Leaking With A Vengeance

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Why did the disclosure of a lone CIA officer's name seem to unhinge an entire city so quickly? The answer is that Plame is just the latest casualty in a low-grade war that has raged for more than a year between the CIA and the White House about the nature and use of intelligence. It has been a constant, under-the-radar struggle between the ideological hard-liners of the Bush team against career intelligence experts at the CIA--a fight over the validity of the evidence that the U.S. and its allies gathered about Saddam and his nuclear ambitions. For all its power and influence peddling, Washington is still a city of ideas, and Bush's biggest idea--that in a post-9/11 world, intelligence, even uncertain intelligence, could be used to justify a pre-emptive war--is one that many consider Bush's real faith-based initiative.

After 9/11 the Administration's hard-liners, led by Vice President Dick Cheney, along with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, believed the U.S. couldn't afford to wait for perfect, bulletproof evidence to come in about the true extent of Saddam's arsenal. In the new wars of this new world, they argued, the U.S. must sometimes act before the jury is done deliberating. The hard-liners advanced this new doctrine partly because they thought the war on terrorism demanded it but also because they became convinced over more than two decades that CIA career analysts were slow, risk averse, too enamored of gadgets and often the last to see the big picture. The hard-liners often didn't trust them to do what was necessary. Rumsfeld grew so tired of the CIA's skepticism that he set up his own intelligence shop to get the evidence he wanted, in effect, sweeping aside the work of an entire agency.