Bush, CIA at Odds on Iran

"As to direct connections with Sept. 11, we're digging into the facts to determine if there was one," Bush said of Iran.

In a second sign of a potential rift between the White House and the intelligence agency, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan told reporters that McLaughlin was not speaking for the president when he said it was unnecessary to create a new, more powerful intelligence czar, despite faulty information before the Iraq war.

"The president is very much open to ideas that build upon the reforms that we're already implementing," McClellan said. "I think [McLaughlin] was expressing his view."

McClellan's comments indicated that the White House was receptive to the idea of fundamental reform in the intelligence community, rather than the "modest changes" McLaughlin had endorsed in an appearance on a Sunday talk show.

The White House-CIA differences emerged as the independent Sept. 11 commission prepared to release its final report Thursday on the 2001 terrorist attacks. The report is expected to contain recommendations that could touch off a contentious drive toward reforming the nation's intelligence-gathering bureaucracy.

The independent commission is widely expected to report that some of the Sept. 11 hijackers had traveled freely between Iran and Afghanistan during 2000 and 2001. Last month, the panel's chairman, former New Jersey Gov. Thomas H. Kean, said in a television interview that Al Qaeda had "a lot more active contacts, frankly, with Iran and with Pakistan than there were with Iraq."

Iran's emerging prominence in the Sept. 11 investigations looms as a potentially difficult issue for the White House, because it could raise new questions about why Bush led a war against Iraq but so far has taken a distinctly less bellicose stance toward Iran.

McClellan argued that the United States indeed had been "confronting" the threat from Iran, which Bush in 2002 listed, along with Iraq and North Korea, as part of an "axis of evil." He added, however, that Iraq was "a unique situation" because it had invaded its neighbors and had possessed and used weapons of mass destruction.