ACTING CIA CHIEF CONSIDERED AS REPLACEMENT.

Byline: Tim Weiner The New York Times

For the fifth time in little more than four years, the Clinton administration is looking for someone to fill the job of director of the Central Intelligence Agency. On Tuesday, the president considered asking George Tenet, the acting director, to take the helm, government officials said.

In the aftermath of Anthony Lake's decision Monday to withdraw his own nomination, the officials said, Clinton and his advisers do not have many choices other than Tenet, one of an exceptionally small number of people who meet three tests for a new nominee: someone who could be approved by the Senate, is capable of doing the job and is willing to take it.

``I can't give you a better name'' than Tenet's, one intelligence official said, or, given those three standards, ``even a name at all.''

Other potential candidates include Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick, who is preparing to leave the Justice Department; Frank Wisner, ambassador to India and son of the famous CIA cold warrior of the same name; and former Sen. Warren Rudman, once a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee and now vice chairman of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. However, none of these possible nominees has expressed any great desire for the job, according to a variety of people familiar with their thinking.

The president's press secretary, Mike McCurry, went out of his way to praise Tenet on Tuesday.

``George Tenet,'' McCurry said, ``does a spectacular job and has got a great reputation inside the agency. I think he's very well liked'' in Congress, where he once worked as staff director of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Tenet has been acting director of the CIA since December, when the Clinton administration let go John Deutch, who had been director for 19 months, and nominated Lake as his successor.

The turnover rate in the post atop the nation's intelligence network has brought the CIA to a state approaching ``institutional collapse,'' says one former vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y.

Now, with the withdrawal of the man who the administration had hoped would bring some stability to that post, Clinton will choose a new nominee ``as soon as possible, given the enormous needs we have,'' McCurry said Tuesday. Government officials said the president might announce his choice even before leaving today for his summit meeting in Helsinki, Finland, with President Boris N. Yeltsin of Russia.

The CIA, McCurry said, ``needs good, inspired leadership, for all the reasons that would be perfectly obvious to anyone who has read a newspaper over the last several months. I mean, that's an agency that is desperate for good, strong leadership.''