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Washington, D.C. (Map, News) - Michael Maloof was back in the game. He and another Pentagon aide, David Wurmser, drove the short distance from the Pentagon to CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. It was early October, a good season in Washington, but Maloof’s nerves were on edge during the scenic ride along the tree-lined George Washington Parkway.

A big gash still hollowed out one side of the Pentagon and America was at war. Maloof was at work on a top secret project initiated by Douglas Feith, the top civilian policy advisor to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Maloof was a legend within the Pentagon circle that tracked arms proliferation. His office was obscure, but it performed a crucial national security function. The job of the Defense Technology Security Administration (DTSA) was to review proposed exports of U.S. technology and weapons. Maloof and his colleagues took their jobs more seriously than that. They pored over reams of intelligence to ferret out the identities of major buyers of American satellite technology and other high-tech items with military applications.

Feith wanted Maloof to use his intelligence sleuthing to trace the connections between al Qaeda and other terror groups. “There was a mountain of intelligence on this subject, on terror networks,” Feith said later. “I needed someone to digest it. I wanted a policy strategy. It was absolutely not about Saddam and al Qaeda. This was about the entire global network: all terror groups, all state sponsors.”

So Maloof headed out to Langley that October day to ask for the CIA’s cooperation in obtaining years of intelligence reports. What Maloof didn’t know at the time was that his trip to Langley marked the first day of the CIA bureaucracy’s war on Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon and George W. Bush’s White House.

At Langley Maloof was escorted to the agency’s Counterterrorism Center (CTC), a top-secret analytical branch that studied intelligence reports on various terror groups and leaders. Maloof met with a number of senior CIA people to explain the intelligence gap and ask for help.

The Pentagon wanted years of intelligence reporting on al Qaeda, Iraq, Iran and other potential targets in the war against global terrorism. The Langley crew listened politely. But at the end, the CTC directors said, simply, no. The CIA, not Feith’s policy shop, would do such work — if ordered. There were follow-up requests. The answer was still no.

Finally, Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld’s deputy, interceded. The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) pressed the CIA to cooperate. Years of CIA intelligence reports — some mature, others raw and unconfirmed — started arriving at the Pentagon. Maloof and Wurmser set up shop inside the supersecure National Military Intelligence Center on the Pentagon’s third floor. By December, they had produced a 150-slide briefing on contacts among al Qaeda, Iraq and Iran.

“The agency blew a gasket,” Maloof recalled. Maloof did not fully realize how his mission offended the extremely territorial Langley.

Wolfowitz and others pushed the CIA to do better and some in the CIA did not like it. Soon, Democratic lawmakers, principally U.S. Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, began charging that Feith had set up an illegal organization. Levin, using the friendly Washington Post and New York Times, launched a campaign against a “rogue” intelligence cell inside the Defense Department.

By 2002, Maloof’s work was augmented by other terrorism studies. DIA officer Tina Shelton and Christopher Carney, a Navy Reserve intelligence officer who would go on to win election to Congress as a Democrat, headed the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, which was able to establish links among various terrorist groups. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Feith, Wolfowitz put one of his aides to work developing a briefing focused only on Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda.

Eventually, the work of all three groups — Maloof’s, Carney’s, and Wolfowitz’s — was merged into a single document. Feith gave a series of briefings on the combined report, first to Rumsfeld, then to about 30 officers at the CIA (including Director George Tenet), then to Stephen Hadley at the National Security Council and finally to Vice President Dick Cheney.

Tenet later remarked that he did not think much of the paper and relied on it little when he wrote his own assessment. In his book, “At the Center of the Storm,” Tenet did not hide his disgust for Feith and for what he called “Team Feith.” He recalled sitting in on the Feith briefing and thinking, “This is complete crap, and I want this to end right now.”

Yet Tenet’s own terrorism analysis was consistent with Feith’s. As Tenet wrote in 2002 to the Senate Intelligence Committee, “Iraq’s increasing support to extremist Palestinians, coupled with growing indications of a relationship with al Qaeda, suggest that Baghdad’s links to terrorists will increase, even absent U.S. military action. ... We have solid reporting of senior-levelcontacts between Iraq and al Qaeda going back a decade. ... We have credible reporting that al Qaeda leaders sought contacts in Iraq who could help them acquire WMD capabilities.”

As Maloof and Wurmser completed their terror-linkage report in December 2001, Maloof suddenly found himself under attack from Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael Hayden, who ran the National Security Agency and would later become CIA director. Hayden accused Maloof of leaking classified material to the press and wanted his security clearance pulled — a death blow to a defense analyst.

Maloof denied the allegation and subsequently passed a polygraph test. But as the process of stripping his clearance proceeded in 2002, newspaper articles began appearing about his case. Reporters quoted unnamed “intelligence sources” accusing Maloof of misdeeds. Maloof had butted heads with Langley over acquiring years of reporting on al Qaeda and a few months later his credibility was under attack from the intelligence community.

The DIA revoked Maloof’s clearance in December 2001. Its order did not cite leaking. Instead, it said he showed a lack of judgment stemming from a romantic relationship with Ia Meurmishvili. The woman, a native of the republic of Georgia, was being recruited by intelligence agencies. Maloof said the relationship began after he had separated from his wife. He later married Meurmishvili. The board also cited Maloof for unacceptable financial debt. Maloof said the debt crunch stemmed from his separation and divorce.

Maloof appealed.

The next spring, the board voted to revoke his clearance again, on “the same information considered by the earlier [board],” according to a 2005 Pentagon inspector general’s report. Maloof lost subsequent appeals, so Feith put him to work on unclassified projects.

Discouraged, Maloof subsequently retired after more than 20 years of tracking arms proliferation between Western countries and the bad guys. The intelligence community had bagged Maloof and damaged Feith in the process.

“When I drove out to the CIA, I thought we would be a team,” Maloof recalled of his October 2001 trip to Langley. “As I tell people now, Rome was burning and the barbarians were at the gate. By October, it was open warfare. They began leaking and making accusations and accusing us of setting up an operation to bypass the agency. They went after me for political reasons.”

And they won.

ABOUT "SABOTAGE": The articles in this series are drawn from “Sabotage,” a book appearing this week from Regnery Publishing. Author Rowan Scarborough, The Examiner’s national security correspondent, tells the story of a CIA bureaucracy that badly damaged the Bush administration with leaks, false allegations and sheer incompetency. He interviewed scores of intelligence and defense sources to paint a picture of an agency that fell into disarray under former President Bill Clinton and that is still rebuilding in the sixth year of the War on Terror. Scarborough is author of a previous book, “Rumsfeld’s War,” also published by Regnery.

Read other "Sabotage" excerpts | Order the book