The first salvo in what degenerated into open warfare within the Bush Administration was fired by the President himself, blaming the CIA for the inclusion of a false claim about Iraq’s nuclear weapons programme in his State of the Union address last January.

The extraordinary public blame Mr Bush heaped upon the agency was underscored by Condoleezza Rice, his National Security Adviser, who summoned reporters covering Mr Bush’s Africa tour to tell them that the CIA had “cleared the speech in its entirety”.

Their finger-pointing exposed the bitter blame game raging within the Administration as the issue of Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction finally caught fire in Washington.

It capped one of the worst weeks Mr Bush has endured since the September 11 attacks and put the normally sure-footed White House on the defensive as it struggled to protect the President from allegations that he he may have knowingly lied to the American public.The Oval Office’s attack on the CIA caused a sensation on Capitol Hill, and brought calls from Democrats for a congressional investigation. The internal warfare was triggered by last week’s White House admission that Mr Bush was wrong to have claimed in his State of the Union speech that Iraq had tried to buy uranium from Africa. That claim was based on intelligence reports that Saddam sought nuclear material from Niger.

After it emerged that the CIA and State Department were told 11 months before the speech that the claim was bogus, congressmen demanded to know why Mr Bush repeated the allegation.

In anonymous briefings to the US media on Thursday CIA officials insisted that the agency explicitly told the White House that the claim was false before the speech. They also said they had tried unsuccessfully to persuade the British Government on this.

That triggered yesterday’s furious White House counter-attack, with Mr Bush saying: “I gave a speech to the nation that was cleared by the intelligence services.”

Dr Rice also insisted that the CIA cleared the speech in its entirety. “If the CIA — the Director of Central Intelligence — had said ‘Take this out of the speech’, it would have been gone.” She added that Mr Tenet was a “terrific” Director, but in Washington her words were seen as devastating.

Pat Roberts, Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, also weighed in. Mr Roberts, a Republican, said that ten days before the speech the CIA was still standing behind the Niger claim. “If the CIA had changed its position, it was incumbent on the Director of Central Intellligence to correct the record and bring it to the immediate attention of the President. It appears that he failed,” Mr Roberts said. Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, fuelled the row by saying that he had not included the uranium-from-Africa claim in his presentation to the United Nations a week after Mr Bush’s speech because he doubted its veracity. John McCain, a Republican senator, said that there should be an investigation to determine how the bogus information made its way into the address. Dick Durbin, a senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said: “Somebody in the White House knew. This really calls into question the leadership in the White House and our intelligence agencies.”

Howard Dean, a Democratic presidential contender, raised Watergate’s famous refrain: “We need to know what the President knew and when he knew it.” He demanded the resignation of any official who failed to tell Mr Bush the information was false.

“The only other possibility, which is unthinkable, is that the President of the United States knew himself that this was a false fact and he put it in the State of the Union anyhow. I hope for the sake of this country that did not happen,” he said. Democrats had begun taking the offensive even before yesterday’s developments, exploiting growing disquiet over mounting casualties in Iraq and over rising unemployment at home.

Mr Bush will arrive back from Africa today facing, for the first time since he took office, questions about his honesty, and looking vulnerable on foreign policy and national security — issues that until now he has successfully used to divide Democrats and unite the public behind him.

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