George Tenet’s announced departure yesterday as director of the Central Intelligence Agency was the first major change since members of Congress and the public began wondering aloud why no top officials were being held accountable for intelligence failures before and since Sept. 11. But his reason for leaving, as reported by President Bush, was wholly inadequate.

“He told me he was resigning for personal reasons,” the president said of Mr. Tenet, who had been director since 1997. “Personal reasons,” along with “spending more time my family,” are two leading euphemisms for any number of real reasons for leaving a job, and under normal conditions are acceptable, if not enlightening, ways to depart.

Mr. Tenet may indeed have serious personal reasons for resigning, but his announcement came the day after the Army said that soldiers who were due to retire or others who expected to leave when their enlistment dates arrived could forget it if their units were scheduled for Afghanistan or Iraq. Personal reasons were not listed as an exception.

This split personality between ordering soldiers into permanent wartime duty and a top intelligence official leaving because he feels he needs to can be traced back to the earliest days of the war on terrorism. It was then that the president told the public the rest of the world was either with us or against us, but that citizens should go on about their business as normal. It could be seen recently as well when Attorney General John Ashcroft warned of possible imminent danger from terrorists, but Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said

he had no plans to raise his department’s warning level.

Is the nation in peril or isn’t it? If it is, leaving merely for “personal reasons” does not seem like an adequate explanation. If Mr. Tenet was pushed out, there should be a statement from the administration acknowledging this significant step at a dangerous time.

As director of the CIA, Mr. Tenet served for a comparatively long time; whether he served well will be reviewed intensely over the next few days, though likely only a few people will know the truth. The CIA is often intentionally mysterious, but the departure of its director at a time of desperate need for intelligence should not be.