Politics and the CIA

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The friction is greatest on the question of whether Iraq and al-Qaeda are working together against the U.S. Some intelligence analysts accuse Bush of grasping at examples that imply an alliance while ignoring others that don't--like the fact that in the past the secular Saddam and the fundamentalist bin Laden have not been ideological soul mates. (Bin Laden offered to fight against Saddam when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1991.) Complicating the fight is the fact that the spooks don't want to overlook evidence on Iraq--as they did with al-Qaeda--so they are trying to turn over every stone. For example, a top Iraqi intelligence official visited bin Laden in Sudan in the mid-1990s, an intelligence source tells TIME. There is also more evidence that al-Qaeda operatives who turned up recently in Baghdad may have been plotting chemical-weapons attacks on U.S. soil. "As we peel the onion," says another senior U.S. intelligence official, "we continue to find things that indicate people should at least be troubled and pay attention to the relationship [between Saddam and bin Laden]."

The peeling, however, hasn't quelled complaints from both hawks and doves that the agency tilts its product. Agency analysts are more pessimistic than are White House hard-liners about possible chaos in Iraq after a U.S. invasion. (The Administration is considering a broad military occupation of Iraq much like the U.S. Army's presence in Japan after World War II.) But State Department intelligence officials remain unconvinced that high-strength aluminum tubes Baghdad has been trying to import are meant to be used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons, as the CIA claims. The tubes, they argue, could just as easily be used to manufacture conventional arms.

"It's all politics," says a senior CIA hand. "We're the meat in the sandwich. People hear what they want to hear from our reports." Agency insiders say that if Tenet tried anything heavy-handed to please one side or the other, he would have a rebellion on his hands from CIA analysts. Insists Tenet: "We draw lines in the sand about anybody ever telling us what to do. I wouldn't stand for it, and the President wouldn't stand for it."

Tenet fact-checked a footnoted version of Bush's Cincinnati speech before the President delivered it, correcting a few items and satisfying himself that it represented the agency's view. So perhaps it is not surprising that, according to a White House aide, Bush was miffed that testimony Tenet later declassified seemed to contradict part of his speech. Tenet wasted no time rectifying the situation. The next day he issued an unusual clarification that there was "no inconsistency" between the CIA's view and that of the President. --With reporting by James Carney and Michael Duffy/Washington