By ELISABETH BUMILLER
(snip)
Even before this latest blowup, Mr. Tenet told friends that he was worn out from the relentlessness of his job since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and that he felt he had served long enough. (Only Allen W. Dulles and Richard Helms held the job longer.) Mr. Tenet, who has directed an extensive overhaul and expansion of the C.I.A. since the attacks, had talked about stepping down by late summer or early fall, people close to him said.
"It's a lot harder job than it was in the Dulles era, and he's been doing it for a long while," an agency official said. "But I think he's for the moment happily engaged."
Friends of Mr. Tenet's said that the leak investigation might now keep him in place longer than he wanted, if only to prove that he was not a casualty of the latest furor — or of the political fallout from the failure so far to find chemical or biological weapons in Iraq.
"He wants to leave on his own terms, but he doesn't want to leave when it looks like he's being chased out of town," a former C.I.A. official said. David Kay, the government's chief weapons inspector, who was chosen and supervised by Mr. Tenet, told Congress on Thursday that his team had failed to find illicit weapons after a three-month search in Iraq, a major setback for the White House.
more…
http://nytimes.com/2003/10/05/politics/05TENE.html?hp
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