The classified memos, which have not been previously
disclosed, were requested by then-CIA Director George J. Tenet more
than a year after the start of the secret interrogations, according to
four administration and intelligence officials familiar with the
documents. Although Justice Department lawyers, beginning in 2002, had
signed off on the agency's interrogation methods, senior CIA officials
were troubled that White House policymakers had never endorsed the
program in writing.

The memos were the first -- and, for years,
the only -- tangible expressions of the administration's consent for
the CIA's use of harsh measures to extract information from captured
al-Qaeda leaders, the sources said. As early as the spring of 2002,
several White House officials, including then-national security adviser
Condoleezza Rice and Vice President Cheney, were given individual
briefings by Tenet and his deputies, the officials said. Rice, in a
statement to congressional investigators last month, confirmed the
briefings and acknowledged that the CIA director had pressed the White
House for "policy approval."

The repeated requests for a paper
trail reflected growing worries within the CIA that the administration
might later distance itself from key decisions about the handling of
captured al-Qaeda leaders, former intelligence officials said. The
concerns grew more pronounced after the revelations of mistreatment of
detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and further still as
tensions grew between the administration and its intelligence advisers
over the conduct of the Iraq war.

"It came up in the daily
meetings. We heard it from our field officers," said a former senior
intelligence official familiar with the events. "We were already
worried that we" were going to be blamed...