Note: I didn't say I wanted John Kerry to win; I said, "Why."

I'm far more interested in "why" than "what."

"What" is dross; it fills the airwaves and newspapers, and I consider it all white noise or, as Bob Dylan said of Time magazine back in the day, "an adult comic book."

"Why" is fun, exciting, surprising, and interesting: that's where I hang out.

The reason Kerry will win is that the CIA and the Pentagon are going to steal the election for him.

Not because they necessarily agree with his politics and plans; rather, because he will leave them alone.

Bush intends to create a national intelligence czar, overseeing the CIA and the Pentagon's intelligence operations, and seizing control of their finances.

Not a happy thought to the entrenched powers-that-be atop the nation's spy shops.

Just as the long knives of the institutional memory arm of the CIA came out earlier this month to publicly disembowel Michael Kostiw, new CIA director Porter Goss's nominee for the agency's powerful number three position, they will strike again, under deep cover and cut out from any possible linkage, to deny Bush an election victory.

Consider yesterday's Washington Post headline: "Turf War Stalls Intelligence Bill; Pentagon Allies at Odds With Advocates of New Director."

The military is not happy with Bush's plans.

Last week, a secret letter to Congress from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Richard B. Myers, opposing the unlimited powers of the proposed new intelligence czar, was leaked to the New York Times.

Yeah, right: "leaked" might not be quite the right word.

This past weekend's Financial Times story on the subject was headlined "Victorious Kerry Would Sack Head of Intelligence."

You don't think the Cold War veterans of the CIA were ecstatic as they read that?

Charles McCarry, one of the greatest living spy novelists, wrote a novel in 1979 called "The Better Angels."

In it, McCarry - himself a former long-time CIA case officer - predicted the 9/11 terrorist bombings with uncanny accuracy.

Remember, this was 22 years before they happened, long before terrorism was even a faint spot on the radar.

The book's plot also hinged on a successful CIA ultra-black-op to rig and steal a presidential election.

I think Shakespeare hit it right on the head four centuries ago when he wrote, in "The Tempest," "What's past is prologue."

Said Kerry recently, "If I'm elected, Porter Goss will have had one of the briefest tenures as head of the CIA in its history."

So that's why I'm quite confident we'll see Kerry as President-elect come November 3, 2004.

[Full disclosure: I am not now, nor have I ever been, an employee of the CIA]