Another Jab From The General

By MICHAEL DUFFY

Retired Air Force General Brent Scowcroft, the Republican foreign-policy Yoda who has worked for five of the past seven Presidents, rarely raises his voice in public. But just a few months after he broke with George W. Bush on Iraq, urging him to stay focused on the war against terrorism before going after Saddam Hussein, Scowcroft is speaking out again. This time he's tangling with an old colleague from the Nixon and Ford years, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

For more than a year, Scowcroft has been quietly nudging the Administration to place control of all American intelligence assets--satellites and eavesdropping ships as well as old-fashioned spies and spooks--in the hands of the CIA director rather than spread it over 14 competing federal agencies. Scowcroft chaired a yearlong study on the subject and sent his report to the President in March. There it collects dust, largely because Rumsfeld, the hyperpopular Pentagon chief, refuses to give up military control of intelligence budgets or assets. At a black-tie Washington dinner last week, when he presented an award to CIA director George Tenet, Scowcroft broke cover again. "For years, we had a poorly organized intelligence system," he said, "but it didn't matter because all the threats were overseas... So now we have a huge problem." It is unfair, he said, to ask Tenet "to take responsibility" for all intelligence matters when he "has authority over only some of them ... I think it's time we give him all the tools he needs to do his job." The room, full of spooks and spy chiefs, exploded in applause. Bush is likely to be less receptive. --By Michael Duffy