During his resignation speech, CIA boss George Tenet apparently came close to tears when he spoke about his family and the way in which his work as America’s spy chief had robbed his son of a good father. It was a seemingly touching, if to some eyes slightly odd, display of emotion.

However, this being the world of intelligence and subterfuge, nothing is being taken at face value. Tenet’s motives and the timing of his quitting are now being closely analyzed along with the resignation 24 hours later of the CIA’s deputy director of operations, James Pavitt.

Why is such an apparently loyal Bush ally quitting at this time? Is Tenet leaving to take the heat off the White House which has laid the blame for intelligence failures squarely at the agency’s door? Is Pavitt’s departure really a coincidence, or is he paying the price for being the operational head of the Iraq spying operation that went so wrong? Is he perhaps something to do with the now discredited Ahmed Chalabi being told that an Iranian secret code had been broken; information which Chalabi appears to have then passed on to Tehran?

Yet while the pundits and analysts are poring over all the leads, they appear to have overlooked one potentially important piece of evidence: Tenet’s emotional behavior at that rostrum as he made his resignation speech. This was clearly not a man in complete command of his life. He may have had the world’s largest and richest spy agency under his direct orders but he has now effectively admitted that the responsibilities of his job were tearing him and his family apart.

Now Tenet did not just wake up one day last week and decide that hey, his work was wrecking his family life and that he ought to quit. This has been a conflict that existed perhaps from the moment he took up the job in 1997. It was very probably nagging at him during those crucial days before the Iraq invasion when the Bush administration was desperate for all and any evidence that could be used to justify the attack. When Tenet so damningly described the evidence gathered by his people as proving “slam dunk” that the Iraqi WMD program was a real and present danger, it was not the sort of temperate language that would be expected of a spy chief.

Is it possible, therefore, that on the evidence of his resignation speech George Tenet, an absolutely key player in the White House’s road to war, was so beset by personal problems he was close to a breakdown? If on the other hand Wednesday’s tears were just a cynical and trashy stunt for the media, they perhaps demonstrate how the CIA under Tenet could have fooled itself and others about Iraq.