WASHINGTON - As a rare dispute over the Senate inquiry of pre-war intelligence spilled into the open, two former CIA officers outraged over the leak of the identity of a covert CIA operative today plan to bring those concerns to the Senate Intelligence Committee.

The closed-door hearing comes at a tense time for the bipartisan and secretive panel. The panel's top Republican and Democrat split openly yesterday over whether its pre-war intelligence probe has reached any conclusions.

Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), panel chairman, said yesterday the committee has found no evidence that the White House exerted any pressure on CIA analysts to tilt their intelligence to conform to its view that Saddam Hussein posed a threat. But Sen. John Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), panel vice chairman, branded Robert's view "premature" and said Roberts does not speak for the committee. Rockefeller said the committee was continuing to examine not just how intelligence was gathered but how the administration used it. "It was premature to speculate about the committee's conclusions," he said.

Roberts had said the panel would hold public hearings into the pre-war intelligence in September, and when that passed, October. The date of those hearings is now uncertain, he said. Declining to elaborate, he said the panel was having trouble getting information "from the relevant agencies."

The two CIA officials who will appear before the committee today wrote Roberts and Rockefeller on Oct. 16 stressing the need for the panel to hold open hearings, saying the "unprecedented" disclosure "endangered American lives, our intelligence assets and our national security." The former CIA agents are Larry Johnson and Jim Marcinkowski, who trained with outted CIA operative Valerie Plame, sources say.

Plame was identified as an operative in a July column by Robert Novak quoting two unnamed senior administration officials. Her husband, former U.S. envoy Joseph Wilson, had discredited a pre-war claim made by President George W. Bush that Iraq was shopping for uranium in Africa. Wilson has charged that the outting of his wife was intended to silence critics.

Both senators said today's hearing does not signal an expansion of its probe of pre-war intelligence to include the CIA leak, now the subject of a Justice Department probe.

"We can't," Rockefeller said when asked whether the committee was now investigating the leak. "The Justice Department is doing an investigation so they would basically tell us to go straight to hell if we took up an investigation. But I am enraged about it. I have a feeling that it was not done for benign purposes."

Knut Royce of the Washington Bureau contributed to this story.

© 2003 The Associated Press

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