Three Harsh Reports on CIA Due Out

NYT - Current and former intelligence officials noted that Mr. Tenet was anticipating heavy criticism from three reports expected to assail the agency either over its failure to detect the Sept. 11, 2001, terror plot or the assessments that Iraq possessed unconventional weapons before the American invasion last year.

Most damaging among them is a Senate Intelligence Committee report, due this month, which is expected to single out errors made by the agency in its prewar judgments.
Some Republican senators, including Pat Roberts of Kansas, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, signaled to the administration in the past two weeks that the report's conclusions would be so critical that it would raise questions about who should be held accountable, an official said. Another official said the highly critical nature of the report was widely known at the White House.

The two other reports expected soon are from an independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, due in late July, and from Mr. Tenet's own weapons hunter in Iraq, Charles Duelfer, who is expected to issue a progress report sometime this summer.

Under Mr. Tenet, the C.I.A. has been the subject of blistering critiques for what its detractors have called the two worst intelligence failures of the last 50 years: not anticipating Sept. 11 and exaggerating the threat of Iraq's unconventional weapons.

"If criticism either actual or anticipated was a factor, he would have left a long time ago," said David Boren, the former Democratic senator from Oklahoma and a mentor to Mr. Tenet who talked to the director on Thursday afternoon. "It's been months of his desiring to leave."

Mr. Tenet had talked so often of leaving, friends said, that last December Mr. Bush personally asked him to stay.

el - oddly detailed accounts from unnamed sources then discuss Tenet's decision with his family and Bush's reactions.