How To Fix Our Intelligence

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But in the wake of 9/11 and the apparent failures of the U.S. intelligence community, Bush quickly shelved the Scowcroft plan. The report was so sensitive that Bush has yet to provide a copy to Congress, and Scowcroft was not allowed to give the 9/11 commission a detailed brief on its findings. The plan went into a coma in large part because Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld opposed any dilution of Pentagon authority over the spy networks. For months no one at the White House wanted to tangle with him, but that fear may have waned. Tenet has long been been thought to support the Scowcroft plan but can't say so without angering Rumsfeld, something Tenet more or less admitted last week. "I'm sitting in the middle of a structure," he said. "I do have a relationship with the Secretary. I care about it a great deal."

How will we know if Bush is serious about reform? One member of his party put it this way: "The question will be whether the guy at the top [in charge of intelligence] has any real budget authority. If he doesn't, it's not real." Kean told TIME last week that he was heartened by Bush's sudden interest in an intelligence overhaul. "I think the good part of the week was the President's statement that he's open to change." But many think Bush is merely buying time, weighing his options and waiting to gauge the reaction when the commission issues its final report. That was the approach he took the last time big changes were proposed, when Congress threatened in 2002 to create a new Department of Homeland Security. Bush opposed that move until it became inevitable. And then he made it his own.

--Reported by Perry Bacon, Timothy J. Burger, John Dickerson, Viveca Novak, Elaine Shannon and Douglas Waller/Washington and Helen Gibson/London