Washington ? The war in Iraq is apotheosis and pitfall for George Tenet and his Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA’s strengths in the opening phase of the war now quickly become grave weaknesses for President Bush’s goals in the decisive stage of this campaign and in Iraq’s volatile political future.

The agency’s strengths lie in its covert license to buy, seduce or eliminate America’s potential and real foes. Its glory at this moment flows from the barrels of guns and the stacks of cash that agency operatives hand out secretly to people who say they will do U.S. bidding.

Tenet’s organization has used those talents to attack murderous dictatorships in Afghanistan and in Iraq, where its pinpointing of Saddam Hussein on March 19 was brilliant tradecraft. Such odious targets make the agency’s role far less controversial and repugnant than in Cold War days, when those talents were at times exercised against elected governments.

But the Iraq war catches the transformation of the agency — and of Tenet himself — still in progress. The people the CIA can buy and control are unlikely to contribute much to the democracy that Bush has promised Iraq when the war is over. With the CIA’s complicit backing, they will in fact bar the road to that outcome if Bush’s commitment wavers even slightly.

Tenet has emerged from the obscurity of Senate staff work to become a swashbuckling CIA director who has charmed Bush more successfully than any other Cabinet member. Actor George Clooney would be a natural to play Tenet, except that Tenet is incomparable in the role himself.

When he worked for Bill Clinton, Tenet’s priorities were to recruit Chinese-speaking Ph.D.s and to push his people to steal more political and financial secrets abroad. People who spent time with him concluded that he was uneasy with the agency’s history of covert operations.

This was especially true on Iraq, where he inherited a record of CIA failure that is unprecedented in cost and duration. But 9-11 and Bush’s focus on Saddam Hussein changed that. Long-standing contacts with current and ex-Saddam proteges and war criminals were reactivated. And in a classic agency mistake, efforts to kill off Iraqi democratic exile movements beyond the agency’s control were intensified.

At an agency briefing shortly before the war began, Tenet told the president that tribal sheiks in southern Iraq had taken CIA cash and promised to be “with us” when the fighting started. But Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld reportedly sounded a cautionary note at that meeting that turned out to be prophetic: “They are also probably telling Saddam they will be with him.”

In a repeat of ill-fated efforts in Afghanistan’s Pashtun regions in October 2001, the agency distributed tens of millions of dollars (or more) to local leaders who kept the cash and failed to rise up against the regime when fighting began.

Wasted cash is not a serious sin in the shadow world of espionage. But basing intelligence estimates on a flawed understanding of others’ intentions is. So is giving U.S. military commanders and the president the impression that the entry into southern Iraq would be supported more broadly than it was. That borders on an intelligence failure.

The CIA has in fact provided much valuable information to Gen. Tommy Franks, the theater commander, including the tip that led to the decapitation strike on Saddam’s bunker. “Franks’ command is working very closely with and admiring of the agency’s work,” says one well-placed administration source. “But the command remains aware the agency has to deal with people who don’t always keep their promises.”

That is only part of the story. The agency has long and actively resisted setting up an Iraqi-run intelligence collection program inside that country which could have made valuable contributions to this campaign. It joined the State Department’s Near East Bureau in working to cut off U.S. funds for the Iraqi National Congress and other anti-Baathist movements that (rightly) urged a long process of starting the political education of the population and a low-intensity conflict against the regime.

A coup pulled off by generals was easier and surer, the spooks replied. And working with two Iraqi security officers they turned, the agency found a new high-tech silver bullet in the form of the March 19 air strike. It was a daring and worthwhile gambit for opening the war.

But the agency remains ill-suited for choosing, promoting and installing leaders who can be trusted to keep their promises — first of all to their own people. That is a job for the Iraqi people and particularly for those among them with a long history of fighting for democracy.

Jim Hoagland is a columnist for Washington Post Writers Group.