The director of the CIA has accused Dick Cheney of "gallows politics" in which he almost hopes for another terrorist attack on the United States so that his charges against President Obama’s national security polices will be vindicated.

"I think he smells some blood in the water," Leon Panetta said in an interview for the new issue of The New Yorker magazine. "When you read behind it, it's almost as if he's wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point."

Mr Panetta's remarks represent the latest shot of increasingly bitter exchanges between the Obama Administration and the former Vice-President, whose office said yesterday that it did not expect him to make an immediate response.

Mr Cheney responded last night, saying: "I hope my old friend Leon was misquoted. The important thing is whether the Obama Administration will continue the policies that have kept us safe for the last eight years."

Mr Cheney has repeatedly claimed in recent months that Mr Obama's decisions on national security issues such as ordering the closure of Guantánamo Bay and a halt to enhanced interrogations of suspected terrorists were endangering America.

With Republicans lacking a national figurehead, Mr Cheney has emerged from the shadows, which he occupied during much of the past eight years, to become a powerful voice criticising Mr Obama.

He went head to head with the President last month by delivering — minutes after Mr Obama had finished a major national security address — a speech condemning the ban on harsh interrogations as "recklessness cloaked as righteousness" and his decision to publish legal advice authorising their use as "unwise in the extreme". George W. Bush, by contrast, has remained virtually silent since leaving the White House in January.

Mr Cheney's supporters say that he is not driven by political ambition because, at the age of 68 and with a history of heart problems, he has no intention of running for office again. They say that his reasons for speaking out are a desire to defend the Bush Administration's place in history and a genuine concern that policy changes have left America less safe.

In a weekend interview the Vice-President, Joe Biden, notably refused to endorse the CIA chief's analysis of his predecessor's motivation. But he added: "I think Dick Cheney's judgment about how to secure America is faulty. I think our judgment is correct." Mr Panetta, a former White House chief of staff under President Clinton, has previously been seen as a moderate within the Obama Administration because he is known to have been opposed to publishing the legal memos on interrogation techniques.

The CIA director told The New Yorker, however, that he had favoured the creation of an independent truth commission to look into the Bush Administration's detainee policies — an idea opposed by Mr Obama.

Mr Panetta acknowledged that there were some people still at the CIA who might be tainted by the programme but indicated that he was agnostic about whether it yielded results. "Yes, important information was gathered from these detainees," he said. "Was this the only way to obtain this information? I think that will always be an open question . . . we did pay a price for using those methods."

Mr Cheney has often stated that interrogations, widely denounced by human rights groups as torture, helped to save lives.

Times Recommends

• Please help: maimed children of war want their lives back
• Cabal seizes diamond riches to buy power
• White House gatecrashers got to the president