Everything that is wrong with the agency was made plain a few weeks ago with the much- anticipated release of a classified CIA "Presidential Daily Brief" from August 6 2001. This was supposed to be the smoking gun which would reveal that Bush knew 9/11 was coming. It turned out to be far more damaging than that. It revealed somewhat carelessly that the CIA - the most sinister acronym in the world, the all-knowing spooks behind the dirty tricks in a thousand Hollywood thrillers - crib most of their info from television shows and foreign intelligence services.

Under the headline "Bin Ladin [sic] Determined To Strike In US", the most lavishly funded intelligence agency in the Western world led off its analysis with its top piece of "classified" "intelligence": "Bin Ladin implied in US television interviews in 1997 and 1998 that his followers would follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and 'bring the fighting to America'."

Terrific. Your crack CIA operative knows how to go into deep cover in his living room and pose as an average American couch potato by switching on the television. Then, just when the rest of the country is settling in for the Friends rerun, he surreptiously flips the remote to the Osama interview on CNN.

Next in the briefing came a couple more historical generalities about bin Laden supplied by foreign intelligence agencies in the late 1990s.

Third on the list was the CIA's only self-generated contribution to the assessment - one sentence, three years old: "A clandestine source said in 1998 that a Bin Ladin cell in New York was recruiting Muslim-American youth for attacks." This turned out to be wrong. The attacks in New York were perpetrated mainly by Saudi youth, let into America on inadequately-filled paperwork processed through the State Department's Saudi "Visa Express" programme.

The CIA ended the briefing on a reassuring note: "The FBI is conducting approximately 70 full field investigations throughout the US that it considers Bin Ladin-related." That was also false. The FBI may have had several dozen "open cases" vaguely bin Laden- related, but it wasn't "conducting" anything like that number of active investigations. So that is the Agency's summation on Osama bin Laden as it stood in August 2001: two old television interviews, two generalities from foreign agencies, one rumour from the late 1990s, and a concluding assertion that demonstrates the CIA doesn't even know what the FBI's doing, never mind anybody else. Hard to see why it was ever "classified", as you could have picked 99 per cent of it from your daily newspaper. This would just about pass muster for an intelligence briefing in a small nation with no role in the world - Luxembourg, say. But, assuming that Luxembourg has an intelligence service, I'll bet it's paying a lot less for it than America is.

...

One reason why Bush has been embroiled in this business about Saddam trying to buy uranium from Niger is because it's obvious that the CIA has no clue about what is going on in that part of Africa. And, when they were invited to check out the claims of British and French intelligence, the agency dispatched not an intelligence specialist but an ex-career diplomat turned "adjunct scholar" at the Saudi-funded Middle East Institute. So, to investigate the case for war with Iraq, the CIA sent an anti-Bush partisan on the House of Saud's payroll who drank mint tea with a couple of Niger bureaucrats and then wrote it up as a third-rate travelogue for The New York Times ("Through the haze, I could see camel caravans crossing the Niger river"). The CIA are tourists in the heart of darkness.