Dowd - Head Spook Sputters

Only a couple of weeks after the endlessly vacationing President Bush got his Aug. 6, 2001, briefing with the shivery headline "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.," the C.I.A. chief, George Tenet, and other top agency officials received a briefing about the arrest of Zacarias Moussaoui after his suspicious behavior in a Minnesota flight school. And that had another shivery headline: "Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly."

"The news had no evident effect" on prompting the C.I.A. to warn anyone, according to the drily rendered report of the 9/11 commission's staff, which faults the agency for management miasma and Al Qaeda myopia, citing a failure to make a "comprehensive estimate of the enemy."

Asked by the commission member Timothy Roemer about whether he had shared this amazing news at a Sept. 4 meeting with Condi Rice, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Clarke ? the meeting on Al Qaeda that Mr. Clarke had been urgently begging for since January ? Mr. Tenet said no. Asked if he had ever mentioned it to Mr. Bush in August, during a month of "high chatter and huge warnings," Mr. Tenet said no.

The Man Whose Hair Was Allegedly on Fire told the commissioners that he had not talked to the president at all in August. Mr. Bush was in Texas, and he was in Washington. Or he was on vacation, and the president was in Texas. Quel high alert.

After the hearing, Mr. Tenet had an aide call reporters to say he had misspoken, that he had briefed the president twice in August, in Crawford on Aug. 17 for a morning briefing he deemed unexceptional and again in Washington on Aug. 31.

I'm not sure whether Mr. Tenet ? a mystifyingly beloved figure even though he was in charge during the two biggest intelligence failures since Pearl Harbor and the Bay of Pigs ? has a faulty memory, which is scary. Or if he's fuzzing things up because he told the president more specifics than he wants to admit. But in a town where careers are made on face time with the president, it's fishy that the head spook can't remember a six-hour trip to Crawford for some.

In a commission staff report, there is a stark juxtaposition of Sandy Berger's approach before the millennium and Condi Rice's before 9/11.

"Berger, in particular, met or spoke constantly with Tenet and Attorney General Reno," the report said. "He visited the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. on Christmas Day 1999 to raise the morale of exhausted officials."

Condi and her deputy, Steve Hadley, did not stoop to mere domestic work. "Rice and Hadley told us that before 9/11, they did not feel they had the job of handling domestic security." They left that up to Dick Clarke to broker, the same guy Dick Cheney said "wasn't in the loop."

Maybe Condi's confusion about her job ? that it entailed national security as well as being the president's foreign policy governess and workout partner ? explains why so many critical clues went into the black holes of the F.B.I. and the C.I.A.