CIA Director George Tenet, who presided over major intelligence lapses involving the September 11, 2001, attacks and the mistaken belief that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, has resigned and will leave in July, the Bush administration said.

In the highest profile departure by a member of the administration?s security team, Tenet submitted his resignation to US President George W. Bush at the White House late on Wednesday after months of mounting calls for him to step down.

The White House said Bush had no prior warning of Tenet?s move and denied suggestions he was forced out over erroneous intelligence reports that have prompted the president to create a bipartisan commission to examine the quality of pre-war US intelligence.

«He told me he was resigning for personal reasons. I told him I?m sorry he?s leaving,» Bush said in a surprise announcement shortly before heading to Italy and France. «I will miss him.»

A senior administration official flying to Europe with Bush told reporters that the president tried to persuade Tenet to stay. «The president did not want him to step down ? wanted him to stay, told him he wanted him to stay,» said the official, who asked not to be identified.

Tenet, 51, told CIA staff that he would end his seven-year tenure as US spymaster on July 11. Only Allen Dulles, who ran the agency from 1953 to 1961, has served longer in the job.

«I tell you about my plans to depart with sadness but with head held very, very high ? as yours should always be, because what you do is so critical to everything our nation stands for: its goodness, its decency and its courage,» he said in an emotional address.

A senior CIA official said Tenet had decided it was time to move on to the next stage of his life after years in a difficult job that in recent years had been «incredibly tough».

«All those talking heads who say he was pushed out are flat wrong,» the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Friday he regretted the surprise resignation of CIA director George Tenet, calling him «an enormously talented public servant».

«I join the President in regretting George?s decision to leave the government and wish him the very best,» Rumsfeld said in a statement released during a visit to Singapore for an Asian security conference.

REBUILT MORALE

Tenet, a longtime Washington insider was appointed in 1997 by President Bill Clinton and helped rebuild morale at an agency wracked by years of instability and budget cuts. But under Bush, Tenet ran into repeated criticism.

He assured the president on the eve of the March 2003 US-led invasion that the case for war in Iraq was a «slam dunk,» using a basketball expression to portray the weapons evidence as a certainty.

Bush cited Saddam Hussein?s weapons program as a prime reason for the US-led war and occupation of Iraq. No chemical, biological or nuclear weapons have been found up to now.

Tenet also was castigated for his espionage oversight in the months ahead of the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington.

In April, the commission investigating the attacks criticized the CIA for failing to comprehend the threat posed by al Qaeda before the attacks that killed 3,000 people.

Bush said at the time that US intelligence operations may need to be reformed and hardline Republicans cited Tenet?s «slam dunk» remark as evidence the president had not been well served by him.

Tenet?s departure comes at a critical juncture for Bush, who has seen his job approval ratings fall to new lows over Iraq, as he faces a tight reelection battle against Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry.

Kerry said: «There is no question ... that there have been significant intelligence failures, and the administration has to accept responsibility for those failures.»

Other Democrats said Tenet?s resignation should be only the beginning of administration accountability.

Deputy CIA director John McLaughlin is slated to take over from Tenet as acting director.

Hours before Tenet informed Bush about his plans, new allegations emerged about intelligence leaks to Iran by Ahmad Chalabi, the discredited Iraqi exile who was once a close administration ally.

The CIA has been pressed by Secretary of State Colin Powell to explain how inaccurate pre-war intelligence, stating that Iraq had mobile biological warfare labs, made it through the agency?s vetting system.

Upheaval at the Central Intelligence Agency

The National Security Act of 1947 established the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Council as instruments of the executive branch to protect US national economic and political interests abroad. The resignation of George Tenet is the result of the inherent bureaucratic conflict between the CIA director ? who represents thousand of employees, faces congressional oversight and is subject to the budgetary whims and political vicissitudes of Capitol Hill ? and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, who does not.

Someone must pay for the distortion of intelligence that facilitated the invasion of Iraq in search of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Tenet?s acquiescent «slam dunk» guarantee to the president on the presence of Iraqi WMDs goes against a historic pattern of CIA challenges to executive branch foreign policy adventurism.

Both George Tenet, the first member of Bush?s national security team to quit, and President Bush said the resignation was for personal reasons. But current and former intelligence officials noted that Tenet was anticipating heavy criticism from three reports expected to assail the agency either over its failure to detect the September 11 terror plot or the assessments that Iraq possessed unconventional weapons before the US invasion last year.

Most damaging among them is a Senate Intelligence Committee report, due out this month, which is expected to single out errors made by the agency in its prewar judgments. Some Republican senators, including Pat Roberts of Kansas, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, signaled to the administration within the last two weeks that the report?s conclusions would be so critical that it would raise questions about who should be held accountable, an official said. Another official said the highly critical nature of the report was widely known at the White House.