Am Prospect: "The Yes Man" - How Porter Goss has all but destroyed the CIA

Nothing Without Hope

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Mon Oct-24-05 09:27 PM
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Am Prospect: "The Yes Man" - How Porter Goss has all but destroyed the CIA

Edited on Mon Oct-24-05 09:53 PM by Nothing Without Hope

This article is the cover story for the November issue of The American Prospect:

This is an absolute must-read and another reason why the Bush Administration has made this country far less safe for long years to come, even if it is forced out of office by people who actually dwell in the reality-based community.

http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewPrint&articleId=10472

The Yes-Man

President Bush sent Porter Goss to the CIA to keep the agency in line. What he�s really doing is wrecking it.
By Robert Dreyfuss
Issue Date: 11.23.05

(snip)

This article, based on more than two-dozen interviews with former intelligence officials from the CIA, the Pentagon, and the State Department, along with ex�Capitol Hill intelligence staffers who worked with Goss, is the first comprehensive account of the CIA�s transition from George Tenet through John McLaughlin, the agency�s respected acting director in mid-2004, to Goss. It reveals that Goss may have put the final nail in the coffin of an agency whose expertise and analytical skills were cavalierly overridden by a White House obsessed with Saddam Hussein. From 2001 on, its covert operatives and analysts were ignored, pressured, and forced to toe the administration�s line; neoconservative ideologues considered those operatives to be virtually part of the enemy camp. Many of those who remain inside the CIA are distraught, convinced that their work is wasted on an administration that doesn�t want to hear the truth. �How do you think they feel?� asked one recently retired CIA officer with three decades of experience. �They�re watching a fucking idiotic policy, run by idiots, unfold right before their eyes!�

(snip �the meat of the report is in this section)

On the seventh floor at Langley, Goss is reportedly isolated. His staff protects him from agency veterans. It is said that he doesn�t walk the halls or mix readily with the troops, doesn�t eat in the CIA cafeteria, and gets chilly stares from employees. Many of them are angry that Goss has quietly allowed Negroponte to usurp traditional CIA roles, such as briefing the president on daily intelligence. �He�s seen as a weak leader, not as an advocate,� says one recently retired Middle East CIA officer. �So the agency is losing its position of influence.� Having clashed early with the Directorate of Operations, Goss has alienated -- some say irreparably -- the heart of the CIA: its clandestine service. �Without the , the CIA is the Brookings Institution with razor wire,� says one former agent. Another adds: �The won�t forgive Goss. With the , you are either an �us� or a �them.� With the start Goss made, he was firmly placed in the �them� category.�

Chas W. Freeman is a former assistant secretary of defense and U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia under the first President Bush. �What Goss is doing is an effort that originated outside the agency to impose a vision on it that its analysts and operatives reject as simply not based on reality,� he says. �It�s totalitarian. We are going to end up with an agency that is more right-wing, more conformist, and less prone to produce people with original views and dissenters.�

Demoralized, weakened, and politicized, the CIA may yet recover. The agency, particularly the Directorate of Operations, has weathered storms before and knows how to hunker down. Goss will probably not remain at the helm for long. And despite him, the agency continues to produce reports on the U.S. predicament in Iraq that reflect a measure of reality-based pessimism. But there is anger, bitterness, and an unhealthy caution that ill serves America�s need for an agency that, as one former CIA officer says, �speaks truth to power.� Enormous damage has been done, and the rebuilding of the CIA will take many years after Goss departs.

Robert Dreyfuss is a Prospect senior correspondent. He covers national security for Rolling Stone and writes frequently for The Nation and Mother Jones. His book, Devil�s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, was published this fall by Henry Holt/Metropolitan.

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The same author wrote a related article in The American Prospect last month:

http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=10394
Tenet's Revenge

Porter Goss can't afford to rattle any more skeletons at the CIA.
By Robert Dreyfuss
Web Exclusive: 10.07.05

There�s no reason why Porter Goss, the embattled director of the CIA, can�t declassify and make public the agency�s internal investigation of its less-than-stellar counterterrorism accomplishments before September 11. And there�s no reason why Goss can�t reprimand any current or former CIA officers, including former Director George Tenet, if they deserve it. (Whether they in fact deserve it depends at least in part on what the report says.) But he won�t.

The report, written by the CIA�s inspector general, was commissioned by Congress in December 2002 and delivered to Congress last summer. Democrats, sensing yet another opportunity to tar George W. Bush with the intelligence community�s failures, would love to have it made public -- but Goss, and Republicans on the congressional intelligence committees, are content to sit on it. Since it was delivered, Goss has declared his opposition to releasing the report to the public, even in redacted form. Then, on Wednesday, the CIA announced that no disciplinary action would be taken against any of the 20 past and present CIA officials reported to have come under criticism in the report.

But there are several hidden crosscurrents at work.

First, since taking over at the CIA a little more than a year ago, Goss has wreaked havoc on an agency that has been considered enemy territory by the Pentagon and its neoconservative allies for the past four years. Since going to Langley, Goss -- carrying water for the White House, which blamed the CIA for resisting its pressure to support the war in Iraq in 2002-03 and for refusing to drink the administration�s Kool-Aid and engage in happy talk about the Iraqi insurgency during the 2004 election season -- has shredded much of the agency�s core capabilities, forcing many senior officers into retirement or exile. He is, according to insiders� accounts, isolated from the agency�s top officials, holed up in his executive suite at Langley and surrounded by a snarling staff of former House aides who accompanied him to the CIA. As a result, Goss has no political capital left at the CIA, and he can ill afford to take gratuitous actions that would further alienate the CIA�s professionals.

(snip)