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That was almost a full-time job. For months, the Administration, along with just about everyone else, was piling on complaints: the agency's spies failed to clearly see bin Laden's army gathering over the horizon back in 2001, failed to realize that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and underestimated the strength of the postwar insurgency in Iraq. In response, the spooks whispered that the President's aides were too quick to blame the agency for their own mistakes of judgment. The agency had repeatedly warned both the current Administration and its predecessor about bin Laden, they said; the agency's doubts about the existence of WMD were not hidden (if you looked deeply enough into the footnotes of the intelligence community's official estimates on Iraq); and although the details of the CIA's warnings have not been made public, there are indications that it predicted that a postwar Iraq would be something other than a walk in the park. "A lot of people did, by and large, warn the White House about the aftermath," says a former agency official.
The backbiting got more vicious in the final days of the presidential campaign, when the Bush camp began to mutter that the CIA was trying to undermine the President's re-election. The evidence was circumstantial at best. But many Republicans nonetheless came to believe the agency was rooting for Senator John Kerry when it cleared for publication a book, Imperial Hubris, written anonymously by Michael Scheuer, a CIA analyst and former chief of the bin Laden unit, that accused the Administration of botching the war on terrorism. Members of Tenet's staff didn't think much of Scheuer--they regarded him as a zealot who couldn't see the whole picture--but they were in a bind. CIA rules allow an officer to publish a book if he is not disclosing classified information. Since Scheuer's book included nothing sensitive, the agency couldn't halt publication. "The rules don't say you can't write dumb stuff," a former officer who worked on the case tells TIME.
Imperial Hubris hit stores in July, and that was enough for some in the Bush campaign to conclude that the agency was trying to undermine the President. Not everyone in the White House was bothered by the book, but those who were included Vice President Dick Cheney, who had tangled with the CIA endlessly over Iraq and had long grown impatient with the agency's rigid devotion to rules. "What the White House has decided, particularly Cheney," a campaign veteran told TIME, "is that the agency has been leaking on us for a year. So we don't have much to lose by cutting them loose."
Goss, meanwhile, had been quietly planning his own housecleaning for a while. He had a mandate from Bush to make the CIA more aggressive and less risk averse in general, but he had special plans for the agency's storied clandestine services branch, the supersecret Directorate of Operations (D.O.), which runs covert spies and schemes all over the world. Last June, while Goss was chairman, the House Intelligence Committee wrote a report that said the D.O. was in danger of becoming "nothing more than a stilted bureaucracy incapable of even the slightest bit of success. The nimble, flexible, core mission-oriented enterprise that D.O. once was is becoming just a fleeting memory."