Smoke is rising at the Central Intelligence Agency as new director Porter Goss asserts his authority there. There are good and bad aspects to what he is doing.

The CIA has failed the United States twice in major ways in recent years. First, it did not obtain or analyze correctly the intelligence that would have enabled the United States to head off the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. Second, it did not obtain, analyze or present convincingly the intelligence that would have established the fallacy of various contentions -- that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, that Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida were in cahoots, and that the Iraqis would strew flowers in the path of invading U.S. forces -- that served as the basis for what has turned out to be a catastrophic U.S. war in Iraq.

So there is no question that the CIA needs badly to be shaken up, and Mr. Goss is doing so. Senior resignations are numerous and, unfortunately, represent a loss to American intelligence of years of experience. Yet these departing officers are presumably the same people who brought about the failures of the past few years.

At the same time, it is worth asking if part of Mr. Goss' cure is not, in fact, laying the basis for future intelligence failures. He has put in charge of the CIA, as his own personal staff, Republican political appointees with no intelligence background who worked for him when he was a congressman.

Worse, he has instructed CIA career officers that he expects them to support Bush administration policy. To do that is to set the United States up for another situation in which intelligence -- instead of being collected and analyzed objectively to serve as the basis for rational decisions at the top -- will be tailored to fit the policy line that the Bush administration is pushing at any given time. That, of course, is exactly how America got into the mess in Iraq.

One could ask what else could be expected of a Republican congressman elevated to the position of director of central intelligence. But we could also ask if we ever learn anything.

President Bush should look closely at this situation and not allow the intelligence agency upon whose recommendations he bases critical decisions, including peace or war, to get politicized to the degree that it becomes useless to him. The CIA is definitely not the place for political purity. It is the place where hard questions must be asked. Mistakes at the CIA cost lives.