Politics and the CIA

For more than a year, George Bush stood by CIA Director George Tenet, dismissing critics who said the agency failed at its core mission--preventing attacks against the homeland. But loyalty is a two-way street for this White House, and since Bush began making his case for war with Iraq, his aides--particularly the hard-line ones--have pressed Tenet to join the march. For the President's war speech in Cincinnati last week, Bush aides badgered the CIA to declassify more intelligence on Saddam Hussein's ties to Osama bin Laden. As a result, Bush was able to disclose that "a very senior al-Qaeda leader received medical treatment in Baghdad this year" (intelligence sources tell TIME that it is a Jordanian operational commander named Abu Musab Zarqawi) and that "Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bombmaking and poisons and deadly gases."

But when a recently released CIA report seemed to paint too dire a picture of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee pressured Tenet to declassify testimony by a top aide who rated the likelihood of Saddam's initiating a chemical or biological weapons attack against the U.S. as "low." That testimony appeared to contradict Bush's claim in Cincinnati that Saddam could lob those weapons at the U.S. or its allies "on any given day." Bush sympathizers saw a sellout by the CIA. "That wasn't intelligence, that was pure speculation," groused a former senior Pentagon official.

So which is it? Is the CIA politicizing the intelligence on Iraq to help the hard-liners persuade people that war is in the national interest? Or is Tenet, a former Senate staff member with keen survival instincts, working to keep the moderates happy too? Tenet denies both charges. "It's ludicrous," he told TIME. "I work for a guy who expects our honest judgment, period. There's no cooking of the books."

Every faction in the Administration reads the evidence gathered by the CIA about Iraq's actions and capabilities in different ways--usually to justify its preferred outcome. And then the factions press for more. The agency has tried not to take sides, but the rift between it and the Administration hawks is widening as the White House "pushes the envelope" on evidence against Saddam, says a senior intelligence official. The pressure from the hard-liners to paint Saddam in the most dangerous hues "is intense," the official explains. "There is one overriding emphasis, and that is to sell the policy of regime change."