Washington ? CIA Director George Tenet tendered his resignation to President Bush Thursday, ending the tenure of a powerful and influential spymaster who steered the nation’s intelligence community through some of the most disastrous and triumphant moments in its history.

Calling it “the most difficult decision” of his life, an emotional Tenet told employees gathered at CIA headquarters near Langley, Va., that he was resigning for “the well-being of my wonderful family — nothing more and nothing less,” according to a videotape released by the CIA.

The only senior official from the Clinton White House to thrive under Bush, Tenet had deftly survived calls for his resignation after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, which critics alleged was the greatest intelligence failure since Pearl Harbor.

Bush immediately named deputy director John McLaughlin, a mild-mannered, professorial analyst, as acting director and is not expected to name a successor before the election.

James Pavitt, the CIA’s deputy director of operations, has also told associates recently that he will resign in mid-summer, leaving the agency with new leaders at a time of a heightened threat of terrorist attacks during political conventions and the Olympics in Greece.

Thursday’s surprise announcement, first made in a two-minute statement delivered by Bush on the South Lawn of the White House, came as the Senate Intelligence Committee prepares to release a scathing, bipartisan report on faulty pre-war estimates of Saddam Hussein’s arsenal of illicit weapons.

Intelligence detailing Iraq’s supposed caches of weapons of mass destruction, which have not materialized, was used as the primary justification for drawing the nation into a war that has been far more costly, and far more deadly, than most predicted.

Tenet reportedly told Bush before the war that his case against Saddam was a “slam dunk.”

The timing of the Tenet’s resignation led to widespread speculation here that the 51-year-old spymaster who had survived seven years of bruising battles, including those over the failure to head off Sept. 11, did not relish yet another Washington fight.

Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the intelligence community had to be held accountable for its failings.

CIA Director George Tenet, in this image from video, announces that he will resign. Tenet served under two presidents, Bush and Clinton, and was at the helm of the intelligence agency when the 9-11 attacks were made on the United States.

“Simply put, I think the community is somewhat in denial over the full extent … of the shortcoming of its work on Iraq and also on 9/11,” Roberts said Thursday morning before learning of Tenet’s decision.

But insiders also noted the extraordinary personal burden of Tenet’s daily job, which includes trying to decipher a maze of never-ending terrorism threats steadily flowing into the agency, and the ongoing insurgency in Iraq, to name just a couple.

Having resisted earlier pressures to quit, Tenet, the second-longest serving director in the CIA’s 57-year history, had recently been expected to stay on until at least after the November presidential election.

“He told me he was resigning for personal reasons,” Bush said during Thursday’s hastily arranged announcement. “I told him I’m sorry he’s leaving. He’s done a superb job on behalf of the American people.”

Bush praised Tenet, saying, “He has been a strong and able leader at the agency … he’s been a strong leader in the war on terror, and I will miss him.”