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Can any modern, professionally staffed, high tech intelligence service plying its trade for a Western democracy ever insulate itself from the biases of its sponsoring government? The answer is probably no.

CIA analysts told Senate investigators that they didn't cave to administration pressure in assessing that Iraq had an active nuclear weapons program. They may not have caved, but they sure bent a lot. The heat on analysts and their managers was enormous, especially from the Vice President's cheerleaders at State, the National Security Council and the Pentagon. As we have reported, this was not because the administration needed the intelligence to craft policy, but it was critical for selling it.

There is a valuable lesson learned in comparing CIA's-or most of the Intelligence Community's, for that matter-conclusions with those of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

U.S. intelligence reported, with varying degrees of confidence, that Iraq had been shopping for uranium in Africa and had purchased aluminum tubes for centrifuge rotors as well as other industrial equipment, such as high-strength magnets, to process that uranium. The IAEA, on the other hand, told the UN Security Council shortly before our invasion that the uranium claim was based on forged documents, that the aluminum tubes were intended for rockets and the magnets were used for guidance systems, electric meters and field telephones.

Why was the IAEA so right and the U.S. so wrong? Because the IAEA was immunized from political pressure.

As Jacques Baute, the agency's chief Iraq nuclear weapons hunter in the 1990s and again in 2002, when the inspectors were reintroduced after a four-year hiatus, put it: "The fact that the (IAEA) has 137 member states forces it to put great distance from any single political agenda and its associated pressure." He penned that observation in an article for the June 2004 issue of the IAEA Bulletin and suggested, without identifying whom he had in mind, that U.S. and Western intelligence services are captive to policy bias. "National analysts...at any given time, may feel under the pressure, explicit or implicit, from a single political line," he wrote.

None of the member states, of course, would be willing to subsume their national intelligence services to a global agency. And U.S. intelligence has a better tradition of independence from executive branch manipulation than the services of many of our allies.

British intelligence, for example, is connected by umbilical cord to Downing Street, headquarters of the executive branch. This was clearly demonstrated in Britain's notorious Sept. 24, 2002, dossier on Iraq's imaginary weapons-the source of Bush's State of the Union claim that Iraq had been shopping for uranium. The document, based on reporting from MI6, the GCHQ and the military, was authored by the Joint Intelligence Committee, a cabinet office that oversees intelligence gathering and produces assessments supposedly based on that collection. But the dossier, which also claimed that Saddam could launch chemical or biological warheads on 45-minutes' notice, received considerable input from Tony Blair's political appointees and spinmeisters. Britain and MI6 has never backed away from the uranium claim. MI6 "is much more part of policy than we are," a former senior CIA officer who has worked closely with the British told us. "That's why they can't back off" the uranium claim for fear of embarrassing Blair.

Since no nation-certainly not the United States—will agree to a global intelligence pooling organization to inoculate itself from policy biases (as we have seen in the runup to the Iraq war, an administration may even want to encourage bias), the burden rests on independence and toughness at the top of the intelligence chain.

Those traits were lacking under George Tenet. "Leadership failed and failed badly," John Gannon, who served as the CIA's deputy for intelligence under Tenet until 2001, told us. "You certainly didn't have a director there who was encouraging people to tell it like they saw it, and to bring all information to the top so it could fairly be evaluated."

He said he could not recall such a strong bias in WMD intelligence reporting-"apart from the Soviet Union itself." But the Soviets did have those weapons. Iraq did not.

Critical, also, is intelligence oversight by Congress. That, alas, has not existed over the past several years.