CIA chief intends to stay on job

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CIA Director George J. Tenet has no plans to step down as agency chief despite calls by critics for his ouster due to a string of intelligence lapses, U.S. officials said yesterday.

"Director Tenet plans to keep on doing his job," an agency official said. "That is what he is focused on."

Meanwhile, the agency's inspector general has begun an investigation of how tainted intelligence on Iraq's nuclear program found its way into a presidential speech, said officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

A U.S. official said that CIA Inspector General John Helgerson has begun looking into the intelligence on uranium at the request of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

The probe is focusing on a national intelligence estimate, a consensus report of 15 member agencies of the U.S. intelligence community, that included the reference to Iraqi procurement of uranium from Niger, Somalia and Congo.

Officials have said several documents on the uranium-purchase effort were later found to have been forged.

Britain's government, which is facing its own inquiry on whether intelligence on Iraq was hyped to support going to war, has stood by its reports on the Niger uranium.

Asked whether Mr. Tenet should resign over the uranium intelligence, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said Sunday that Mr. Bush "has confidence in George Tenet. This was a mistake."

Mr. Tenet, 50, is a former Democratic Senate staffer who worked in the White House as intelligence director for the National Security Council staff during the Clinton administration from 1993 to 1995. He moved to CIA as deputy director in 1995 and took the top position in July 1997.