles losing three years in a row. And Smarty Jones is bringing the life back to Philadelphia.

IKE REESE, EAGLES LINEBACKER: I'm like everybody else in the city of Philadelphia. We're pulling for him. We need a champion here. We need something to hang our hat on and say, this is a winning town.

BURKE: In January, the Eagles came up one win shy of the Super Bowl for the third straight season. And when the Flyers were recently knocked out a win away from the Stanley Cup Finals, it marked the ah time in 21 years that a Philadelphia playoff team failed to win a championship. It is a drought that the City of Brotherly Love has begun to hate.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He'll be another Philly horse if he doesn't win the Triple Crown.

RANDY WOLF, PHILADELPHIA PHILLIES: Chicago has the goat, which is the animal that caused the cure. So maybe a horse can reverse Philadelphia's curse.

LIEBERTHAL: As a horse, I don't know if he knows he's from Philly. So maybe he's got that going for him.

BURKE: But could winning the first Triple Crown in 26 years be enough to satisfy the city's championship desire?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: By asking that question, you probably just jinxed us.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I'm hoping it is the Phillies a little bit over the horse. But it may take a horse. It may take a filly.

(LAUGHTER)

BURKE: Alas, Smarty is a Philadelphian, not a filly. But should he realize the hopes of a title-starved town, it seems anything might be possible.

JIM O'BRIEN, 76ERS HEAD COACH: Well, if he wins the Triple Crown, I'm going to have him talk to my team in training camp.

BURKE: That would be winning advice straight from the horse's mouth.

Josie Burke, CNN.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: The race is Saturday.

Morning papers are next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(ROOSTER CROWING)

BROWN: I don't usually get nervous about doing morning papers. I'm a little nervous tonight. Time to do morning papers from around the country and around the world. I have no idea what that is about.

We'll start with "The Christian Science Monitor." All the expected suspects on the front page, say, for one, Tenet and an Iraq story on the Ayatollah Al Sistani. This is a good story, a good political story. "Bush, Kerry in the Battle for Catholics. As Bush Meets the Pope, the Once Democratic Bloc is Fluid Despite Kerry's Catholicism."

This is a story over here I love. "Love Forged In The Heat Of World War II; 6,000 French women fell in love with I guess 6,000 American G.I.s when they liberated France. And this is one of those stories. Back in 1944, it all happened. That's your "Christian Science Monitor."

"The Washington Times" of course leads with the news in Washington. "Tenet Steps Down as Director of CIA." They also put former President Clinton on the front page. "Clinton Back in Spotlight to Hawk Tome, Vows Not to Overshadow Kerry." President Clinton was in Chicago tonight doing a speech before publishers in anticipation of his book coming out. And we'll be dealing with that I assume much of the summer.

"The Moscow Times," this is the big story in Russia. It's a huge country with a gazillion problems. Here is the lead story. It's a tennis story. It's an all Russian-French final. The two finalists in the women's side of the French Open are both Russian and you can imagine the executives at NBC, who have the French Open television rights, are really thrilled to hear, that that no American made it.

"The Chattanooga Times Free Press," Chattanooga, Tennessee, leads local. "Thundering Into The City, 35 Harley-Davidson Enthusiasts Roll into Chattanooga for Three-Day Hog Fest." Good time to get out of town maybe.

"Cincinnati Enquirer" leads local, too, pretty much a sports story. "Will It Be Here?" That's Ken Griffey Jr., who has returned home, as Griffey closes in on 500. He's a Cincinnati kid who wanted to go back there, but there is talk now that he won't end his career there. And so they put it on the front page.

How we doing on time? Thirty-five seconds? Oh, my goodness.

"Philadelphia Inquirer," the Tenet story of course, an analysis piece on that. But down in the corner, "Smart Money at Belmont Goes Beyond just Smarty." Every day on the front page I think of "The Philadelphia Inquirer," probably both Philadelphia papers, there's been a Smarty Jones story.

And let's just go to "The Chicago Sun-Times" right now. Oh, yes. Well, no, actually, there's something I wanted to say about this.

"Boston Herald," "No Escape For Our Logan Delays During the Democratic National Convention. We Can't Even Fly Out." The paper has been complaining about this for a while. "O.J. Juiced For Reality TV Show." Man, what is going on? OK, think about that for a minute.

The weather in Chicago tomorrow is "high res." I don't know what that means either, but it looks like a nice day. We'll wrap up the day. Last night, it was grammar. What will it be tonight?

We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: At first at the National Spelling Bee, there were 265 contestants. By today, many had fallen by the wayside, including one who fell not by the way side, but literally crumbled.

Anyway, talk about your D-R-A-M-A.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN (voice-over): It was the third and final day of the 77th Scripps National Spelling Bee, 46 spellers still in the running. And it was a nerve-wracking day. One speller fainted, but recovered quickly and managed to make it to the last round. In the end, 14- year-old David Tidmarsh from Indiana was the last speller standing.

The final word:

DAVID TIDMARSH, CONTESTANT: I'll talk through this. A-U-T-O-C- H-T-H-O-N-O-U-S. Autochthonous.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You are the champion.

BROWN: And if any of you don't know that word...

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Oh, my goodness, that poor kid. And he's going to up on "AMERICAN MORNING" tomorrow.

We'll see you tomorrow night. Good night for all of us.

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