I wonder: Has John Negroponte ever told the president to knock it off? Gone into the Oval Office, plopped down on the sofa, and said, in effect, “Look, Mr. President, we don’t spend $44 billion a year on intelligence so you and Cheney and Rice can go out and tell the American people exactly the opposite of what we’ve found.”

Not likely. Because the director of national intelligence has joined the president in an exercise known as putting make-up on a pig. In this case, “the pig” is his own dire report detailing the cataclysmic blowback from the invasion of Iraq.

The night before President Bush declassified the summary pages of Negroponte’s now-famous National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), the intelligence chief gave a scheduled speech on an entirely different subject at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington.

The NIE, as everyone knows, gave lie to the president’s rosy pronouncements on Iraq — and virtually all other happy talk about the success of his “war on terror.”

At the end of his address Negroponte briefly touched on the swirling controversy. While giving a torturous reading of his own NIE’s findings, he put Iraq seventh on his list of causes for the global jihad prairie fire.

“While there is much that remains to be done in the war on terror, we have achieved some notable successes against the global jihadist threat,” he said.

Negroponte’s comments are remarkable on two counts. For a half century, U.S. spy chiefs handed in their reports and kept their mouths shut, no matter what presidents said. But, more importantly, Negroponte actually vowed to Congress during his April 12, 2005, confirmation hearing that he wouldn’t keep quiet if he found that his bosses were misinterpreting his intelligence.

Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee wanted assurances that this spy chief would speak out if the president and his team were saying things that the spooks privately knew were wrong.

They didn’t want a repeat of what happened in the run-up to the Iraq war, when government’s top intelligence officials bit their tongues while the White House manipulated secret intelligence to make a public case for toppling Saddam Hussein.

Now, a year and a half later, the rubber’s hit the road with the leak, and subsequent partial declassification, of Negroponte’s first NIE.

The part about Iraq was bad enough. Our presence there has become a “cause celebre” for young Muslims to get their feet wet in American blood, it said.

But the situation is far worse, according to the report: The invasion has stirred nonreligious radicals the world over to emulate al Qaeda (which is still, according to the report, pursuing nuclear, chemical and biological weapons).

“Anti-U.S. and anti-globalization sentiment is on the rise and fueling other radical ideologies,” the NIE said. “This could prompt some leftist, nationalist, or separatist groups to adopt terrorist methods to attack U.S. interests.”

Negroponte turned in those findings, the consensus of the 16 agencies of the so-called U.S. intelligence community, six months ago.

All the while, the president, vice president and other top administration figures were presenting a fun house view of the findings Negroponte had provided in private.

This was exactly the situation the Intelligence Committee’s Democrats, in particular, had in mind when they had Negroponte under oath in the hearing room in the Hart Senate Office Building.

Would Negroponte “speak truth to power,” stand up to the president and tell him what he didn’t want to know or find inconvenient to say, the Democrats asked again and again.

Yes, he would, said the ambassador (as he preferred to be addressed, after tours as envoy to Hondurus in the 1980s, the United Nations in 2001, and then Baghdad).

Of course, these were “hypothetical questions” and there were “bridges to cross,” but yes, he said, he would “speak truth to power.”

“And if you believed an erroneous statement was made by a top policy maker to the public,” asked Carl Levin of Michigan, the committee’s top Democrat, “what would you do?”

“Well, I think that, first of all, given an opportunity to comment beforehand on the correctness or not of the statement, and if I had information that contradicted what was in a draft presidential speech, I would seek to ensure that that incorrect information did not find its way into a Presidential or—”

“And if it did?” Levin cut in.

Negroponte: “Well, you know, we have to cross that bridge, senator. But I believe that we’ve got to work to establish objective intelligence. And the Intelligence Reform Act . . . ”

“But it seems to me,” said Jon Corzine, the Democrat from New Jersey, “that it is almost imperative that the Director of National Intelligence — what’s the term? — speak truth to power or whatever the phrase is. It will be absolutely a requirement. . . .”

Yes, Negroponte said.

“[F]rom everything we’ve learned, from the experience we’ve had in the past several years, we don’t want a repetition of this kind of situation. . . .”

The “situation,” of course, was the White House’s cherry picking of intelligence reports — many entirely false — that bolstered its arguments for invading Iraq.

Well, Corzine pressed, “Will it be the responsibility of the DNI to challenge that privately? I’m not asking for political confrontation.”

“Yes,” said Negroponte, “I have no problem whatsoever with that.”

Now Maryland Democrat Barbara A. Mikulski, the blue-collar daughter of a Baltimore grocer, pressed the ambassador.

“Let me go first . . . to this question of truth to power . . .”

Would intelligence officials,including those who worked for him, she asked, speak up “if they have yellow flashing lights — like when Secretary Powell was going before the U.N. [with trumped up reports on Iraq’s weapons]?”

“How would you, No. 1, create the tone, the climate and actually administrative mechanisms so that you’re getting truth so that you then can do the kind of job that needs to be done?”

Negroponte must have wondered if the session was within the limits of acceptable torture.

“I mean, truth to power is crucial . . .” he protested.

“Truth to power,” echoed John D. Rockefeller IV, the committee’s ranking Democrat, of West Virginia. The dialogue was starting to sound like a Sunday morning call-and-response.

“You will need to speak truth to power, and that includes the President of the United States, obviously. . . .” Rockefeller said.

Negroponte said he got it.

“I believe in calling things the way I see them,” he said. “And I believe that the president deserves from his director of national intelligence . . . the unvarnished truth as I best understand it.”

But last week, Negroponte’s public comments about his NIE amounted to spin, plain and simple. And by speaking publicly at all, Negroponte is departing from a long tradition of intelligence chiefs to stay in the background.

“Is that the role Negroponte sees for himself in this new environment?” asks John Rollins, a longtime intel operative and former intelligence chief of staff to former Homeland Secretary Tom Ridge. “Fine, he can do that. But if then it behooves him to step out in public when he disagrees.”

For sure, Negroponte deserves credit for presenting the White House with the agonizing truth about the desperate straits America (not just the administration) finds itself in five years after 9/11. Considering the performance of his predecessor atop U.S. intelligence, that, at least it’s a promising start.

But that’s what he is paid to do. And, as he pledged to the Senate Intelligence Committee last year, it’s only part of the job.

Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.