By Jeff Stein, CQ Staff

In normal times you might expect intelligence types to support John McCain , who has said he would like to turn the CIA into something like the far more nimble World War II-era cadre of spies and saboteurs, the OSS.

It’s an idea that’s suddenly attractive to a lot of disillusioned veteran CIA operatives, who think the present CIA has grown too big, cautious and sclerotic for today’s needs.

But this is not a normal year, to say the least. And the signals I’m picking up from the direction of CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., suggest that the spies are going for Barack Obama .

“Normally, at least a while back, and certainly in the 1990s, during the Clinton administration, people around the CIA would tend to vote Republican,” says a recent covert agency retiree, asking not to be identified because he still consults with the spy agency.

“But I think that’s changed, probably because of Iraq and Afghanistan,” he said.

After years of derision and insults from neoconservatives who coalesced in the Bush administration, old hands say, they’re getting their revenge.

“I think a lot of the intelligence community, and particularly the CIA, has been pissed off at the neoconservatives, going back to the first Red Team effort,” a group of 1970s-era hawks that challenged the Carter administration’s CIA estimates on Soviet weapons, says a national security official who has served in both Republican and Democratic administrations.

“There’s been a longstanding distrust by conservatives of the intelligence community and particularly the CIA,” he said, asking not to be identified because he occupies a sensitive position.

Campaign insiders say former CIA Director George J. Tenet and virtually his entire senior management team at the agency are standing behind Obama — in the shadows, naturally — not that a public endorsement by the top intelligence officials who helped bring us Iraq could do the Democratic candidate any good.

To be sure, McCain has the backing of former CIA Director James Woolsey and other ex-CIA notables, like Duane R. “Dewey” Clarridge, who mined the harbors of Nicaragua for President Ronald Reagan during the long ago wars in Central America. And Gary Berntsen, who led one of the first CIA teams into Afghanistan, is heading Veterans for McCain in New York.

As far as I can tell, the loyal Republicans among CIA veterans tend to be the retirees whose ranks were decimated during the 1990s, when the Clinton White House and Congress took knives to the corps of Cold War-era spies.

But the current undercover rank and file are listing toward Obama, say CIA insiders (with the exception of the ex-military types who dominate the agency’s paramilitary wing, who tend to be Republican hawks).

There’s been “a presumption that the intelligence community is more like the military than the foreign service,” said the former national security official. “And I think that’s a horribly gross generalization. But I think the foreign service tends to be more Democratic than the military, or more liberal than conservative, whatever the right label is.”