Out Of The Line Of Fire

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When Powell was asked by Bush to make the case for war at the U.N., he insisted that Tenet sit directly behind him there so that the CIA's credibility was visibly on the line. After the first phase of the war ended and it became clear that weapons inspectors might come up empty handed, Powell blamed Tenet personally for providing him with exaggerated assessments. By that time, Powell had also witnessed the debacle surrounding the claims that Iraq had sought to buy uranium from Niger, an assertion that made it into Bush's State of the Union address in January 2003. By June it was plain that the claim was based on intelligence that the CIA should have known was highly suspect. On June 7, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice asked Powell to make appearances on the Sunday-morning talk shows defending the CIA. During a conference call with more than half a dozen Administration officials, he refused. "I'm not gonna do it," said Powell, according to a source who was in on the call. "I don't trust the information coming out of the agency."

The next morning, Rice went on the shows and claimed that while some junior CIA officers may have been concerned about the validity of the uranium allegations, they never informed anyone in the White House. What followed were days in which the CIA and Rice's office were engaged in a finger-pointing exercise about who should have scrubbed the line from the President's speech before he gave it. Eventually, Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley had to acknowledge that the CIA had sent him memos outlining the agency's concerns about the uranium claim.

But at the news of Tenet's resignation last week, Rice showed no sign of old rancor. "It's really a great loss," she said Thursday aboard Air Force One. "I'm personally very sad because this has been a great team and it's worked through a lot of really hard issues." The hardest issue may be the one still to come — how to form an intelligence system that can extract high-quality information and analyze it without bowing to anyone's preconceptions. "If any future President asks my advice," Bush told TIME three years ago, "my advice is get to know your CIA director and make sure the CIA director is an integral part of a national security team." For a while Bush certainly did that with Tenet. Whether he did it in a way that served the national interest is another question.