A Peace Offering To The CIA

By John F. Dickerson and Massimo Calabresi

When National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice is not with President George W. Bush, her deputy, Stephen Hadley, is. A longtime policy hand, he has a quiet, low-key manner that makes him a perfect person to deliver tough news to the President. That's what he did last week when he disclosed that he had belatedly found two memos from the CIA expressing serious doubts about intelligence claims that Iraq had tried to acquire uranium in Africa. He thus offered himself as the fall guy for the disputed sentence about uranium that wound up in Bush's State of the Union address. "I should have asked that the 16 words be taken out," he told reporters at a hastily called press conference. "I failed in that responsibility."

Yet the mea culpa was also about politics--an olive branch for the CIA. In an effort to put to rest the controversy about those 16 words, both Bush and Rice had pointed a finger at the agency, saying it had not conveyed its broad doubts about the intelligence. In response, the White House has been pelted with leaks (which Bush aides claim are coming from the CIA) that contradict Administration statements. By accepting some of the blame, the White House hopes to hush the family sniping. Some aides even welcomed the congressional report on intelligence failures at the CIA and FBI before 9/11 as a way of diverting attention. "Now it's the CIA and FBI pointing fingers at each other," said a top aide of the report, "instead of the CIA and White House pointing fingers at each other."

So has the buck finally stopped with Hadley? The White House said Rice's deputy--who is responsible for mountains of interagency approvals, meetings and cables every day--simply forgot about the CIA memos. But others suggest that Hadley's hard-line views on Iraq--going back to the first Bush Administration, when he was an arms-control expert under Defense Secretary Dick Cheney--may have influenced which memos he remembered and which he didn't. "He comes across as this mild-mannered, quite decent lawyer who wants everyone to feel like the process has worked fairly," says a former senior staff member. "But there's really only one party whose unhappiness gets him moving, and that's the Pentagon. That's where his sympathies lie." A current Hadley aide responded vigorously to the suggestion that his political views might have influenced his handling of intelligence: "That is flat untrue." --By John F. Dickerson and Massimo Calabresi