It's a little like yelling an obscenity at a wedding. In the etiquette of Washington, it has always been an unwritten rule that members of the CIA don't publicly criticize the people they work for - namely the US government.

From the agency's inception some 50 years ago, the mantra of top officials in particular has been to provide "hard" information - estimates and analyses - not public opinions about their bosses' policies or veracity.

Now a senior CIA official is violating the trench-coat oath - and roiling already sensitive relations between the White House and the nation's top spy agency. It comes at a time of major reform of the nation's intelligence apparatus.

Mike Scheuer, a 22-year veteran who works in the CIA's Counterterrorist Center and is a former head of its Osama bin Laden unit, is criticizing the Bush administration for going to war in Iraq and for the way it has conducted the war on terror in general. And he's doing it very publicly.

Mr. Scheuer, who says he will leave his job today after holding "cordial" talks with his superiors on Wednesday, has been granting interviews to members of the media for days - and will appear Sunday night on CBS's "60 Minutes."

"I have concluded that there has not been adequate national debate over the nature of the threat posed by Osama bin Laden and the forces he leads and inspires, and the nature and dimensions of the intelligence reform needed to address that threat," Scheuer said yesterday. He hopes to produce "a more substantive debate."

In many respects, his mini-revolt is just the most visible sign of a tension that has existed between the White House and the CIA almost since 9/11. As the agency has been censured for its failures leading up to the Sept. 11, and for incorrect estimates about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, agency members have circulated information defending their intelligence reporting and criticizing the Bush administration for going to war in Iraq and diverting attention from Osama bin Laden. Most of the missives have been anonymous leaks.

Never before, say government officials and outside experts, have relations between the CIA and the administration been so contentious. And never, they say, has the agency so publicly crossed the line to involve itself in policy debate. A Wall Street Journal editorial went so far as to call the agency's leaks and criticisms an "insurgency."

The agency was already in tumult. In the wake of numerous investigations and fault-finding charges, former CIA director George Tenet resigned this past summer, as did James Pavitt, the man who ran the agency's day-to-day counterterrorism operations. Now, Congress is debating the recommendations of the 9/11 commission. It's not yet clear to what extent reforms - such as appointing an über director with supervisory and budgetary control over the entire intelligence community, or creating a national counterterrorism center - will be implemented. But the agency is likely to lose much of the power and prestige it has garnered over the past 50 years.

"You can't be a member of the CIA and read that as anything but the status and power of the agency is going to decline," says Jim Walsh, an expert on security at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. "I think it's understandable that some people may be sick and tired of this or pretty darned mad."

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