>"The president is a very powerful guy," said Ray Close, who spent 26 years in the C.I.A. "When you sense what he wants, it's very difficult not to go out and find it."

Cloaks and Daggers On Day 78 of the Search for Iraqi W.M.D., yesterday, once again nothing turned up. Spooks are spitting mad at the way their work was manipulated to exaggerate the Iraqi threat, and they are thus surprisingly loquacious (delighting those of us in journalism). They emphasize that even if weapons of mass destruction still turn up, there is a fundamental problem �not within the intelligence community itself, but with senior administration officials � particularly in the Pentagon. One has to take the outrage among the spooks with a few grains of salt because the intelligence folks have been on the losing end of a power struggle with the Pentagon. But that's the problem: the Pentagon has become the 800-pound gorilla of the Bush administration, playing a central role in foreign policy and intelligence as well as military matters. "The basic problem here is that O.S.D. [Office of the Secretary of Defense] has become too powerful," noted Patrick Lang, a former senior official in the Defense Intelligence Agency. One step came in the Clinton administration, when the defense secretary gained greater control over the handling of images from spy satellites. Mr. Rumsfeld then started up his own intelligence shop in the Pentagon. The central philosophy of intelligence � that it should be sheltered from policy considerations to keep it honest � was deeply bruised. A commission led by Brent Scowcroft suggested two years ago that intelligence functions be consolidated under the director of central intelligence. It was an excellent idea � killed by, among others, Mr. Rumsfeld. "The president is a very powerful guy," said Ray Close, who spent 26 years in the C.I.A. "When you sense what he wants, it's very difficult not to go out and find it." As best I can reconstruct events, Mr. Rumsfeld genuinely felt that the C.I.A. and D.I.A. were doing a horrendous job on Iraq � after all, he was hearing much more alarming information from those close to Ahmad Chalabi. So the Pentagon set up its own intelligence unit, and it sifted through everyone else's information and goaded other agencies to come up with more alarmist conclusions. "He's an ideologist," one man in the spy world said of Mr. Rumsfeld. "He doesn't start with the facts, even though he's quite brainy. He has a bottom line, and then he gathers facts to support the bottom line." That is not, of course, a capital offense. Pentagon leaders should feel free to disagree strenuously with foolish judgments by the C.I.A. But for the process to work, top C.I.A. officials need to fight back. Instead, George Tenet rolled over. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/06/opinion/06KRIS.html