- A powerful "old guard" faction in the Central
Intelligence Agency has launched an unprecedented campaign to undermine
the Bush administration with a battery of damaging leaks and briefings
about Iraq.
-
- The White House is incensed by the increasingly public
sniping from some senior intelligence officers who, it believes, are conducting
a partisan operation to swing the election on November 2 in favour of John
Kerry, the Democratic candidate, and against George W Bush.
-
- Jim Pavitt, a 31-year CIA veteran who retired as a departmental
chief in August, said that he cannot recall a time of such "viciousness
and vindictiveness" in a battle between the White House and the agency.
-
- John Roberts, a conservative security analyst, commented
bluntly: "When the President cannot trust his own CIA, the nation
faces dire consequences."
-
- Relations between the White House and the agency are
widely regarded as being at their lowest ebb since the hopelessly botched
Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba by CIA-sponsored exiles under President John
F Kennedy in 1961.
-
- There is anger within the CIA that it has taken all the
blame for the failings of pre-war intelligence on Saddam Hussein's weapons
programmes.
-
- Former senior CIA officials argue that so-called "neo-conservative"
hawks such as the vice president, Dick Cheney, the secretary of defence,
Donald Rumsfeld, and his number three at the defence department, Douglas
Feith, have prompted the ill-feeling by demanding "politically acceptable"
results from the agency and rejecting conclusions they did not like. Yet
Colin Powell, the less hardline secretary of state, has also been scathing
in his criticism of pre-war intelligence briefings.
-
- The leaks are also a shot across the bows of Porter Goss,
the agency's new director and a former Republican congressman. He takes
over with orders from the White House to end the in-fighting and revamp
the troubled spy agency as part of a radical overhaul of the American intelligence
world.
-
- Bill Harlow, the former CIA spokesman who left with the
former director George Tenet in July, acknowledged that there had been
leaks from within the agency. "The intelligence community has been
made the scapegoat for all the failings over Iraq," he said. "It
deserves some of the blame, but not all of it. People are chafing at that,
and that's the background to these leaks."
-
- Fighting to defend their patch ahead of the future review,
anti-Bush CIA operatives have ensured that Iraq remains high on the election
campaign agenda long after Republican strategists such as Karl Rove, the
President's closest adviser, had hoped that it would fade from the front
pages.
-
- In the latest clash, a senior former CIA agent revealed
that Mr Cheney "blew up" when a report into links between the
Saddam regime and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the terrorist behind the kidnappings
and beheadings of hostages in Iraq, including the Briton Kenneth Bigley,
proved inconclusive.
-
- Other recent leaks have included the contents of classified
reports drawn up by CIA analysts before the invasion of Iraq, warning the
White House about the dangers of post-war instability. Specifically, the
reports said that rogue Ba'athist elements might team up with terrorist
groups to wage a guerrilla war.
-
- Critics of the White House include officials who have
served in previous Republican administrations such as Vince Cannistraro,
a former CIA head of counter-terrorism and member of the National Security
Council under Ronald Reagan.
-
- "These have been an extraordinary four years for
the CIA and the political pressure to come up with the right results has
been enormous, particularly from Vice-President Cheney.
-
- "I'm afraid that the agency is guilty of bending
over backwards to please the administration. George Tenet was desperate
to give them what they wanted and that was a complete disaster."
-
- With the simmering rows breaking out in public, the Wall
Street Journal declared in an editorial that the administration was now
fighting two insurgencies: one in Iraq and one at the CIA.
-
- In a difficult week for President Bush leading up to
Friday's presidential debate, the CIA-led Iraqi Survey Group confirmed
that Saddam had had no weapons of mass destruction, while Mr Rumsfeld distanced
himself from the administration's long-held assertion of ties between Saddam
and the al-Qaeda terror network.
-
- Earlier, unguarded comments by Paul Bremer, the former
American administrator of Iraq who said that America "never had enough
troops on the ground", had given the row about post-war strategy on
the ground fresh impetus.
-
- With just 23 days before the country votes for its next
president, both sides are braced for further bruising encounters.
-
- © Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2004.
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