New man at CIA

The departing George Tenet will be replaced at CIA, at least temporarily, by Deputy Director John McLaughlin. You may recall that we have mentioned that name previously.

In our discussion of the August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing which gave Bush forewarning of the 9/11 attacks, we noted that a piece in a German periodical included information that could only have come from Tenet. I doubt that Tenet spoke directly to the writer, one Oliver Schroem. The source, I have argued, may well have been John McLaughlin.

Why do I say this? Because McLaughlin was (to put it bluntly) ticked off by the administration's actions and inactions before 9/11. A Guardian piece of March 25, 2004 includes this data nugget:

However, the impact of the CIA director's testimony was partially undermined by a report delivered yesterday morning by the commission's staff. The report found that when the CIA picked up increasing numbers of signals that a major attack was imminent, some agency officials, including Mr Tenet's deputy, were impatient with the administration's response.

"Some CIA officials expressed frustration about the pace of policymaking during the stressful summer of 2001," the report found. "Although Tenet said he thought the policy machinery was working in what he called a rather orderly fashion, [the deputy CIA director, John] McLaughlin told us he felt a great tension, especially in June and July 2001, between the new administration's need to understand these issues and his sense that this was a matter of great urgency."

In other words, while W is off in Europe to participate in D-Day observances, Central is now firmly in the hands -- at least for a short while -- of a man who may not be Bush's friend.

Whatever the inscrutable Mr. Tenet may have truly felt about our president, McLaughlin is a man who believes that the administration "blew it" in the summer before that the attack on America. And he cannot be happy about the recent neocon attempts to blame the Agency for all that went wrong in Iraq.

Don't be surprised to see more damaging leaks.