WASHINGTON, JAN 17: President elect George W Bush has asked CIA Director George Tenet to stay on as head of the US spy agency for "an undetermined period of time," Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer said on Tuesday.``Director Tenet has been asked to stay on the job for an undetermined period of time,'' Fleischer said at a briefing, without defining what the length of time would be.Fl said Tenet had been informed about the decision. Tenet had given Bush an intelligence briefing last Thursday in their first face-to-face meeting since Bush became President-elect.Tenet, 48, who has headed the Central Intelligence Agency since July 1997, was the third director in President Clinton's two terms, replacing John Deutch who Left in December 1996.He is credited with raising morale in an agency battered in the last decade by post-Cold War cutbacks and espionage scandals such as Aldrich Ames, a veteran CIA officer who sold secrets to the former Soviet Union.Tenet's intelligence roots lie in Congress where he was on the staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee from 1985 to 1992, at the end as staff director. He then worked at the White House National Security Council from 1993 to 1995 as the Chief adviser on intelligence issues to former National Security Adviser Anthony Lake.As CIA director he oversees the spy agency and 12 other intelligence offices that are mainly connected to other agencies such as the defence and state departments that make up the US intelligence community.Tenet's role in the Middle East has taken on a higher public profile recently. He met with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to discuss security issues this month in Washington and met with Israeli and Palestinian security officials in Cairo to try to stop violence in the region.Last year, Tenet was spotted during peace talks at Camp David and later in Paris. He has worked behind the scenes as a communication link between Israelis and Palestinians on security issues aimed at preventing violence.
