What about the timing of Tenet's departure? It comes in tandem with more alerts about terrorist attacks this summer, and right around the June 30 transition of power in Iraq. Do you think Tenet was explicitly asked to leave?

I think he was definitely asked to leave. He showed every sign of extreme distress.

And there's been plenty of speculation that has to do with the forthcoming congressional reports on 9/11 and Iraq intelligence, which won't look good for him.

The obvious answer is probably the correct one. Tenet would spend all his time defending himself against the reports. Everybody knows that another guy could run the agency just as well and could run it the same way. Bush has even made sure it'll be run the same way by keeping the same leadership, with [Deputy Director] John McLaughlin taking over. Bush would end up spending a lot of political capital fighting for Tenet; it's much simpler just to get him off the stage -- just like they did with Gen. Ricardo Sanchez in Iraq. Once somebody made clear that Sanchez knew about Abu Ghraib, they didn't argue about it. They got rid of him.

What does Tenet's departure say about the state of the agency at a critical time for U.S. national security operations?

The agency is politicized to an extreme. It is under the control of the Bush White House. Tenet is leaving in the middle of an unresolved political crisis -- what really amounts to a constitutional crisis. It's somewhat like Iran-Contra, though on a totally different scale. The president wanted to go to war. He's supposed to have the support of the Congress. How did he get it? Well, his administration made up a scary story about imminent dangers.

Doesn't Tenet's departure make him the fall guy implicitly, even if President Bush delivered him cordially?

Of course the implicit blame is there, and that's one of the reasons why he looked and sounded so distressed. He had plenty reason to be; there was a cumulative insistence that the CIA had to be at fault. He could change that picture dramatically by standing up and saying, "Look, you want to know what I really told the president before 9/11? Here it is." Obviously that would be quite a bombshell and you can be sure the president would never speak to him again.

I think the truth about what happened at the policy level will eventually come out. We know, because it was on paper, that on Aug. 6, 2001 the CIA gave the president a very explicit warning. When 9/11 actually occurred, you would expect to look back and see, once the distress light was on, various U.S. intelligence and police organizations scurrying around frantically responding to the warning. But what do you find? Nothing.

While Tenet appears to have equivocated about Iraqi WMD in some instances, we also know that the CIA expressed significant doubt about specific intelligence on Iraq long before the war -- the bogus Niger-uranium report, for example -- that the Bush administration still used to make its case. How can the administration possibly continue to promote the idea that the CIA got it all wrong?

Well, who else is the administration going to blame? If they don't say that, then they would have to ask, "Why did the CIA write a report that went in certitude beyond the evidence?" The answer is very likely to be, "Because that's what the president wanted, and he made sure that was understood."

Is the war inside the U.S. intelligence system completely off the charts historically? Is there any precedent for this?

I can't think of any. It's not uncommon for the various secret branches of the U.S. government to be at odds with each other. The CIA quarreled with the Defense Department for years over Soviet missiles, but I don't remember anything like this. The CIA was present when that team of Iraqi police went in and ransacked Chalabi's compound. I mean, that's amazing. The only thing that would've made it more amazing was if it had happened in Washington.

In a way it reminds me of the "Night of the long knives" in 1934, the night when Hitler got rid of the Brown Shirts, the street fighting organization that had helped the Nazi Party come to power. It was a highly organized institution bitterly hated by the army. It was run by a bunch of people who were politically ambitious and were direct rivals of the group that came into power with Hitler. Literally in one night the offices and headquarters of this group were raided and many of them were killed in their beds. Immediately all kinds of propaganda came out about their low behavior and betrayal. It was an internal government bloodletting where one faction just simply swept the other off the scene.

What the CIA did to Chalabi isn't exactly the same, but it makes me worry even more about the level of covert fighting inside our own government.

Just last week the New York Times reported that the CIA is still struggling with a "major flaw" in its operations. A senior agency official, Jami Miscik, described conditions still ripe for the distortion of information, and similar problems reportedly plague the Defense Intelligence Agency. What's your view of the rising chorus within Congress to overhaul the intelligence system?

I think it's a good idea, and I never thought that before. It ought to be set up with a devoted Cabinet post, a secretary of intelligence who would have a wide range of powers and authority to oversee the whole system. But that person can't run everything; each of the agencies is distinct for good reasons, and each one has to be run by its own chief.

Separating intelligence and police operations is absolutely essential. If you put it all under a single authority it would represent the greatest threat by far to American democracy. Other countries have proven that. A single intelligence organization will abuse the power of secrecy to protect itself -- all intelligence organizations routinely abuse the power of secrecy to protect themselves.

Just look back at the way we got into this war: There was nobody in the public who had the capacity to seriously question the CIA's evidence and arguments. We just had to take it on trust.

And that's a dangerous prospect when you have a White House with an inflexible agenda that's in control of the system.

I think so. I don't know how else to explain getting it completely wrong. If you go back and look at Powell's speech at the U.N., he makes dozens of claims and not one of them was ever robustly confirmed -- in fact, almost all of them were completely false. I mean, how could he get it that wrong?

The most important thing to do now is to alter the chain of command. I think it makes sense to have the secretary of intelligence serve for a four-year term that overlaps presidential terms, an appointment that begins at the end of the first year of every presidential term. In other words, each president coming into office inherits the previous intelligence leader for at least a year. That provides continuity and avoids election year politics.

How do you view the Bush administration in terms of dealing with this whole series of intelligence problems that have come to light?

It's a catastrophe beyond belief. Going into Afghanistan was inevitable, and in my opinion the right thing to do. But everything since then has been a horrible mistake, one that has made it more difficult to fight the war on terror, has driven away allies and diminished the degree of cooperation from a number of intelligence services and governments in the Arab world. And it promises to get worse. This was a completely unnecessary, distracting, expensive war that has isolated the United States.

It seems like there has almost never been direct acknowledgement by the White House of any policy problems.

Yes, but they've done something else which troubles me more than anything. They correctly read how the various institutions of our government could be used to stage a kind of temporary coup on a single issue: Whether or not to go to war with Iraq.

President Bush used the intelligence system as a blunt instrument, and they forced Congress to go along -- the Congress was in an almost impossible position. When the president uses the maximum power of his own office and says, "I am soberly telling you that this is necessary for the safety of the country," you gotta listen to the guy. At least once.

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