"Everyone senses we're reaching the end of growth for the intelligence budget," said Mark M. Lowenthal, a former top C.I.A. official and Congressional intelligence staff member.
"I don't think it is so much that he stands up for the C.I.A.," one veteran intelligence staff member said, adding that Mr. Roberts viewed agency personnel, "usually correctly, as honest, hard-working Americans who want to do a good job".
What is generally agreed upon, a congressional intelligence-committee staff member told me, is that the Niger documents were initially circulated by the British — President Bush said as much in his State of the Union speech — and that "the Brits placed more stock in them than we did".
He has a history of strong responses when he thinks he has been personally slighted, and some staff members and intelligence officials have spread word that Mr. Shelby's antipathy toward Mr. Tenet and the C.I.A. stems from a 1999 incident.
If Congress enacted such limits it would force a widespread change in the way many of the country's most delicate intelligence operations are run, and would most likely require the intelligence agencies to hire more staff members of their own to do work that in recent years has increasingly been outsourced.
He is known as a contentious deal maker and a difficult boss, but industry insiders say he balances these qualities with intelligence and loyalty to his staff members.
It was Hoven who gave Lindauer the nickname Snowflake, which was quick to catch on among an informal circle of Capitol Hill staff members and intelligence-community enthusiasts who gathered every Thursday night at a Hunan restaurant across the street from the Heritage Foundation.
Whereas the Coalition relied disproportionately on Iraqi exiles for intelligence, the U.N. had three thousand Iraqi staff members who had remained in the country, even during the invasion.
But staff members of the Senate and House intelligence agencies are preparing reports suggesting that the administration and intelligence agencies had seriously overestimated the nature of the threat posed by illicit Iraqi weapons.
