WHAT THE AGENCY DIDN'T KNOW

By DOUGLAS WALLER

The CIA has informants at overseas hospitals who watch for foreign officials checking in for treatment. It employs a dozen doctors and psychiatrists to review videos of world leaders for signs of physical or mental ailments: weight changes, pale skin, unsteady gait, even wrinkles on ear-lobes (one indication of heart problems). For example, agency physicians privately concluded that the late French President Francois Mitterrand had cancer more than a decade before he made it public. But on July 3, on the morning of the Russian presidential vote, the CIA received a call from Clinton aides: Why hasn't Boris Yeltsin been seen for four days? The CIA's response: Maybe a virus? Administration officials now tell TIME that they didn't learn how ill Yeltsin was during that absence until Sept. 20, when his doctor admitted on TV that the President had suffered a heart attack.

--By Douglas Waller