WASHINGTON – They are getting ready to play one of the favorite games in our nation’s capital – a political version of pin the tail on the donkey. In the case at hand, the donkey is the Central Intelligence Agency and its director, George Tenet.

The trouble is that all the donkeys eligible for the tail won’t be in the corral when the game begins.

The powers on Capitol Hill want someone to take the fall for all the bad pre-war intelligence on Iraq, and since the Republicans will make certain that their president isn’t the fall guy, and make certain the bad news doesn’t come out until after Election Day, George Bush is willing to let them have at it.

There’s no question that the CIA got at least part of the intelligence on Iraq wrong, especially on weapons of mass destruction. If a few heads roll over this the agency headquarters, so be it. But it should be noted that the idea that Saddam Hussein both had and sought WMD was conventional wisdom in this town for at least 10 years.

Bill Clinton and his wonks talked about Saddam Hussein and the threat his chemical and biological weapons posed during much of their eight years in office. It became an article of faith. Given that Saddam had actually USED poison gas to kill a whole town full of Kurds, no one had trouble believing he still had the stuff and was working to get other, deadlier weapons, including nukes.

Remember, too, that this isn’t the first time the CIA got something terribly wrong, or failed to see a very large train coming down the tracks. Remember the fall of the Soviet Union? Remember, if you are old enough, the Bay of Pigs?

It seems as though every time the agency stumbles, it is due to a lack of any decent human intelligence (humint) product. The people who control the money on Capitol Hill – and every administration since before Jack Kennedy – have been bedazzled by the product of the very expensive National Security Agency – satellite cameras that can read over your shoulder from 200 miles up, and tapes of the phone calls of almost everyone in the world. National technical means, they call it.

“Now everyone is saying George Tenet put too much reliance on humint and we need to go back to national technical means,” one senior administration official told me. “What was wrong was not humint but specifically the humint we got from Ahmad Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress people and their defectors – who have all proved to be either totally wrong, or worse, double agents putting out a line straight from Saddam or his intelligence people.”

That human intelligence was not foisted upon the decision-makers by the CIA or the NSA. It came out of Vice President Dick Cheney’s office and out of the Office of Special Plans, run by Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith, in the office of the secretary of defense, Donald H. Rumsfeld.

Feith has not been heard from much of late. “They are really laying low, hoping the CIA takes all the hits while they skate,” the senior official said. “But they had much more impact on how the intelligence was read and acted on.”

Because the bosses, Rumsfeld and Cheney, didn’t like the intelligence product and analysis they were getting from CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, they created Feith’s happy kingdom. He crafted reports much more to their liking, based largely on Chalabi’s wishful thinking and Israeli intelligence that had the aim of pushing us to take on Iraq and take out Saddam.

None of these folks will be in the pen when the bipartisan blue-ribbon investigative commission begins waltzing around the truth and pinning the tail on a target chosen by acclamation. Not the vice president, not Feith, not Secretary Rumsfeld, and certainly not Chalabi.

It is equally unlikely that anyone will get around to looking at the larger truth: Our national intelligence apparatus is broken. The country spends $45 billion a year on that machinery and gets little of what it needs in return. We buy spy satellites that cost $4 billion a copy and everyone in the world knows how to beat them; knows when they are going to be overhead; knows how to spoof them.

We can count the sheep behind a mud hut in Waziristan and eavesdrop on a prime minister’s phone-sex with his mistresses, but somehow we haven’t been able to find Osama bin Laden or Mullah Omar in more than two years. That requires human intelligence, and that is in short supply. And not just in the Middle East either. It is occasionally quite lacking in Washington, too.

Joseph L. Galloway is the senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers and co-author of the national best-seller “We Were Soldiers Once … and Young.”

Readers may write to him at: Knight Ridder Washington Bureau, 700 National Press Building, Washington, D.C. 20045.

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