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Contact us The CIA 'old guard' goes to war with Bush By Phillip Sherwell in Washington (Filed: 10/10/2004) A powerful "old guard" faction in the Central Intelligence Agency has lau nched an unprecedented campaign to undermine the Bush administration wit h 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. Head to head: Bush and Kerry 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 vindi ctiveness" in a battle between the White House and the agency. John Roberts, a conservative security analyst, commented bluntly: "When t he President cannot trust his own CIA, the nation faces dire consequence s" Relations between the White House and the agency are widely regarded as b eing at their lowest ebb since the hopelessly botched Bay of Pigs invasi on of Cuba by CIA-sponsored exiles under President John F Kennedy in 196 1 There is anger within the CIA that it has taken all the blame for the fai lings 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, Dona ld Rumsfeld, and his number three at the defence department, Douglas Fei th, 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 scath ing in his criticism of pre-war intelligence briefings. The leaks are also a shot across the bows of Porter Goss, the agency's ne w director and a former Republican congressman. He takes over with order s from the White House to end the in-fighting and revamp the troubled sp y agency as part of a radical overhaul of the American intelligence worl d Bill Harlow, the former CIA spokesman who left with the former director G eorge 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. People are chafing at that, and that's the background t o 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 Presiden t'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 "b lew up" when a report into links between the Saddam regime and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the terrorist behind the kidnappings and beheadings of host ages 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 sa id 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 R onald Reagan. "These have been an extraordinary four years for the CIA and the politica l pressure to come up with the right results has been enormous, particul arly 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 w anted and that was a complete disaster." With the simmering rows breaking out in public, the Wall Street Journal d eclared in an editorial that the administration was now fighting two ins urgencies: one in Iraq and one at the CIA. In a difficult week for President Bush leading up to Friday's presidentia l debate, the CIA-led Iraqi Survey Group confirmed that Saddam had had n o 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 administr ator of Iraq who said that America "never had enough troops on the groun d", had given the row about post-war strategy on the ground fresh impetu s With just 23 days before the country votes for its next president, both s ides are braced for further bruising encounters.
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