Cia

PRESIDENT BUSH has been criticized on the issue of weapons of mass destruction, or chemical, biological and nuclear weapons in Iraq. As the tempo of the Democratic primary campaign accelerates, critics of U.S. military intervention in Iraq or of the postwar occupation will seize the WMD issue as a focal point for attacking the president. Some Bush defenders also are disappointed by the president's reaction to the statement by David Kay, head of the Iraqi Survey Group inspecting for WMD after the Iraq war, that there were no significant quantities of WMD in prewar Iraq.

WASHINGTON -- A Guatemalan military officer who ordered the killings of an American citizen and a guerrilla leader married to an American lawyer was a paid agent of the CIA, a member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence said yesterday.The intelligence agency knew about the killings ordered by the Guatemalan colonel on its payroll, but concealed its knowledge for years, the committee member, Democratic Rep. Robert G. Torricelli of New Jersey said in a letter he sent to President Clinton yesterday.

WASHINGTON -- Valerie Plame, the diplomat's wife whose secret resume was exposed in a newspaper column that eventually led to the indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, is leaving the CIA on Friday, people familiar with her plans said. Plame, 43, worked undercover for the CIA tracking weapons proliferation. Her clandestine career was imperiled after she was identified as an agency operative in the summer of 2003 in an article by syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak.

WASHINGTON -- The head of the CIA, Robert M. Gates, yesterday ordered the agency's inspector general to conduct an investigation into the CIA's misleading and incomplete statements to the Justice Department and a federal judge in Atlanta about a bank fraud case involving billions of dollars in loans to Iraq.The internal investigation is the first to be publicly ordered by Mr. Gates since he took over as the director of Central Intelligence nearly a year ago. It serves as an acknowledgment of a politically embarrassing error by the CIA on an issue that is dogging President Bush's re-election campaign: the administration's embrace of Saddam Hussein in the years before Iraq invaded Kuwait.

PARIS -- On the day that Alger Hiss' death was made known, the New York Times reported that Richard Nuccio, a senior State Department officer, has been threatened with criminal charges and faces the ruin of his government career because last year he made it known to a member of the House Intelligence Committee that the CIA had repeatedly lied to it, in defiance of the law, about its responsibility in the murders of an American citizen and the husband of...

WASHINGTON -- An internal CIA report on the case of the confessed spy Aldrich H. Ames paints a picture of incompetence and indifference at the agency and confronts its director, R. James Woolsey, with a decision on disciplining some of the agency's most senior officers, according to government officials familiar with the report.For years, top officials at the agency paid little attention to the fact that there was, in essence, a serial killer in their midst, the report says. It depicts a careless attitude toward the search for the worst turncoat in the agency's 47-year history, a man who turned out to be a bumbling alcoholic.

WASHINGTON -- The CIA first became aware that Aldrich H. Ames might be a Soviet mole nearly seven years ago but failed to focus on evidence pointing at the intelligence officer until last year, when officers finally searched his office, intelligence officials and members of Congress said yesterday.Recounting the investigation that led to Mr. Ames and his wife being charged with spying for Moscow, they said the CIA's investigation of a suspected traitor in its ranks rose and fell in intensity over the years.

Legacy of Ashes The History of the CIA By Tim Weiner Doubleday / 702 pages / $27.95 In 1952, amid a stalemate in the Korean War, the Central Intelligence Agency dropped more than 1,500 Korean secret agents behind enemy lines in North Korea. The operation was overseen by the station chief in Seoul, Albert R. Haney, "a garrulous and ambitious Army colonel who boasted openly that he had thousands of men working for him on guerrilla operations and intelligence missions," writes Tim Weiner.

WASHINGTON -- Reeling from the treachery of one of its own, the CIA is also fighting a rear-guard action against adversaries in the U.S. government.As it begins to ask itself why it took nine years to unearth a mole for Moscow, Aldrich H. Ames, and to assess the damage from the worst spy scandal in its history, the agency is coming in for criticism of a kind not heard since Watergate-era investigations in Congress showed that the CIA had spied on U.S. citizens...

CIA has become a synonym for failure.It no longer provides policy-makers with the kind of accurate and timely intelligence needed to protect the United States, nor does it deliver to taxpayers a fair return on their money. It is time, as Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a New York Democrat, has suggested, to consider dismantling the CIA and restructuring the nation's intelligence establishment.The CIA's latest failure was its inability to foresee the nuclear tests conducted by India, which precipitated Pakistan's tests.