Former CIA Chief Tenet Joins Qinetiq

[TRUTH]

Qinetiq, the British defence and security technology company privatised this year, has appointed George Tenet - the CIA chief at the time of 9/11 - a board member.

The company announced yesterday that Mr Tenet, 53, would be a non-executive director for a rolling three-year period. It said he would be based largely in the US but did not disclose details of his salary.

The appointment will help the company, which was spun out of the Ministry of Defence's research laboratory, develop closer links with the US intelligence establishment and take advantage of the boom in national security technology.

Qinetiq was part of what was the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency, the Ministry of Defence's research laboratory. It develops hi-tech defence and security projects, from the Talon robots used by the US army for surveillance and disarming weapons in Iraq to systems to protect networks from hackers.

The MoD was criticised for its controversial £1.3bn flotation of the company in February, which made tens of millions of pounds for the chairman, Sir John Chisholm, and chief executive, Graham Love.

Before the flotation, the government came under fire for selling part of the Farnborough-based company too cheaply. The Carlyle Group, a US venture capital company, bought 34% for £42m in 2003 and sold around half of that stake for £160m - about eight times what it paid. The Ministry of Defence remains the biggest shareholder, with 19%. Carlyle holds 10%.

Expansion in the US is central to Qinetiq's growth strategy under Sir John. Over the past two years it has made a series of US acquisitions, including the $288m (£154m) purchase of Apogen Technologies, one of the US government's biggest information technology providers. It also acquired two companies that sell military technology to the US department of defence, Foster Miller and Westar Defence and Aerospace. Helped by acquisitions, Qinetiq's annual North American turnover rose from £70.1m to £248.4m this year.

Sir John said the appointment of Mr Tenet would help the company win US defence contracts. "His extraordinary track record and experience in the fields of intelligence and security are particularly relevant as we continue to focus on the US defence and security market," he said.

Mr Tenet was one of the longest-serving CIA directors. He was appointed by President Clinton in 1997 and retired in July 2004 for "personal reasons". He was widely criticised for intelligence failures in the period before the September 11 terrorist attacks and in the run-up to the Iraq war.

According to Bob Woodward's book Plan of Attack, Mr Tenet told President Bush it was a "slam dunk" that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. Mr Woodward said Mr Tenet's claim was an important factor in President Bush's decision to invade Iraq. But the White House and the CIA denied he had been forced to retire because of intelligence failures.

Mr Tenet became a professor at Georgetown University and a non-executive director of other companies such as L-1 Identity Solutions, which develops face-scanning technology.

"I am especially interested in the capacity of the company's technologies to meet a number of the challenges faced by our nations' military and intelligence personnel," he said in a statement yesterday.




http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,1930677,00.html