washingtonpost.com
Spy Satellites Are Under Scrutiny
Negroponte to Advise Congress on Funding New Systems

By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 16, 2005; A11



Bush administration intelligence chief John D. Negroponte is reviewing two multibillion-dollar spy satellite programs, according to congressional and administration sources, and will make recommendations on their future to House and Senate intelligence committees next month.

Although Negroponte has made some decisions on reprogramming funding in the current fiscal 2005 budget, his recommendations on the satellite programs -- which have been controversial on Capitol Hill -- will be the first major budgetary changes he will propose for next year's spending, sources said. Those reviews come as Negroponte begins to exercise new authority under the intelligence restructuring passed last year by Congress, which created Negroponte's position, director of national intelligence (DNI), and gave that person control over funds spent by the 15 agencies that make up the intelligence community.

Negroponte's deputy, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, told members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence last month that the DNI's spending recommendations for the 2006 budget will be Negroponte's assessments, not the result of consensus among numerous government agencies. The decision-making is being done "in a way that it didn't exist before," Hayden said. "This is not going to be a group answer; it's going to be the answer of the DNI."

Hayden did not specifically discuss the satellite effort to be reviewed, but he alluded to it: "It's a very classified program, but it's very expensive, very important."

One of the systems under scrutiny by Negroponte is a classified program to build the next generation of stealth satellites, whose estimated costs have nearly doubled to $9.5 billion in recent years, according to sources.

The program has been severely criticized in closed session by members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, who have objected to the rising costs and who argue that it is ineffective against modern adversaries such as terrorist networks. The Senate panel has tried to kill the program in the past, sources said, but it has been supported by House and Senate appropriations committees and the House intelligence panel.

Because of their small size, these satellites -- early generations had been code-named Misty -- would be almost invisible among existing space debris to enemy radars. But those same small dimensions would also limit some of their collection capabilities, according to John Pike, an expert in space vehicles with GlobalSecurity.org.

The other futuristic spy satellite program that Negroponte has focused on is the new generation of non-stealth space vehicles -- using optical, radar, listening and infrared-red capabilities -- known collectively as the Future Imagery Architecture (FIA). Development of these satellites, which has been going on since the late 1990s, has also had major cost increases, now estimated at more than $25 billion over the next decade. As a result, the House intelligence panel voted sharp reductions in its version of the fiscal 2006 intelligence authorization bill.

The intelligence authorization bill has passed the House and is pending in the Senate.

A DNI spokesman confirmed that Negroponte would be giving Congress the "DNI position" on classified intelligence programs when the legislators return after Labor Day but would not confirm the programs involved.

The two new generations of spy satellites are being developed by the National Reconnaissance Office, a Pentagon agency that also reports to the DNI. There was a recent change of leadership at the office, with Donald M. Kerr moving over from the CIA, where he had headed the science and technology division. Negroponte played a role in the choice of Kerr, who in the past has run the FBI's criminal laboratory and the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

August 17, 2005 -- Political purges continue at the National Security Agency (NSA). NSA insiders report that politically-motivated purges orchestrated by the neo-conservative cabal at the Pentagon continue unabated at the signals intelligence (SIGINT) agency. Career NSA personnel who have been identified as non-conformists have been subjected to a psychologically abusive and Kafkaesque series of administrative and personnel actions, which ultimately lead to revocation of their security clearances and dismissal from the agency. The tactics involve the use of psychiatrists and psychologists who certify that targets for purges suffer from a myriad of personality disorders. Those subjected to such treatment have included personnel with over 16 years experience in SIGINT and electronics intelligence (ELINT), foreign language capabilities (including Arabic and Urdu), and covert joint operations with the CIA in hostile environments. Contrary to earlier expectations, the new NSA Director, Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, is continuing the draconian purge policies implemented by his predecessor, Gen. Michael Hayden, now the Deputy Director for National Intelligence. Alexander is also continuing the policy of purging career NSA personnel with a view to replacing them with less reliable contractors, including those who work for companies with ties to a hostile intelligence nation currently being investigated by the U.S. Attorney for Eastern Virginia. In addition, contractors are much less likely to question the misuse of raw SIGINT intelligence, including cherry picking SIGINT to bolster questionable Bush administration military actions and eavesdropping on opponents of those actions.

NSA personnel who are identified as targets of opportunity ultimately receive the following career-ending form letter:


NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY

FORT GEORGE G. MEADE, MARYLAND 20755-6000



Date of notice

Employee's Name

Employee's Street Address

Employee's Town/City, State, Zip Code

Dear Mr./Ms.

This letter is to notify you of the NSA Access Appeals Panel’s decision concerning your request for review of the revocation of your access to Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI) made by the Associate Directorate of Security and Counterintelligence (ADS&CI). [L. Kemp Ensor]

After a thorough review and discussion of all the information contained in the investigative file, as well as your oral reply, the Panel decided to sustain the decision by Chief, Adjudications to revoke your access to SCI. The reason cited by the Panel for its decision is behavior that is inconsistent with the standards of Director Central Intelligence Directive (DCID) 6/4, Personnel Security Standards and Procedures Governing Eligibility for Access to Sensitive Compartmented Information.

As a result of the Panel’s decision to sustain the revocation of your access to SCI, you no longer meet a mandatory condition of NSA employment. The Associate Directorate of Security and Counterintelligence [Ensor] and the Employee Relations office will complete your removal from NSA employment, effectively date.

This decision constitutes the final action by NSA of your due process under Executive Order 12968. If additional information concerning this matter is requested, please contact Security Information at (410) 854-4896.

signature

BERNARD F. NORVELL

Chairperson

NSA Access Appeals Panel

cc: NSA Access Appeals Panel (Case File)

Q235, Security Information

CIA Report on 9/11 Is Complete

By Walter Pincus

The CIA inspector general's report on the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks has finally been completed -- nearly two years after its congressionally set deadline -- but has yet to be sent to Capitol Hill because CIA Director Porter J. Goss is still deciding how to respond to its findings, according to administration and congressional sources.

Inspector General John L. Helgerson's voluminous report, triggered in December 2002 by a recommendation of the House-Senate inquiry into the Sept. 11 attacks, was completed in June and delivered last month to Goss for his review, according to a note sent by the CIA to members of Congress on July 22. It is expected to go to the House and Senate intelligence committees soon, according to one senior administration official.

Under the joint committee mandate, the CIA director is to report back to the House and Senate intelligence committees on the steps taken to assign responsibility for poor performance and to reward excellence.

One reason for the long delay in producing the report, according to present and former agency officials, has been the original requirement by the joint committee that Helgerson "determine whether and to what extent personnel at all levels should be held accountable for any omission, commission or failure to meet professional standards" in relation to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

When Goss received a draft of the report last October, he sent it back because performance failures were attributed to individuals without giving them the chance to respond to those findings or have the matter adjudicated by an accountability panel, according to an October letter sent by Goss to intelligence committee members. The communication was made available to The Washington Post.

Over the past months, individuals named in the report were given opportunities to respond to the sections that mention them, and a few were allowed to read the entire report, according to present and former intelligence officials.As a result, some changes have been made in the report, the officials said.

Goss, however, has yet to decide what if any steps he will take before he sends the report to the congressional intelligence committees, the officials said. The CIA director could create an internal panel to look at each case and submit recommendations to him. Such a group is typically made up of senior agency officials and chaired by the CIA's executive director, the third-ranking official in the agency.

Officials said Goss could establish additional procedures to deal with any systemic problems uncovered in the report. Or he could send the IG report to the Hill, noting the many changes that have already been made, and indicate that many of the senior officials at the time of the attacks have left the agency.

Some present and former agency officials have been upset that four years after the attacks, the CIA is still being criticized despite having been the loudest voice in government to warn Presidents Bill Clinton and Bush of the terrorist threat.

"What about Congress and the White House not paying attention, or even the Federal Aviation Administration?" one former agency official asked yesterday.

Inspector general reports for the Defense Department and the FBI had been delivered previously. The declassified version of the report of Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine noted a "significant failure" by the bureau, caused in large part by "widespread and longstanding deficiencies" in the way the agency handled terrorism and intelligence cases.

The FBI said that it agrees with many of Fine's conclusions and that it "has taken substantial steps to address the issues presented in the report."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/e...er=emailarticle

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2005/8/prwebxml271942.php


CIA File: Remote Viewers Predicted 911 Style Attack on Washington

Did Military Remote Viewers identify 911 pilot?

(PRWEB) August 15, 2005 -- 911 hijacker Ziad Jarrah may have been identified in the 1980'S by military remote viewers.

A CIA Star Gate document, based upon input from four military sources, reveals that a pilot with a name similar to "Jerry, Gerard, or Geraldo" will "...fly to Washington D.C. with the mission of crashing into the US Capitol Building."

The date of the document appears to be prior to "12 DEC 83."

There are two copies of the same document in the CIA Star Gate Collection of released material. The Star Gate collection covers more than twenty years of government sponsored research into anomalous mental phenomena (AMP) information collection (RV - Remote Viewing) and perturbation (RP - Remote Perturbation).

The two documents of interest (they are identical, one is marked "confidential") appear to be from 1983, as there is a notation that the target subject of the remote viewing data (pilot) is "...not in the country as of 12 Dec 83."

This document is of interest primarily for two reasons:

There is the prediction of an event:

An aircraft will "...fly to Washington, D.C. with the mission of crashing into the US Capitol building..."

There is possible identification of the pilot:

The pilot, "...not in the country as of 12 Dec 83, foreign, perhaps Iranian, speaks English and perhaps French... Name may be or sound like Jerry, Gerard, or Geraldo..."

The remaining information, as presented in this document, appears at first glance to be seriously wrong. Starstream has discovered that removal of contextual overlay reveals interesting correlations to 911 events, including the identification of New York and New Jersey.

The art of remote viewing is far from being an exact science. There is a signal to noise ratio involved, and errors are to be expected. There is the extraordinary distance in space-time from 1983 to 2001. More importantly, the original data presented by the "four different sources" is not available. What is presented in the document appears to be an analytical summary and interpretation of the raw data provided by the viewers. The methodology used by the viewers is not known.

Keywords and concepts from the original document can be mapped to the assumed target event: the failed attack on Washington during the 911 terrorist events of 9-11-2001. The terrorist pilot on United Flight 93 was Ziad Jarrah (also sometimes spelled Jarrahi), a name that might be considered to "...sound like Jerry Gerard, or Geraldo." Jarrah, a foreigner from Lebanon, was not Iranian, however at least one passenger identified the terrorists as possibly Iranian. Jarrah was of Middle Eastern origin and spoke both English and French.

It should be noted that according to the document "This information was produced unofficially and is unconfirmed."

Notes added on 8-17-05:

From Paul H. Smith's "Reading the Enemy's Mind":

Smith writes that he was among the second group of INSCOM people to get RAPT'ed sometime around Dec. 2, 1983. See page 143.

Thursday Dec. 8th, 1983 Future 15

Smith writes:

"...we were to try to perceive events occurring over the next two years."

INSCOM RAPT Gateway Experience Precognition Session, ~ Dec 9th, 1983

Page 150-151 tells the story of a special future oriented remote viewing group session at the Monroe Institute.

Smith mentions being tasked against a specific target:

"Will there be a terrorist attack against government facilities in the Washington, D.C. area in next few months?"

"Where will the next terrorist attack take place?"

"When will the next attack take place?"

Papers with the impressions were handed in, and according to Smith "...we never heard about it to my recollection."

Source:

Starstream Report

Preliminary Results CIA STAR GATE Documents:

CIA-RDP96-00788ROO1900470003-9

CIA-RDP96-00788ROO1200070002-1

http://www.bangladesh-web.com/news/view.ph...000000000056850

US embassy refuses to comment on CIA role in Aug 15 coup


Tuesday August 16 2005 11:48:42 AM BDT


The US Embassy in Dhaka refused to make any comment on the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) involvement in the August 15 coup leading to the assassination of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, as written anew by an American journalist on the 30th anniversary of assassination of the leader Monday, reports UNB.

"No comment," a spokesman for the American mission told the news agency as Lawrence Lifschultz, who was in Dhaka during the topsy-turvy, reopened the wounds.

However, Foreign Minister M Morshed Khan said those who were in charge of the Foreign Ministry and in state power at that time should know who were involved in the killing.

"Because, the Awami League (AL) was replaced by the Awami League. The Speaker was there, the cabinet was there; fortunately the BNP was not there, BNP was not born at that time," he told diplomatic correspondents when they sought his comments.

Asked about the killing of the country's first President, he said, "All killings are heinous--we don't support any killing."

About opposition allegation that the alliance government is patronising the killers of Bangabandhu, Khan said, "Opposition is free to make any opinion; we believe in democracy, we believe in freedom of press."

Asked about the previous AL government's initiative to sign an extradition treaty with the United States (US) government to bring back some absconding convicts of the Bangabandhu murder case, who are believed to be hiding in America, he said, "We've not abandoned any initiative.

"They have tried for five years…we're successive government, but not the revolutionary government. This question has to be addressed to the nation," the Foreign Minister replied when a correspondent asked if being a successive government they are pursuing the initiative for extradition treaty.

BDNEWS adds: The Foreign Minister said the government did not condone any killers of Bangabandhu and turn down any efforts for extradition treaty with the USA to bring the killers home.

Talking to journalists at his office Monday when the nation was observing national mourning day across the country, Khan said the assassination was no doubt a hatred incident.


UNB/ The Financial Express

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/columnist...l=sfla-news-col

CIA leak law comes full circle
Ex-agent finds irony in scandal enveloping Bush's White House.

Published August 21, 2005


HAVANA · Philip Agee, the renegade former CIA agent best known for blowing the covers of more than 1,000 colleagues, takes a certain satisfaction in watching the political storm brewing over the White House.

Agee is the reason for the law that makes it a federal crime to reveal the identities of covert operatives. His best-selling 1975 memoir, Inside the Company: CIA Diary, and a subsequent radical magazine he helped launch exposed CIA agents around the world in an effort to thwart U.S. intelligence activities.

Former President George H.W. Bush, who became CIA director a year after Agee's book was published, was so incensed by his betrayal and the potential threat to agents in the field that he campaigned for the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which passed in 1982.

Now the tides of history have turned. The law intended to silence Agee and would-be copycats is at the center of a thorny investigation hanging over George W. Bush's White House: what role senior aide Karl Rove played in leaking the identity of covert agent Valerie Plame, the wife of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, an opponent of the Iraq war.

A special prosecutor was appointed in 2003 to determine whether White House officials violated the law and exposed Plame's name in a campaign to discredit Wilson after he wrote an opinion piece in The New York Times criticizing the Bush administration's decision to go to war.

"It is so ironic that the White House itself might be the first violator of this law, which my name is attached to," said the soft-spoken Agee, who at 70 looks more like a retired banker than a former man of mystery.

Actually, the little-known law has been used once before to prosecute a CIA clerk in Ghana who pleaded guilty to charges of revealing the identities of covert agents to her boyfriend.

Agee says he has not been following "Rovegate" closely and is a little surprised to see his name back in newspapers.

These days he divides his time between homes in Havana and Hamburg, Germany, where his wife works as a ballet teacher.

After an 11-year career with the CIA during which he worked to penetrate Cuban embassies in Ecuador and Uruguay, Agee has become an outspoken admirer of Fidel Castro's socialist revolution and is on friendly terms with some of the island's top officials.

His apartment building in the Vedado district is aging and disheveled like most of Havana. But inside, his home is an oasis of comfort above the city's gritty bustle. Graceful armoires, marble-topped tables and cozy couches rest on oriental rugs. Paintings and mementoes decorate the walls.

One room is devoted to www.cubalinda.com, the online travel agency Agee founded in 1999 to entice Americans to visit Cuba. The Web site offers package deals, fishing trips and tours to Ernest Hemingway's Havana hangouts. But despite initial interest, business is slow.

Due partly to the Bush administration's tightened restrictions on the U.S. travel embargo, Agee said he books only about 30 tourists a month, mostly non-Americans.

He is also at work on a book to "expose and denounce" alleged U.S. intervention against Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. For Agee, an icon of the left and pariah of the right, it is a return to the so-called "guerrilla journalism" that characterized his first book.

Agee's personal story with the CIA began in 1957 when he was recruited as a graduate student at the University of Florida. Hungry for a life of adventure and exotic travel, Agee, who says he was politically "naive" at the time, was posted in Ecuador and Uruguay to recruit Cuban intelligence officers into the CIA.

"I was involved in political repression because I worked with police and military in both Ecuador and Uruguay, having people arrested, some of them tortured," he said.

By 1968 he had grown so disillusioned with U.S. policies in Latin America that he quit the CIA.

"I began to realize that everything that I and my colleagues had been doing in the '50s and '60s in Latin America was a continuation of the horrors of the conquest and of the colonial period," he said. "The thought came into my mind, which until then was unthinkable, to possibly write a book describing how these activities are carried out as a way of helping people defend themselves."

Inside the Company: CIA Diary caused a furor when it was published. It described CIA activities in such detail that many accused Agee of researching the book while still in the CIA, a charge he denies.

When Richard Welch, the CIA station chief in Athens, was killed by a Greek terrorist group in 1975, Agee was blamed for his death even though he had not named him in his book.

In 1978 he helped found the Covert Action Information Bulletin, a quarterly magazine that also unmasked agents' identities. Reviled as a traitor, Agee's U.S. passport was revoked a year later and he was banned from five NATO countries.

In a 1991 speech, former President Bush said he would "never forgive Philip Agee and those like him who wantonly sacrificed the lives of intelligence officers."

Today, Agee says he has no regrets about publishing the names.

"Through all these years there have been accusations that it hurt people. But in actual fact I never knew of any case," he said. "The only case they could ever accuse me of was the Welch case, but that was totally false."

Agee seems somewhat indifferent to the outcome of the Rove-Plame case. Because the law is tightly written, he says, that he doubts Rove can be charged under it.

"I'm not really interested in the case other than the way it might affect the law," Agee said.

Vanessa Bauzá can be reached at vmbauza1@yahoo.com

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1205101.cms


Osama armed to make an 'American Hiroshima'
CHIDANAND RAJGHATTA

TIMES NEWS NETWORK[ FRIDAY, AUGUST 19, 2005 11:56:53 AM ]

WASHINGTON: Pakistani nuclear scientists led by prime smuggler and proliferator AQ Khan have armed Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda with nuclear weapons in their efforts to bring about an ''American Hiroshima,'' according to a sensational new book.

The plan calls for the detonation of seven tactical nuclear devices in seven US cities at the same time. At least one of these weapons has been shipped to the US from Karachi in a cargo container, says Paul Williams, author of the book ‘Osama's Revenge’, accounts from which are now appearing on several websites and blogs.

News about Khan's involvement with al-Qaeda and the American Hiroshima plan first emerged with the capture of several al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan in October 2001, during the first phase of Operation Enduring Freedom, and, later, with the arrest of Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, bin Laden's military operations chief, in Karachi, according to Williams.

From Khalid Mohammad's laptop, CIA officials uncovered details of al-Qaeda's plan to create a series of ''nuclear hell storms'' throughout the United States. After days of ... ...interrogation coupled with severe sleep deprivation, he told US intelligence officials that the chain of command for the ''American Hiroshima'' answered directly to bin Laden, al-Zawahiri, and a Khan.

He also told officials about continuous visits by bin Laden and company to the AQ Khan Research Laboratories in Pakistan, where they gained the assistance of nuclear physicists like Dr Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, chairman of Pakistan's Atomic Energy Commission.

Mahmood, who was taken into custody by Pakistan's ISI and CIA agents on Oct 23, 2001. He later admitted that he had met with bin Laden, al-Zawahiri and other al-Qaida officials on several occasions, including the morning of Sept 11, 2001, to discuss the means of speeding up the process of manufacturing nukes from the highly enriched ... ...uranium that al-Qaida had obtained from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and other sources, according to the book.

Mahmood insisted that he had provided answers to technical questions concerning tactical nuclear weapons but declined to provide bin Laden actual hands-on help for the creation of such devices. Upon voicing this denial, Mahmood was subjected to six lie-detector tests. He failed them all.

According to Williams, throughout 2002, CIA and ISI officials obtained more and more information concerning the involvement of scientists from the AQ Khan Research Laboratories in the plans for the American Hiroshima.

After being threatened with seven years in prison under Pakistan's Official Secrets Act, Dr. Chaudry Abdul Majid, PAEC's chief engineer, admitted that he met with bin Laden and other al-Qaida officials on a regular basis to provide technical assistance for the construction and care of its nuclear weapons.

Dr. Mirza Yusuf Baig, another PAEC engineer, made a similar confession. ''Yet a host of other leading scientists and technicians from Khan's facility...
... have managed to elude arrest and interrogation by quietly slipping out of the country.

Dr. Mohammad Ali Mukhtar and Dr. Suleiman Assad, nuclear engineers and close colleagues of Khan and Mahmood, escaped to Myanmar, where they are currently engaged in building a 10-megawatt nuclear reactor for the Third World country. Others have made off for unknown destinations,'' says an account published on the website WorldNetDaily.

Still, says Williams, the interrogations of the Pakistani scientists, coupled with findings from Dr. Mahmood's office for ''charitable affairs'' in Kabul, verified for the CIA that al-Qaida had produced several nuclear weapons from highly enriched uranium and plutonium pellets the size of silver dollars at Khan's facilities.

At least one of these weapons was transported to Karachi where it was shipped to the United States in a cargo container.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/08/17/...ain782930.shtml

Bin Laden Expert Steps Forward
Aug. 21, 2005

Ex-CIA Agent Sizes Up Osama


"Michael Scheuer created a secret CIA unit for tracking and eliminating Osama bin Laden. (Photo: CBS)

Scheuer says in May 2003, Osama bin Laden secured a fatwa - an Islamic decree - from a Saudi sheik saying he would be justified in using nuclear weapons against Americans, in retaliation for Muslims who have died.

Scheuer speaks with Correspondent Steve Kroft in his first television interview since resigning from the CIA and emerging from anonymity to speak publicly for the first time in 22 years. No one in the West knows more about the al Qaeda leader than Scheuer (left), who has tracked him since the mid-1980s.

(CBS) Michael Scheuer, one of the CIA's foremost authorities on Osama bin Laden, is the senior intelligence analyst who created and then advised a secret CIA unit for tracking and eliminating bin Laden since 1996.

When Correspondent Steve Kroft first reported this story last fall, Scheuer was at the center of an ongoing battle between the CIA and the White House over Mideast policy and the war on terror.

With the CIA's blessing, Scheuer authored a highly critical book on the administration's counterterrorism policy, published under the name Anonymous, which the White House viewed as a thinly veiled attempt by the CIA to undermine the president. Through it all, Anonymous remained anonymous, until last November, when he resigned from the CIA after 22 years and revealed his identity on 60 Minutes. After a career as a spy charged with keeping secrets, Scheuer decided it was more important to join the public debate on how to best attack Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda.

"His genius lies in his ability to isolate a few American policies that are widely hated across the Muslim world. And that growing hatred is going to yield growing violence," says Scheuer. "Our leaders continue to say that we're making strong headway against this problem. And I think we are not."

In 1996, at a time when little was known about the wealthy Saudi, other than he was suspected of financing terrorism, Scheuer was assigned to create a bin Laden desk at the CIA.

"The uniqueness of the unit was more or less that it was focused on a single individual. It was really the first time the agency had done that sort of effort," says Scheuer.

Did he try to figure out where bin Laden was? "Where he was, where his cells were, where his logistical channels were," says Scheuer. "How he communicated. Who his allies were. Who donated to them... I think it's fair to say the entire range of sources were brought to bear."

Code-named "Alec," the unit was originally made up of about a dozen agents. And in less than a year, they discovered that bin Laden was more than some wealthy Saudi throwing his money around - and that his organization, known as al Qaeda, was not a Muslim charity.

"We had found that he and al Qaeda were involved in an extraordinarily sophisticated and professional effort to acquire weapons of mass destruction. In this case, nuclear material, so by the end of 1996, it was clear that this was an organization unlike any other one we had ever seen," says Scheuer.

Scheuer says his bosses at the CIA were initially skeptical of that information. And that was just the beginning of his frustrations.

In a letter to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees earlier this year, Scheuer says his agents provided the U.S. government with about ten opportunities to capture bin Laden before Sept. 11, and that all of them were rejected.

One of the last proposals, which he described to the 9/11 Commission in a closed-door session, involved a cruise missile attack against a remote hunting camp in the Afghan desert, where bin Laden was believed to be socializing with members of the royal family from the United Arab Emirates.

Scheuer wanted to level the entire camp. "The world is lousy with Arab princes," says Scheuer. "And if we could have got Osama bin Laden, and saved at some point down the road 3,000 American lives, a few less Arab princes would have been OK in my book."

"You couldn't have done this without killing an Arab prince," asks Kroft.

"Probably not. Sister Virginia used to say, 'You'll be known by the company you keep.' That if those princes were out there eating goat with Osama bin Laden, then maybe they were there for nefarious reasons. But nonetheless, they would have been the price of battle."

And that doesn't bother him? "Not a lick," says Scheuer.

"My understanding is you had a reputation within the CIA as being fairly obsessive about this subject," says Kroft. "I dislike obsessive," says Scheuer. "I think hard-headed about it."

"Michael Scheuer created a secret CIA unit for tracking and eliminating Osama bin Laden. Whatever you call it, in 1999, three years after he started the bin Laden unit, Scheuer's candor got him into trouble with his supervisors at the CIA. What were the circumstances under which he left the bin Laden unit?

"I think I became too insistent that we were not pursuing this target with enough vigor and with enough risk-taking -- an unwillingness to take risks," says Scheuer. "I got relieved of the position I was in. I had a lovely sojourn in the library and then had other sojourns since."

His exile ended shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11, when he was brought back to the bin Laden unit as a special adviser. But by then, everything had changed.

His nemesis had gone underground, and the United States was on its way to invading Afghanistan and Iraq - creating, Scheuer says, the perception in the minds of 1.3 billion Muslims that America had gone to war against Islam.

"The war in Iraq - if Osama was a Christian - it's the Christmas present he never would have expected," says Scheuer.

Right or wrong, he says Muslims are beginning to view the United States as a colonial power with Israel as its surrogate, and with a military presence in three of the holiest places in Islam: the Arabian peninsula, Iraq, and Jerusalem. And he says it is time to review and debate American policy in the region, even our relationship with Israel.

"No one wants to abandon the Israelis. But I think the perception is, and I think it's probably an accurate perception, that the tail is leading the dog - that we are giving the Israelis carte blanche ability to exercise whatever they want to do in their area," says Scheuer. "And if that's what the American people want, then that's what the policy should be, of course. But the idea that anything in the United States is too sensitive to discuss or too dangerous to discuss is really, I think, absurd."

Is he talking about appeasement?

"I'm not talking about appeasement. There's no way out of this war at the moment," says Scheuer. "It's not a choice between war and peace. It's a choice between war and endless war. It's not appeasement. I think it's better even to call it American self-interest."

Scheuer believes that al Qaeda is no longer just a terrorist organization that can be defeated by killing or capturing its leaders. Now, he says it's a global insurgency that's spreading revolutionary fervor throughout the Muslim world.

"Bin Laden's still at large. His most recent speech, I think, demonstrates that he's not running rock to rock, cave to cave. We are tangled in a very significant Islamic insurgency in Iraq," says Scheuer.

"Most dramatically, and perhaps least noticed, is the violence inside Saudi Arabia itself. Saudi Arabia was, until just a few years ago, probably one of the most safe countries on Earth. And now the paper is daily full of activities and shootouts between Islamists who supported Osama bin Laden and the government there."

(CBS) But if bin Laden is much stronger than he was, why haven't there been more attacks on the United States?

"One of the great intellectual failures of the American intelligence community, and especially the counterterrorism community, is to assume if someone hasn't attacked us, it's because he can't or because we've defeated him," says Scheuer. "Bin Laden has consistently shown himself to be immune to outside pressure. When he wants to do something, he does it on his own schedule."

"You've written no one should be surprised when Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda detonate a weapon of mass destruction in the United States," says Kroft. "You believe that's going to happen?"

"I don't believe in inevitability. But I think it's pretty close to being inevitable," says Scheuer.

A nuclear weapon? "A nuclear weapon of some dimension, whether it's actually a nuclear weapon, or a dirty bomb, or some kind of radiological device," says Scheuer. "Yes, I think it's probably a near thing."

What evidence is there that bin Laden's actually working to do this? "He's told us it. Bin Laden is remarkably eager for Americans to know why he doesn't like us, what he intends to do about it and then following up and doing something about it in terms of military actions," says Scheuer. "He's told us that, 'We are going to acquire a weapon of mass destruction, and if we acquire it, we will use it.'"

After Sept. 11, Scheuer says bin Laden was criticized by Muslim clerics for launching such a serious attack without sufficient warning. That has now been given. And he says bin Laden has even obtained a fatwa, or Islamic decree, justifying a nuclear attack against the United States on religious grounds.

"He secured from a Saudi sheik named Hamid bin Fahd a rather long treatise on the possibility of using nuclear weapons against the Americans. Specifically, nuclear weapons," says Scheuer. "And the treatise found that he was perfectly within his rights to use them. Muslims argue that the United States is responsible for millions of dead Muslims around the world, so reciprocity would mean you could kill millions of Americans."

Scheuer says the fatwa was issued in May 2003, "and that's another thing that doesn't come to the attention of the American people."

Despite this threat, Scheuer insists the CIA doesn't have nearly enough trained analysts working on the Osama bin Laden unit today. At a time when Congress is considering revolutionary changes in the way the intelligence community is organized, Scheuer sees no major problems with the CIA or the product it produces.

He blames Sept. 11 on poor leadership from people like former CIA Director George Tenet, his chief deputy, Jim Pavitt, and former White House counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, who were invited, but declined, to appear on Sunday's 60 Minutes.

"Richard Clarke has said that you're really sort of a hothead, a middle manager who really didn't go to any of the cabinet meetings in which important things were discussed, and that basically you were just uninformed," says Kroft.

"I certainly agree with the fact that I didn't go to the cabinet meetings. But I'm certainly also aware that I'm much better informed than Mr. Clarke ever was about the nature of the intelligence that was available against Osama bin Laden and which was consistently denigrated by himself and Mr. Tenet," says Scheuer.

"I think Mr. Clarke had a tendency to interfere too much with the activities of the CIA, and our leadership at the senior level let him interfere too much," continues Scheuer. "So criticism from him, I kind of wear as a badge of honor."

Is there anything about bin Laden that Americans don't know, but should? "Yeah, I think there is. I think our leaders over the last decade have done the American people a disservice in continuing to characterize Osama bin Laden as a thug, as a gangster, as a degenerate personality, as some kind of abhorrent individual," says Scheuer.

"He surely does reprehensible activities, and we should surely take care of that by killing him as soon as we can. But he's not an irrational man. He's a very worthy enemy. He's an enemy to worry about."

"You wrote in your book that he's a great man," says Kroft.

"Yes, certainly a man, without the connotation good or bad, he's a great man in the sense that he's influenced the course of history," says Scheuer.

Does he respect bin Laden? "Until we respect him, we are going to die in numbers that are probably unnecessary," says Scheuer.

http://en.rian.ru/world/20050822/41200481.html

World
Expert says U.S. is underestimating bin Laden
10:19 | 22/ 08/ 2005




WASHINGTON, August 22 (RIA Novosti correspondent Arkady Orlov) - Washington has underestimated Osama bin Laden, according to the chief of the former CIA unit established nine years ago to capture the world's most wanted man.

Michael Scheuer told U.S. television channel CBS Sunday that U.S. authorities had harmed Americans by continually portraying bin Laden as a gangster and the degenerate type of a bandit, and an altogether disgusting person in the last 10 years. Scheuer said bin Laden was not insane, but a worthy adversary.

He called bin Laden a great man for having influenced the march of history.

The CIA officer warned that bin Laden could stage an attack on the United States using weapons of mass destruction and said Bin Laden had been given a fatwa, a kind of Muslim blessing, for the attack back in 2003.

Scheuer said bin Laden had received a detailed treatise from Saudi Sheikh Hamid bin Fahda on the possibility of using nuclear weapons against Americans.

Weapons Around the World
(Physics Web)
http://www.physicsweb.org/articles/world/18/8/3

August 2005
(This piece provides data from Deadly Arsenals: Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Threats by Joseph Cirincione, Jon B. Wolfsthal and Miriam Rajkumar, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2005)

Nuclear weapons remain the most powerful force ever invented by humankind. They can be constructed with either highly enriched uranium (over 20% U-235) or plutonium. Most modern nuclear weapons rely on a combination of fission and fusion, using the initial nuclear release from a core of uranium or plutonium to ignite a secondary fusion of lighter elements. The first nuclear weapons developed by the US had explosive yields equivalent to 10-20 kt of TNT, while most of today's deployed weapons range from 100-500 kt in yield. In all, there are approximately 27,600 nuclear weapons in existence.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050826/ap_on_...DltBHNlYwM3MTY-


CIA Panel: 9/11 Failure Warrants Action By KATHERINE SHRADER, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - The CIA's independent watchdog has recommended disciplinary reviews for current and former officials who were involved in failed intelligence efforts before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, The Associated Press has learned.

CIA Director Porter Goss now must decide whether the disciplinary proceedings go forward.

The proceedings, formally called an accountability board, were recommended by the CIA inspector general, John Helgerson. It remains unclear which people are identified for the accountability boards in the highly classified report spanning hundreds of pages. The report was delivered to Congress Tuesday night.

Following a two-year review into what went wrong before the suicide hijackings, people familiar with the report say Helgerson harshly criticizes a number of the agency's most senior officials. Among them are former CIA Director George Tenet, former clandestine service chief Jim Pavitt and former counterterrorism center head Cofer Black. The former officials are likely candidates for proceedings before an accountability board.

The boards could take a number of actions, including letters of reprimand or dismissal. They could also clear them of wrongdoing.

Those who discussed the report with the AP all spoke on condition of anonymity because it remains highly classified and has been distributed only to a small circle in Washington.

Tenet and Pavitt declined to comment. Black could not be reached Thursday.

Goss was among those who requested the inspector general's review as part of a 2002 congressional inquiry into the 9/11 attacks. At the time, Goss was chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. A CIA officer in the 1960s, Goss must now decide whether the current and former agency personnel should be considered for sanctions.

Those who know Goss well question whether the director, who took over the agency last September, will commission the disciplinary reviews.

Despite public outcries for accountability, many in the intelligence community believe Goss would be loath to try to discipline popular former senior officials and cause unrest within the agency.

He may not want to go after less senior people still in the CIA's employ. Intelligence veterans say these CIA employees are the government's mostly highly trained in counterterrorism and before the Sept. 11 attacks, devoted their time to trying to stop al-Qaida. The hearings would force them to defend their careers rather than working against extremist groups.

In addition, the numerous investigations after Sept. 11 determined that an intelligence overhaul was essential to attack Muslim extremism.

Some Congress members — including California Rep. Jane Harman (news, bio, voting record), the Intelligence Committee's senior Democrat — are pushing for the CIA to produce a declassified version of the report so the public can debate these and other issues. Some family members of 9/11 victims have also called for the report's immediate release.

"The findings in this report must be shared with all members of Congress and with the American public to ensure that the problems identified are addressed and corrected, thus moving to restore faith in this agency," a group called Sept. 11 Advocates said in a statement Thursday.

The final version comes after much internal debate at the CIA and new national intelligence director's office about whether to simply scrap the document because it looks backward and is so harsh, said one official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Beth Marple, spokeswoman for National Intelligence Director John Negroponte, said, "As expected, there has been discussion between Director Negroponte and Director Goss about this report. But there were absolutely no efforts to kill it."

The CIA declined to comment on the substance of the report.

Accountability boards are normally made up of top CIA officials. In the case of the most serious issues, it would not be unusual for the agency's No. 3, the executive director, to lead the proceedings.

People familiar with the inspector general's process said the document largely covers ground already plowed in the 9/11 commission's report and a House-Senate inquiry that issued its own report on the attacks in December 2002. Those 37 Congress members requested the inspector general's review to consider issues of accountability.

Among items that received significant attention in the past: the CIA's failure to put two known operatives, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, on government watch lists and to let the FBI know that the future hijackers had entered the United States.

The new report, however, comes at the events from a different perspective, focusing more narrowly on the agency's performance.

http://seven.com.au/news/topstories/102809

CIA officials face discipline over 9/11
Date: 26/08/05
By Katherine Shrader



The CIA's independent watchdog has recommended disciplinary reviews for current and former officials who were involved in failed intelligence efforts before the attacks of September 11, 2001.

CIA Director Porter Goss now must decide whether the disciplinary proceedings should go forward.

The proceedings, formally called an accountability board, were recommended by the CIA inspector general, John Helgerson. It remained unclear which CIA people were identified in the highly classified report to go before the accountability boards. The report was delivered to Congress on Tuesday night.

After a two-year review into what went wrong before the suicide hijackings, people familiar with the report say Helgerson harshly criticises a number of the agency's most senior officials.

Among them are former Central Intelligence Agency Director George Tenet, former clandestine service chief Jim Pavitt and former counterterrorism centre head Cofer Black, none of whom still work for the agency. The former officials are likely candidates for proceedings before an accountability board.

The boards could take a number of actions, including letters of reprimand or dismissal. They could also clear them of wrongdoing.

Those who discussed the report spoke on condition of anonymity because it remains highly classified and has been distributed only to a small circle in Washington.

Tenet and Pavitt would not comment. Black could not be reached.

Those who know Goss well question whether the director, who took over the agency last September, will commission the disciplinary reviews.

Despite public outcries for accountability, many in the intelligence community believe Goss would be loath to try to discipline popular former senior officials and cause unrest within the agency.

He may not want to go after less senior people still in the CIA's employ. Intelligence veterans say these CIA employees are the government's mostly highly trained in counterterror and had devoted their time before the September 11 attacks to trying to stop al-Qaeda. The hearings would force them to defend their careers rather than work against extremist groups.

In addition, numerous investigations after September 11 determined that an intelligence overhaul was essential to attack Muslim extremism.

Some Congress members, including California Representative Jane Harman, the Intelligence Committee's senior Democrat, are pushing for the CIA to produce a declassified version of the report so the public can debate these and other issues. Some family members of 9/11 victims also have called for the report's immediate release.

"The findings in this report must be shared with all members of Congress and with the American public to ensure that the problems identified are addressed and corrected, thus moving to restore faith in this agency," a group called September 11 Advocates said in a statement.

The final version comes after much internal debate at the CIA and the new office of the national intelligence director about whether to scrap the document because it looks backward and is so harsh, said one official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Beth Marple, spokeswoman for National Intelligence Director John Negroponte, said, "As expected, there has been discussion between Director Negroponte and Director Goss about this report. But there were absolutely no efforts to kill it".

The CIA would not comment on the substance of the report.

Accountability boards normally comprise top CIA officials.

Copyright © 2005 AP

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/26/politics...artner=homepage

C.I.A. Report Said to Fault Pre-9/11 Leadership

By SCOTT SHANE and JAMES RISEN
Published: August 26, 2005
WASHINGTON, Aug. 25 - A long-awaited C.I.A. inspector general's report on the agency's performance before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks includes detailed criticism of more than a dozen former and current agency officials, aiming its sharpest language at George J. Tenet, the former director, according to a former intelligence officer who was briefed on the findings and another government official who has seen the report.

Mr. Tenet is censured for failing to develop and carry out a strategic plan to take on Al Qaeda in the years before 2001, even after he wrote in a 1998 memo to intelligence agencies that "we are at war" with it, they said, speaking about the highly classified report on condition of anonymity.

The report was delivered to the Senate and House Intelligence Committees on Tuesday by Porter J. Goss, the current C.I.A. director. Its preparation and previous drafts have provoked strong emotions at the beleaguered agency, which has borne the brunt of public criticism in a series of major studies of intelligence failures.

The inspector general, John L. Helgerson, intends to send Congress additional materials, including a compilation of responses from Mr. Tenet and about two dozen other officials, the officials said.

The report describes systemic problems at the agency before 2001, the officials said. In addition to criticizing Mr. Tenet; James L. Pavitt, the former deputy director of operations; and J. Cofer Black, the former director of the agency's Counterterrorist Center, it offers praise for some specific actions taken by them and other officials, they said.

The findings place Mr. Goss in a delicate position. As chairman of the House Intelligence Committee in the years before the attacks, he influenced intelligence policies and monitored intelligence agencies. As a leader of the joint Congressional inquiry into the attacks, he joined in requesting the inspector general's inquiry nearly three years ago.

Now, as director of the Central Intelligence Agency, he will have to decide whether to take disciplinary action against any of those criticized, risking a further blow to the morale of an agency still charged with protecting the country against future terrorist attacks.

The report recommends that Mr. Goss convene "accountability boards" to recommend personnel actions against those faulted in the report, who are identified by title rather than by name. Officials said the only action possible against Mr. Tenet and other officials who have retired would probably be to send them a letter of reprimand.

In a "message to the workforce" sent by e-mail after he delivered the report to the Senate and House intelligence committees, Mr. Goss said that during the preparation of the report, "much has been done at C.I.A. and throughout the intelligence community to improve and reform the way we do business." He said he thought "the major changes to our agency are behind us."

He said, "The bottom line is I want you to continue to do what you do best - provide our country with close-in access to the plans and intentions of its enemies and provide decision makers with the information they need to make the tough decisions." The agency declined to release the message, but its text was provided by a former intelligence official.

Paul Gimigliano, a spokesman for the agency, declined to comment on the report or Mr. Goss's plans.

Mr. Tenet, who stepped down in July 2004 after seven years as director of central intelligence, has responded vigorously to the challenge to his record. In addition to writing a lengthy response, he asked former Senator Warren B. Rudman, who served as chairman of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board from 1997 to 2000 and was co-chairman of a major commission on terrorism, to review the report.

Neither Mr. Tenet nor Mr. Rudman would comment, and neither Mr. Pavitt nor Mr. Black could be reached for comment on Thursday. But a former intelligence official close to Mr. Tenet said Mr. Helgerson's team had failed to interview policy makers and intelligence officers outside the agency or to note that the agency was more focused on Al Qaeda than any other arm of government was before 2001.

But the official who has seen the report said it appeared to be "thorough and professional." He said inspector general investigations usually were not authorized to interview people outside the agency.

Eleanor Hill, who served as staff director for the joint Congressional inquiry into Sept. 11, said the report had been requested to provide "accountability" for the failures that permitted the attacks.

"The families of the victims had repeatedly asked for some kind of accountability," Ms. Hill said. The Congressional inquiry did not have time to do "the kind of painstaking work necessary to assess individual responsibility," she said.

While agency morale is important, she said "the quality of its performance is even more important, given the nature of the threats the country faces."

One earlier draft of the inspector general's report criticized the management of the Counterterrorist Center and the Directorate of Operations for focusing on Al Qaeda's leadership, rather than looking for ways to attack the terrorist network at lower levels, according to a former senior agency official who read the draft. The former official said that by focusing on going after Osama bin Laden, the agency missed opportunities to recruit low-level agents on the margins of Al Qaeda who might have eventually provided access to its inner workings.

He also said the report took top officials to task for allowing thousands of pages of Arabic intercepts to go untranslated.

An Outsider's Quick Rise To Bush Terror Adviser

By Susan B. Glasser and Peter Baker

Frances Fragos Townsend wanted an answer.

The government's senior terrorism officials were poring through intelligence reports last summer suggesting that New York's financial district was being targeted by al Qaeda. The question at hand was whether to raise the nation's terrorism threat level to orange.

Asa Hutchinson, then an undersecretary at the Department of Homeland Security, recalled that he deferred to his absent boss. But Townsend, the top White House adviser on counterterrorism and homeland security, had a higher authority to invoke. "You don't understand," she said. "The president will be calling momentarily. We need your position."

From the low-ceilinged, windowless confines of a basement office in the West Wing, Townsend runs President Bush's far-flung campaign against terrorism. Her two predecessors were four-star generals who brought decades of experience to the fight. Townsend, 43, a former mob prosecutor, has a different credential -- the president's ear.

Just a little over two years ago, she had never met Bush and was viewed with suspicion by the inner circle of a tribalistic White House that does not easily accept outsiders. But the hard-charging Townsend has parlayed a succession of powerful patrons into one of the government's most important jobs. Along the way, in a city where partisan lines are rarely bridged, she has transformed herself from confidante of then-Attorney General Janet Reno to a confidante of George W. Bush.

In many ways, Townsend is the perfect match for a leader who sees the battle with al Qaeda as a black-and-white struggle against radical outlaws. At a time when experts in and out of government complain that the White House is more focused on killing and capturing Osama bin Laden's inner circle than the broader task of countering a rapidly metastasizing global jihad movement, Townsend offers Bush a "tactical, one-at-a-time prosecutor, 'get the bad guys' approach," said a former senior official who worked closely with her.

To some critics, that reflects a broader strategy mired in what one former counterterrorism official called "extreme amorphousness." Some longtime counterterrorism professionals complain that Townsend was not prepared for such an extraordinary task. Others nurse resentments that as a Justice Department official she did not do more to ensure that information on terrorist threats was shared more widely inside the government before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

But by all accounts, Townsend has impressed Bush with a tough efficiency and a bit of a swagger that resembles his own. Her influence has grown to the point that Cabinet secretaries and agency directors who do not normally return media calls about White House staff members rush to phone with lavish praise for a profile.

"She obviously has the confidence of the president, and that has a huge impact on her ability to influence the process," said Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. She is the "coordinator, the facilitator, the bridge," as FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III put it, between the powerful institutions and clashing egos of a war cabinet. Townsend is both "honest broker" in the many internal debates, said national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley, and "crisis manager" during terrorist attacks such as the recent London bombings.

Among her many mentors, she counts Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, longtime FBI Director Louis J. Freeh and former White House counterterrorism czar Richard A. Clarke. Even Saudi princes greet her deferentially as Bush's personal emissary, although she had never been to the Middle East before signing on with the president. "He turns to her as a kind of go-to person," Rice said.

In recent months, Townsend has overseen an intelligence reorganization and is now directing the first White House review of its anti-terrorism campaign since the aftermath of Sept. 11, a process intended to broaden the struggle into a new "strategy against violent extremism." It's time, Townsend said in an interview, to "adjust the thermometer."

The first person in her family to graduate from high school, Townsend shows little interest in entertaining questions about her unlikely rise. But unlikely it has been -- mystifying, according to several Democrats who once worked alongside her at the Justice Department and considered her one of theirs, "meteoric" in the words of her best friend.

Townsend is a renowned detail freak, "an accumulator of the facts," as Mueller put it. This obsessive personality is wrapped in a colorful, even flamboyant style. In a city of dark threads, the petite Townsend sat for an interview in a butter-yellow pantsuit. She is a mother of two young sons who manages to make sure her pedicure matches her outfit and maintains her deep tan though she spends each day -- from 6:30 a.m. to 8 or 9 p.m. -- at the White House.

Even her husband, John -- an arbitrage lawyer, a classmate of Bush's at Andover and Yale, and a registered Democrat -- said his wife confounded expectations for someone in her position. "People tend to be surprised," he said. "They don't expect a woman. They don't expect a young woman. They don't expect a small, fairly attractive young woman. So she surprises people on several layers."

On that fateful Sept. 11 nearly four years ago, Townsend was at home with her 2-week-old son, Patrick, frantically paging her close friend John O'Neill.

O'Neill, a legendary FBI official who led its efforts against al Qaeda before growing disillusioned, had just quit the bureau to head security at the World Trade Center. He assured her he was all right in a text message that arrived minutes before the first tower collapsed, burying him in the rubble.

The day came at a low point in Townsend's career. Until a few months earlier, she had run the Justice Department's Office of Intelligence Policy and Review that decided which cases merited supersecret intelligence wiretaps, work that took her inside al Qaeda cases, such as the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa.

She also became a key adviser to Reno, acting in her own words as a "back channel" between O'Neill and the attorney general, briefing her multiple times a day during a crisis. "Reno would call at all hours of the day or night from her office," Townsend's husband remembered.

"She was very close to Janet," Reno deputy Eric H. Holder Jr. said. "Not just professionally. Clearly there was a personal dynamic to it."

Townsend had arrived at Justice headquarters a few years earlier under the patronage of Reno's criminal chief. She is a native of Wantagh, Long Island, the daughter of a Greek American roofer and an Irish American bookkeeper. She rushed through American University in three years, then the University of San Diego law school. Her first job was at the Brooklyn district attorney's office. Early work on mob cases led Rudolph W. Giuliani to hire her in the U.S. attorney's office in New York; the future mayor recalled that "she was exactly like today -- very, very smart. Very much in charge."

After returning to Washington in late 1993, Townsend caught Reno's attention at the department's daily 8:30 a.m. senior staff meetings, recalled a former top aide who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "She was very 'we'll take care of it' in those meetings. She understands the principle that you say 'We'll take care of it' even if you have no clue how you'll actually take care of it."

By the late 1990s, Townsend was a fixture. "Fran would be back-channeling to Janet," the former aide said. "Things would be inked and decided. And Fran would go off to Janet and things would be decided the other way."

Her office would be a focus of controversy after Sept. 11. As the gatekeeper for intelligence wiretap requests, Townsend's office fought efforts to invoke the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in matters that could result in criminal cases, fearing that prosecutors would use such surveillance to circumvent the more difficult threshold for obtaining a criminal wiretap. In practical terms, the result was what commission reports called "The Wall," fencing off investigators from potentially useful information about suspects on American soil.

In an example cited by a bipartisan congressional commission, Townsend refused to endorse a secret intelligence wiretap on Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee because the FBI's interest in the case was "way too criminal." (She told the panel she did not recall making that remark but did not deny conveying such a point.) Townsend in recent years has said she fought "tooth and nail" against information-sharing restrictions. But three former senior advisers to Reno said they knew of no such examples. "She was one of the leading defenders of the famous Wall," one of them said. "She was an assiduous defender of the rules."

When Bush came into office, senior Justice officials were told by incoming Attorney General John D. Ashcroft's team that Townsend was one of those slated to go. They also mentioned complaints about her by U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth, at the time head of the secret-wiretap court. "It was clear she was not a favored person by folks who were about to take over running the department," said a Reno adviser who spoke with them. "It had to have been a political thing: 'Anybody who could be this close to Reno, we don't want.' "

In the end, Townsend said, her departure was "an agreed-upon thing." "When John Ashcroft came in, there was no doubt in my mind he might decide to put in his own team, so I made that offer" to resign, she said. "Did they fire me? The answer is absolutely not. . . . I was ready to go, they were ready to put in their own team."

By that sad September morning, she was on maternity leave from her decidedly low-profile new job as intelligence chief for the Coast Guard. "We thought it was a nice, friendly place for someone expecting her second child," her husband said.

After spending the day as a "communications hub" for O'Neill's worried friends, Townsend turned her focus to the Coast Guard. The agency was not legally part of the "intelligence community" and not entitled to share sensitive information. Working from home, she helped the Coast Guard get added to intelligence legislation and transformed the agency's priority from South American drug-smuggling to the vulnerability of America's ports.

The next leap came in spring 2003, when two Townsend patrons urged Rice to hire her at the National Security Council. Both Clarke, the publicity-savvy former counterterrorism chief who later criticized Bush for failure to pay early enough attention to the al Qaeda threat, and Gen. John A. Gordon, at the time Bush's homeland security chief, lobbied for Townsend.

"They used all the right adjectives," Rice recalled. "Smart, tough, persistent, which is important. . . . Somebody who will not let anything slip past her."

It was a controversial hire. Political hands in the White House worried about her past as a Democratic appointee. Republicans on Capitol Hill circulated a stinging memo with details of her connection to the Wall. National security veterans worried, as one career official who worked with her put it, "Is she senior enough for this?" Columnist Robert D. Novak wrote that Reno's onetime protege could turn out to be an "enemy within."

At the time, Townsend told an interviewer she had volunteered to resign. But by December, she was coordinating government response to terrorism scares that led to the grounding of holiday season flights from Europe. She had also bonded with the president.

On Christmas Eve, Rice recalled, "She said to the president, 'I'll call you tomorrow morning,' which was Christmas morning. And he said, 'Yeah, do that.' And then he thought about it and said, 'But when are you going to open your presents?' . . . She said, 'Don't worry, we'll find a time.' " That May, just a year after arriving in the White House, she was promoted to head both counterterrorism and homeland security offices. "There's a toughness to her," said former homeland security secretary Tom Ridge. "There's an intensity level to get the job done."

In the months since, she has served as the administration's public face defending its controversial election-season decision to raise terrorist threat levels and as Bush's envoy to inspect Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. When a presidential commission headed by senior U.S. District Judge Laurence H. Silberman and former senator Charles S. Robb (D-Va.) recommended sweeping changes in the intelligence community, Bush tapped Townsend to implement them.

"She was very tenacious about forcing people to make the hard decisions," Hadley recalled. She confronted turf-conscious bureaucrats, telling them, as Hadley recalled, "If you're going to accept it, accept it. If you've got problems, what are they and how can we work through them?"

But this quintessential Washington operator enjoys getting out in the field, too. In her office, in addition to the obligatory pictures of her with Bush and the somber aerial view of the still-smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center, sits a more lighthearted snapshot. The picture was taken days earlier while she was in freefall at 13,500 feet, clutched in the arms of a Navy SEAL sky diving over San Diego.

The SEAL works with the top-secret team assigned to hunt down bin Laden and other remnants of al Qaeda's leadership that had recently come under attack in the wilds of Afghanistan. Townsend had flown to California to get a briefing from what she calls "the tippy end of the spear." Hurtling toward the ground at 126 mph was a side benefit of "pure joy."

Was she scared? She scoffed at the question. "Do I look scared?"

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/e...er=emailarticle

Split between US intelligence and policy communities leads to reassessment of Cuba's 'biological weapons.'

http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0908/dailyUpdate.html

Key Official In Clandestine Service of CIA To Retire

By Dana Priest and Walter Pincus

Robert Richer, the second-ranking official in the CIA's clandestine service, has announced his retirement, telling colleagues that he lacked confidence in the agency's leadership, according to current and former intelligence officials.

Richer, who was one of CIA Director Porter J. Goss's key personnel choices, made his announcement last Friday at a meeting of the Directorate of Operations leaders, according to some of the officials.

Some of them said Richer's decision revolved around an ongoing debate over how to improve human intelligence and the direction of the CIA. The agency's role and influence have waned with the appointment of John D. Negroponte as the overall director of national intelligence.

Other government officials disagreed with that assertion and said Richer's departure involved disputes over "operational issues" that they would not specify, and a clash of personalities between Richer, a former Marine, and Goss and his top aides.

Last year, Richer's predecessor and his boss resigned after clashing with Goss's aides. During Friday's meeting, Richer said he and his boss, the deputy director of operations -- who cannot be named because he remains undercover -- had been frustrated by Goss and his staff in their efforts to implement certain measures, sources said. Richer subsequently met with national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley to explain his decision.

A CIA spokesman declined to comment on the matter. Other intelligence sources would speak only anonymously because of agency rules and traditions against speaking to the media.

Yesterday, Goss sent an unusual worldwide message to all CIA employees praising Richer for his nearly 35 years of service. That only fueled the belief among some former intelligence officials that Richer's resignation reflects ongoing problems at the agency.

Richer has served for less than a year as the number two in the spy service, having been promoted from being chief of the Near East division.

The CIA has been under pressure to make changes after a presidential commission and the Sept. 11 commission found last year that human intelligence collection had failed regarding both the al Qaeda terrorist network and whether Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

The presidential commission recommended creation of a Human Intelligence Directorate within the CIA, which would rank above the agency's Directorate of Operations and coordinate foreign human-intelligence collection across the intelligence community, including the Pentagon and the FBI.

Some top administration officials favor a plan to make the clandestine service, as the Directorate of Operations is known, the central focus of the CIA, with all other functions -- such as analysis and technology -- subordinate to the human intelligence role.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/e...er=emailarticle

In From the Cold and Able to Take the Heat

By Robin Wright

Last month, Henry "Hank" Crumpton, a revered master of CIA covert operations, formally came in from the cold.

Crumpton gained almost mythical fame after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks -- always anonymously. He is the mysterious "Henry" in the Sept. 11 commission report, which notes he persistently pressed the CIA to do more in Afghanistan before Osama bin Laden's terrorist spectaculars. Two key proposals to track al Qaeda were turned down.

Tapped to head the CIA's Afghan campaign after the attacks, Crumpton is "Hank" in Gary C. Schroen's "First In: An Insider's Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan" and Bob Woodward's "Bush at War." Both books recount how Crumpton crafted a strategy partnering elite intelligence and military officers in teams that worked with the Afghan opposition to oust the Taliban. The novel and initially controversial approach worked at limited cost in human life and materiel -- and avoided the kind of protracted U.S. ground war that the Soviet Union lost.

It also changed the way the United States fights terrorism.

"Hank was a tough, focused, brave operator and an excellent organizer. His work was invaluable," said Gen. Tommy Franks, now retired, who was in charge of Central Command during the Afghan war and the initial Iraq invasion.

Added John E. McLaughlin, former acting CIA director now at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, "He's a genuine American hero."

Now, after almost a quarter-century as a spy or station chief on at least four continents, Crumpton has emerged from undercover to take the job as State Department Coordinator for Counterterrorism -- with the very public rank of ambassador.

The move surprised colleagues. Crumpton says he had wanted to be a spy since childhood, when he first wrote to the CIA. "And they responded -- on letterhead. In a small rural community in Georgia, to get a letter from the CIA, that was pretty cool," he reflected in his first interview since taking the job.

After joining the agency in 1981, Crumpton cut his teeth in Liberia during its disintegration into tribal clashes. "That was a good place to start, dealing with chaos and trying to understand the different political and tribal tensions," he said, noting he learned more from African insurgents than he did in his initial training at home. "They were people working with nothing," he said.

Most of his work since then is still secret, although Crumpton was deeply involved in probing the 1998 al Qaeda bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania as well as the 2000 boat bombing of the USS Cole off Yemen, colleagues say.

He has specialized in hot spots -- and looked for operatives with similar aptitudes. When he took over the Afghan operation, Crumpton posted a sign on his office door, the wording borrowed from ill-fated Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton: "Officers wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages. Bitter cold. Long months of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful."

Georgia-born and soft-spoken, Crumpton can be deceiving in his demeanor, say his friends and peers. "There's a twinkle in his eyes, and he's an aw-shucks guy, but he's one tough intelligence officer," said James Pavitt, former deputy director of operations, the CIA's covert wing. "He was not afraid to look people in the eyes and say they were wrong. That was his great strength. And that's the kind of thing that started making things happen" after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Colleagues recall how Crumpton would crouch down like a squad leader between President Bush and Vice President Cheney with maps to explain what the CIA was doing in Afghanistan. "He wasn't intimidated," McLaughlin said.

After Afghanistan, Crumpton increasingly focused on how to redefine and streamline the way U.S. agencies work with one another, and how the United States integrates its security with the rest of the world. Colleagues say Crumpton is relentless -- and sometimes unyielding -- when he has an idea.

Jennifer E. Sims's new book was launched after a meeting with Crumpton -- at the International House of Pancakes. "He's incredibly direct," Sims said. "I got a call from him saying he'd like to meet at IHOP at 7 a.m. in Arlington. . . . I thought it was weird, but there I was in north Arlington. He was probably 10 minutes ahead of me. I slid into the booth and we had nice chitchat, and I said, 'So what's up?' "

"He said, 'We've got huge changes we need in intelligence, and what we need is a new partnership with the American people.' . . . He said, 'I need a vehicle,' then he stared at me. I thought, 'I'm getting recruited here,' " recalled Sims, who had been Crumpton's professor at Johns Hopkins when he took a break to get a master's degree. She had given him an A. Crumpton, she added, was the only student who had ever intimidated her.

That initial meeting launched more sessions, at assorted IHOPs, when Crumpton was still undercover, as the two drew up a list of people to contribute to a book. The result, released this month, is "Transforming U.S. Intelligence," edited by Sims and former CIA operations officer Burton Gerber. Crumpton wrote two chapters: one on intelligence and homeland security, the other offering tantalizing historic details on the Afghan operation.

Crumpton stresses how the winning strategy in Afghanistan included economic and social components because Afghans fought for tribal honor as well as geopolitical gain. The tribal leader who sided with the United States was rewarded with prizes that fell from the sky within 72 hours of the request -- in the form of airdrops of tents, medicine, clothes, Korans, food and toys.

"U.S. power is usually measured in terms of kinetic strength, but the power of empathy, honor, prestige, hope and material self-interest can complement raw strength and produce a more effective, more enduring victory," he wrote.

Crumpton also has urged relying on local forces, noting the advice of T.E. Lawrence -- Lawrence of Arabia -- to his British bosses: "Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. . . . Actually also, under the very odd conditions of Arabia, your practical work will not be as good as, perhaps, you think it is."

Crumpton, who has won four of the CIA's highest awards, was originally listed in the book as Henry Smith. Only after he took the State Department job did he allow the use of his real name -- leading the publisher to quickly insert little slips of paper with his real identity in the book proofs.

Colleagues joke that IHOP is a good cover for Crumpton, who is big on healthful eating and exercise -- and prefers tea to coffee. The biggest influences in his thinking, he said, are Sun Tzu, the Chinese military strategist born in 500 B.C. who wrote "The Art of War," and the Greek historian Thucydides, who chronicled the 5th-century B.C. war between Athens and Sparta.

Crumpton's approach to using intelligence as a tool in counterterrorism is premised on Sun Tzu's advice: "The expert in using the military subdues the enemy's forces without going to battle," he wrote.

For all the success of his plan in Afghanistan, the United States did not capture bin Laden during Crumpton's watch. It does not disturb Crumpton. "Alexander the Great never got King Darius of Persia. His own men gave him up. Pershing never got Pancho Villa," he reflected. "We will succeed. We have no doubt about that."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/e...er=emailarticle

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americ...ticle312207.ece

'Hank' steps out of the shadows to take over US counter-terrorism

http://www.wpherald.com/storyview.php?Stor...15-013610-9246r

Dispute over CIA reform leads to departures
By Bill Gertz
The Washington Times
Published September 15, 2005


WASHINGTON -- A senior official in the CIA's espionage branch will leave earlier than announced because of a dispute with CIA Director Porter J. Goss on reforms within the agency's spying branch, Bush administration officials said yesterday.

Robert Richer, the associate deputy director of operations, the No. 2 official in the CIA's clandestine service, had planned to retire from the agency effective November, according to a recent announcement to agency employees by Mr. Goss.


However, Mr. Richer now will enter the agency's retirement transition program within two weeks, said officials, who declined to be named.

A CIA spokesman refused to comment.

Mr. Richer told associates earlier this week that he decided to enter the transition program earlier because of concerns about the CIA leadership.

He has said that he disagreed with and did not have confidence in Mr. Goss and his key aides.

The move speeds up the end of Mr. Richer's involvement with CIA operations matters.

His scheduled departure highlights an ongoing and largely secret political struggle inside the CIA over efforts by Mr. Goss to reform the agency in the aftermath of intelligence failures related to September 11 and Iraq's weapons programs.

A senior intelligence official said Mr. Richer was forced out because of "insubordination."

A second official said the departure was due to a personality clash between Mr. Richer and Mr. Goss related to reforms at the Directorate of Operations. Both officials declined to elaborate.

Some leaders within the directorate have been opposing efforts by Mr. Goss to improve CIA spying. One issue in the recent past was a dispute over the selection of station chiefs, which mainly is done by the deputy director of operations, as the chief of the agency clandestine service is known.

The espionage branch was considered the elite element of the agency and is made up of about 7,000 case officers trained for spying overseas. Almost all other CIA employees are involved in analysis or technical work.

Mr. Goss and four close aides have been working behind the scenes to try to improve the agency's spying operations and have encountered resistance from officials who oppose some of the changes.

In particular, Mr. Goss is pressing hard for agency spies to do better in Iraq.

"The biggest problem for CIA can be summed up in two words: No spies," said one official.

The agency, in the two years since a presidential commission called for reforming human spying efforts, still has not succeeded in penetrating the major targets of U.S. intelligence with human spies, the official said.

Those targets include the terrorist group al Qaeda and the governments of China, North Korea and Iran.

According to intelligence officials who support reforming the CIA, a network of current and former operations officials has been working to oppose the reform efforts of Mr. Goss and his aides, whom they regard as political appointees and not professional spies. Mr. Goss is a former CIA case officer.

http://insider.washingtontimes.com/article...14-102406-4122r

Top CIA official to quit sooner over Goss disputeBy Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
September 15, 2005
A senior official in the CIA's espionage branch will leave earlier than announced because of a dispute with CIA Director Porter J. Goss on reforms within the agency's spying branch, Bush administration officials said yesterday.
Robert Richer, the associate deputy director of operations, the No. 2 official in the CIA's clandestine service, had planned to retire from the agency effective November, according to a recent announcement to agency employees by Mr. Goss.
However, Mr. Richer now will enter the agency's retirement transition program within two weeks, said officials, who declined to be named.
A CIA spokesman refused to comment.
Mr. Richer told associates earlier this week that he decided to enter the transition program earlier because of concerns about the CIA leadership.
He has said that he disagreed with and did not have confidence in Mr. Goss and his key aides.
The move speeds up the end of Mr. Richer's involvement with CIA operations matters.
His scheduled departure highlights an ongoing and largely secret political struggle inside the CIA over efforts by Mr. Goss to reform the agency in the aftermath of intelligence failures related to September 11 and Iraq's weapons programs.
A senior intelligence official said Mr. Richer was forced out because of "insubordination."
A second official said the departure was due to a personality clash between Mr. Richer and Mr. Goss related to reforms at the Directorate of Operations. Both officials declined to elaborate.
Some leaders within the directorate have been opposing efforts by Mr. Goss to improve CIA spying. One issue in the recent past was a dispute over the selection of station chiefs, which mainly is done by the deputy director of operations, as the chief of the agency clandestine service is known.
The espionage branch was considered the elite element of the agency and is made up of about 7,000 case officers trained for spying overseas. Almost all other CIA employees are involved in analysis or technical work.
Mr. Goss and four close aides have been working behind the scenes to try to improve the agency's spying operations and have encountered resistance from officials who oppose some of the changes.
In particular, Mr. Goss is pressing hard for agency spies to do better in Iraq.
"The biggest problem for CIA can be summed up in two words: No spies," said one official.
The agency, in the two years since a presidential commission called for reforming human spying efforts, still has not succeeded in penetrating the major targets of U.S. intelligence with human spies, the official said.
Those targets include the terrorist group al Qaeda and the governments of China, North Korea and Iran.
According to intelligence officials who support reforming the CIA, a network of current and former operations officials has been working to oppose the reform efforts of Mr. Goss and his aides, whom they regard as political appointees and not professional spies. Mr. Goss is a former CIA case officer.

Panel Briefed by Spy Manager Who Quit

By Walter Pincus and Dafna Linzer

Robert Richer, the outgoing No. 2 official in the CIA's clandestine service, made an unusual appearance at a closed session of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence yesterday to answer questions about how his concern over a lack of leadership at the agency triggered his retirement.

The afternoon session was not publicly announced; neither senators nor staff members who attended would even confirm Richer's presence during their weekly session devoted to "hot topics." "He was impressive," was all one participant in the meeting would say yesterday, insisting that because of committee rules he could not be identified.

Richer's departure is a setback for the CIA and particularly CIA Director Porter J. Goss, who selected him for the job less than a year ago. In leaving as assistant deputy director of operations, Richer joins a number of senior clandestine managers, including several with Middle East expertise, who have left since Goss took over the agency one year ago Saturday. Richer is a former CIA station chief in Amman, Jordan, and had headed the Near East division.

On Sept. 14, less than a week after Richer announced his retirement at a Directorate of Operations leadership meeting, he had a private session with Goss to explain his decision.

According to sources close to both men, Richer was blunt in his assessment of Goss's tenure and urged Goss, a Republican former congressman from Florida who once chaired the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, to communicate a vision for the agency and demonstrate leadership that senior career officials could rally behind.

"Rob laid at his doorstep, in a collegial way, that Goss is out of touch," said one officer whose identity is protected by law. "It fell on deaf ears," the officer said. Richer left the meeting angry and walked out of the Langley headquarters for perhaps the last time, several officers said.

The CIA and its leadership have struggled to determine their role in the wake of last year's legislation that reorganized the intelligence community, including creation of a director of national intelligence (DNI) with a staff of 500 that is over the CIA and Goss.

Last March, a presidential commission recommended expanding and improving gathering of human intelligence in all government agencies and creating a directorate within the CIA to coordinate it. Troubling some in the agency was that the new body would be superior to the Directorate of Operations, which traditionally has overseen all clandestine operations.

Current and former intelligence officials said Richer wanted something more expansive in reforming and expanding the clandestine service within the CIA, while reducing the side of the agency that conducts analysis, some of which would pass over to the DNI's operation. Richer has told others he was disappointed with Goss's response to his ideas.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/e...er=emailarticle

Goss Plans To Expand CIA Spying And Analysis

By Walter Pincus

Facing criticism both inside his agency and from Capitol Hill for a lack of vision and leadership, CIA Director Porter J. Goss yesterday outlined his plans for expanding CIA's spying and analytical operations overseas while cutting back on the bureaucracy at headquarters.

In an unusual town hall meeting for his staff, Goss said he is going to send more case officers and analysts abroad and put "a refreshed emphasis on the CIA as a global agency," according to a prepared text of his remarks. That would mean, he said, locating agency personnel not only "in places that [policymakers] need us to be today . . . but where they may need us to be tomorrow."

He said he will expect and encourage "calculated risk taking," a sensitive subject for agency personnel who have been accused of being risk-averse by the independent 9/11 commission and by members of the House and Senate intelligence committees. Saying he expected risky efforts to "go right," he added that he knows "it won't go right all the time. And when it goes wrong, I will support you."

Goss also made clear that sending more people overseas will also mean moving agency officers and analysts out of embassies and under cover, no longer guaranteeing them diplomatic immunity if they are caught spying. "We are definitely going to be using new cover arrangements overseas, because we have to," he said.

Reflecting criticism he made as a House member of the practice of pulling CIA officers out of stations around the world to serve short terms in Iraq, Goss said that "surging CIA officers, instead of having an established presence, an expertise, and developed relationships at hand, is a poor formula."

"We are not in all of the places we should be," he said, adding, "We don't have this luxury anymore. . . . We are going to be in places people can't even imagine."

Goss's talk, which came on the one-year anniversary of his taking over the agency, reflected many of the positions he and his top aides took when he was chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. It also followed the departure of many senior members of the clandestine service, including most recently, Robert Richer, the service's second-ranking officer and a more than 30-year veteran with Middle East experience.

Goss reassured the clandestine service that the "CIA remains the flagship of the intelligence community for HUMINT [human intelligence]."

He praised the analysts in the agency's Directorate of Intelligence, saying, "Analysis is the engine that drives the CIA; in my view, it is analysis that must drive collection." He said competitive analyses will be encouraged. "We are not afraid to publish opposing perspectives, if they exist. This gives policymakers more with which to work."

Addressing widely voiced complaints within the agency that President Bush, Vice President Cheney and other top administration officials either misused or ignored intelligence, Goss cautioned, "We must not lose sight of the notion that our policymakers are not obligated to accept at face value any intelligence estimate we put before them. And they are not required to follow it."

He also dealt with published criticism that he has avoided sessions with visiting heads of foreign intelligence services by turning them over to subordinates. "As many of you know," Goss said, "I have been very pleased to spend a lot of my time and attention on a multitude of liaison relationships . . . and I will continue to do so." But he added that he wanted the agency to make its own, unilateral operations the "governing paradigm."

Asked during the question period about Richer's retirement, Goss denied that his private talk with the departing veteran was as confrontational as it was described in news stories, according to reports from people who were at the meeting.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/e...er=emailarticle

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,170241,00.html

CIA's Goss Outlines Plans, Faces Questions
Friday, September 23, 2005

WASHINGTON — CIA Director Porter Goss (search) sketched out his vision for the spy agency in a speech to employees Thursday and took some heat from the audience about high-level departures and other concerns.

Goss spoke for just under an hour in the agency's auditorium, covering such issues as new methods of protecting the identities of clandestine officers and a push to rely less on information from friendly intelligence services. A transcript of the speech was provided to reporters Thursday evening.

In questions later, which were not made public, Goss found himself in some awkward moments, facing queries about the recent departure of a high-level clandestine operative and his plans for the agency's best-known division, the clandestine service, according to former officials familiar with the session. All spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the exchange was not made public.

Goss, a former Republican congressman from Florida who was chairman of the House Intelligence Committee (search) and a one-time CIA officer, has overseen the agency for one year. At the urging of the White House and a series of intelligence commissions, Goss is making changes to fix problems related to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the prewar intelligence on Iraq.

When Goss took office last fall, a number of high-level agency personnel departed. This month, another senior manager in the clandestine service, Robert Richer (search), also left over differences about Goss' changes. Goss was pressed for details Thursday.

"It was a very candid meeting," said his spokeswoman Jennifer Millerwise Dyke. But "he wouldn't answer specifics about Mr. Richer's departure."

She said Goss made clear that staff have a right to confidentiality.

In addressing change, Goss said the agency will "not rely solely" on information from friendly intelligence services. Without ignoring those "vital relationships," Goss said the agency will do more on its own.

He said he encourages calculated risks. "And when it goes wrong, I will support you," he said.

He was also critical of "surging," or sending numerous CIA personnel into trouble spots, as has been in the case in countries including Iraq. Instead, the CIA (search) should establish a foothold in countries to gain expertise. "We are not in all of the places we should be," he said.

Former clandestine service chief Jim Pavitt said deep budget cuts and other policies during the 1990s have had a devastating effect on the agency and forced such moves after Sept. 11.

"No one wanted to surge," Pavitt said. But "there was no other way to deal with the issues that had become presidential priorities than to surge to meet the intelligence challenges."

Goss' speech comes as the intelligence community is in the midst of an overhaul, including major changes at the top with the newly created national intelligence director's office.

That chief, John Negroponte (search), has been embroiled in a number of decisions that will test his ability to oversee all 15 agencies of the intelligence

In one of his first major moves, Negroponte this week decided to shift parts of a major satellite contract from Boeing Co. to Lockheed Martin Corp., putting his stamp on a contentious debate over a highly classified

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/n...curity_cia_dc_1


CIA chief calls for new unilateral agency effort By David Morgan
Thu Sep 22, 9:40 PM ET


WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The CIA, seeking to repair a reputation damaged by Iraq and the September 11 attacks, will do more of its own spying in countries where it has tended to rely on foreign intelligence services up to now, CIA Director Porter Goss said on Thursday.

In a meeting with CIA employees at the agency's Langley, Virginia, headquarters, Goss laid out his blueprint for a revised CIA structure that would give field agents greater authority, establish operations in more countries and add foreign-born agents to its ranks.

"CIA will have the authority to set standards for the entire intelligence community on things relating to (human espionage)," Goss told his audience.

"Our national interests and our security needs are global," he added. "When I say we need to be global, this is an admission that we are not in all of the places we should be. We don't have this luxury anymore.

"We are going to be in places people can't even imagine," said Goss, who is overseeing a 50 percent increase in spies and analysts at the agency.

Goss' new emphasis on unilateral activity overseas follows blistering criticism over the agency's use of a German source of intelligence that claimed prewar Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. The assertion was used to justify the U.S.-led 2003 invasion.

No such weapons have been found in Iraq. A blue-ribbon presidential commission concluded in March that much of the bogus intelligence came from a disreputable Iraqi source code-named "Curveball," whose information was passed along to U.S. intelligence through German interrogators.

CALCULATED RISK-TAKING

"Unilateral operations will return to be part of the governing paradigm for the CIA," Goss told employees.

The CIA has also weathered international criticism over rendition, its practice of abducting terror suspects overseas and transporting them to their home countries, where critics say they are sometimes tortured.

"The CIA credo is that the U.S. must always have the place of primacy among our interests," Goss said in describing the agency's new emphasis on unilateral operations.

"I expect and encourage calculated risk-taking -- and, it will be rewarded. I also expect it to go right, but I know it won't go right all the time. And when it goes wrong, I will support you," he said.

A transcript of his remarks was provided to news organizations following the event. The CIA declined to elaborate.

The CIA's future has been a target of speculation since congressionally mandated reforms created an intelligence czar to correct flaws revealed by the Iraq war and the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington.

In April, Goss surrendered his former title as director of central intelligence to the new czar, John Negroponte, who now leads the 15-agency intelligence community with greater authority over budgets and personnel.

"This was long overdue, because as the last DCI, I can say that the job had become frankly too big for one person," Goss said.

Goss also has faced criticism for his role at the agency. Robert Richer, the No. 2 official in the agency's clandestine services, expressed doubts about the director's leadership this month while announcing his retirement. The CIA declined to comment on the case.

Richer appeared before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence at a closed hearing on Wednesday, sources said.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/20...9-22-goss_x.htm

Goss lays out vision for CIA
By Katherine Shrader, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON — CIA Director Porter Goss sketched out his vision for the spy agency in a speech to employees Thursday and took some heat from the audience about high-level departures and other concerns.
Goss spoke for just under an hour in the agency's auditorium, covering such issues as new methods of protecting the identities of clandestine officers and a push to rely less on information from friendly intelligence services. A transcript of the speech was provided to reporters Thursday evening.

In questions later, which were not made public, Goss found himself in some awkward moments, facing queries about the recent departure of a high-level clandestine operative and his plans for the agency's best-known division, the clandestine service, according to former officials familiar with the session. All spoke on the condition of anonymity because the exchange was not made public.

Goss, a former Republican congressman from Florida who was chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and a one-time CIA officer, has overseen the agency for one year. At the urging of the White House and a series of intelligence commissions, Goss is making changes to fix problems related to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the prewar intelligence on Iraq.

When Goss took office last fall, a number of high-level agency personnel departed. This month, another senior manager in the clandestine service, Robert Richer, also left over differences about Goss' changes. Goss was pressed for details Thursday.

"It was a very candid meeting," said his spokeswoman Jennifer Millerwise Dyke. But "he wouldn't answer specifics about Mr. Richer's departure."

She said Goss made clear that staff have a right to confidentiality.

In addressing change, Goss said the agency will "not rely solely" on information from friendly intelligence services. Without ignoring those "vital relationships," Goss said the agency will do more on its own.

He said he encourages calculated risks. "And when it goes wrong, I will support you," he said.

He was also critical of "surging," or sending numerous CIA personnel into trouble spots, as has been in the case in countries including Iraq. Instead, the CIA should establish a foothold in countries to gain expertise. "We are not in all of the places we should be," he said.

Former clandestine service chief Jim Pavitt said deep budget cuts and other policies during the 1990s have had a devastating effect on the agency and forced such moves after Sept. 11.

"No one wanted to surge," Pavitt said. But "there was no other way to deal with the issues that had become presidential priorities than to surge to meet the intelligence challenges."

Goss' speech comes as the intelligence community is in the midst of an overhaul, including major changes at the top with the newly created national intelligence director's office.

That chief, John Negroponte, has been embroiled in a number of decisions that will test his ability to oversee all 15 agencies of the intelligence

In one of his first major moves, Negroponte this week decided to shift parts of a major satellite contract from Boeing Co. to Lockheed Martin Corp., putting his stamp on a contentious debate over a highly classified government program.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

http://www.davidcorn.com/archives/2005/09/has_fbi_failed.php

September 23, 2005
Has FBI Failed in a Big Power-grab?
Has the FBI failed in a Bush-blessed, attempted power-grab?

That was the lead sentence in an article of mine posted yesterday at www.thenation.com. But somewhere along the line, that line was cut and did not appear as the kickoff sentence. Nevertheless, the article deals with a policy-wonkish subject that has not gotten the attention it deserves: the FBI trying to grab a power that would go far beyond what the Patriot Act permits. If you had any concern about the Patriot Act, then you ought to be worried about the Bureau's attempt to obtain what's known as administrative subpoena power. As the article notes, civil libertarians of the right and left fret about this. Read on. And let me note that research support for this article was provided by the Institute for Justice and Journalism at the USC Annenberg School for Communication, which awarded me a fellowship last year.

The FBI Fails (For Now) to Grab Subpoena Powers
by DAVID CORN
September 22, 2005

With several key provisions of the controversial Patriot Act set to expire later this year, Congress has been working for months on legislation that would extend and perhaps restrict those provisions.

Most of the debate has concerned whether the Patriot Act went too far and has focused on the measure's Section 215, which allows the FBI to obtain library records and other "tangible things" in a terrorism or national security investigation by obtaining a warrant from the super-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court.

But the FBI, with the presumed approval of the White House, has been pushing for power that would go beyond that of the controversial Section 215. In particular, the bureau has wanted the new Patriot Act measure to award it the right to issue administrative subpoenas. With an administrative subpoena, an FBI agent could--without going to a court or a grand jury--demand that a person or institution hand over any record on another person or organization: financial papers, health records, library records, e-mails and more. The order would be subject to judicial review only if the recipient--say, an Internet service provider--opposed the order. Administrative subpoenas would give the FBI greater power than Section 215 and national security letters. (With a national security letter, the FBI can, without bothering a court, obtain a limited set of information--certain financial documents, credit reports and Internet-use records. But a federal court last year declared national security letters unconstitutional. The Bush Administration has filed an appeal.) Moreover, as Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, notes, "The FBI wants this administrative subpoena power forever"--that is, with no sunset provision. Beating back the FBI's demand for this authority would be a victory for the civil liberties community. And so far, the FBI has been losing.

Opposition to FBI administrative subpoenas has united civil libertarians of the left and right. Nancy Libin, staff counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology, notes that administrative subpoena power is "really kind of scary. The FBI would have the right to approach any business or person and say, 'Hand over whatever we want,' and a gag order would be attached. You can't challenge the subpoena. You can't talk about it. If an FBI agent wants a grand jury subpoena, he has to go through a prosecutor. It's not just an agent issuing a subpoena. Administrative subpoenas would make Section 215 moot." Paul Rosenzweig, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a prominent champion of the original Patriot Act, says, "I don't like administrative subpoenas. Judges have to be involved. A law that permits the uninhibited exercise of executive authority is bad." And Suzanne Spalding, former assistant general counsel at the CIA, argues that "removing courts is a mistake."

In its search for administrative subpoena authority, the FBI turned to the Senate Intelligence Committee. In May, as the committee was considering legislation to reauthorize parts of the Patriot Act, Valerie Caproni, the FBI's general counsel, testified before it, claiming that the bureau desperately needs administrative subpoenas for its terrorism investigations: "We cannot wait to disrupt terrorist acts or to prosecute terrorist crimes after they occur. To stay a step ahead of the terrorists, investigators need tools allowing them to obtain relevant information as quickly as possible." She noted that regulatory agencies that probe healthcare fraud and child abuse can issue administrative subpoenas. But as Democratic members of the Intelligence Committee pointed out in a subsequent report, Caproni, upon being questioned, "could not document significant past or current instances when national security investigations faltered or were hindered due to lack of an administrative subpoena authority."

The Democrats also noted that the administrative subpoena power available to other agencies is far more limited than what the FBI has been seeking. And when the Democrats proposed providing administrative subpoena power to the FBI for "emergency use," Republicans on the committee, apparently fronting for the FBI, voted against it. Emergency authority was not good enough; the FBI wanted full and everyday use of this wide-ranging power.

Why has the FBI been hellbent on administrative subpoena authority? Rosenzweig says he suspects it is a case of bureaucratic "gimme, gimme, gimme." Robert Litt, a former federal prosecutor and past senior Justice Department official, notes that the FBI "hates having to go through the Department of Justice to get information. But going to an assistant US Attorney to get a subpoena is hardly that burdensome."

Litt says the FBI's current drive for administrative subpoena authority is part of a years-long effort to expand the bureau's power that predates September 11, 2001. After 9/11 the Bush Administration proposed antiterrorism legislation that included a provision that would allow the FBI to issue administrative subpoenas. But Congress resisted and stuck to the notion that the FBI's authority to obtain records ought to be subject to judicial review. Congress did relax pre-existing restrictions, giving birth to the infamous Section 215. "None of us who participated in drafting Section 215 thought it would become so controversial, given that we retained FISA court procedures," says Beryl Howell, who at the time was general counsel for the Democratic-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee. "Originally the FBI wanted administrative subpoenas so they would not have to go to court to get third-party records, so they could bypass courts and prosecutors. Section 215 was a disappointment for the FBI."

The FBI lost the battle in 2001 but did not forget about the issue. In June the Republican-controlled Intelligence Committee, led by chairman Pat Roberts, approved Patriot Act legislation that granted the FBI administrative subpoena authority. Under this bill it would be a crime in some instances for the recipient of such a subpoena to tell anyone that he or she had received one. Democratic members of the committee complained that such a gag order "could prevent the recipient of an FBI administrative subpoena from exercising First Amendment rights to protest government action, including by bringing abuses to the attention of members of Congress or Inspectors General."

By winning over the Senate Intelligence Committee, the FBI had only managed to clear a low hurdle. "The intelligence committees on the Hill are generally viewed as being held hostage by the agencies they oversee, but the judiciary committees are not," says one former senior Capitol Hill staffer. "Judiciary committee members tend to be more familiar with law enforcement and civil liberties issues and sometimes more skeptical of additional authority. It's par for the course for the FBI to go to the intelligence committees, which say yes, and then it's the judiciary committees' job to say no or to work out a compromise. Usually this happens behind closed doors, with staff aides on the different committees holding informal discussions. But not this year."

As the Senate Intelligence Committee was doing the FBI's bidding, the House and Senate Judiciary Committees--which also have jurisdiction over the reauthorization of the Patriot Act--signaled that they were cool to idea of administrative subpoena authority. The Republican chairmen of the committees--Representative James Sensenbrenner Jr. and Senator Arlen Specter--both opposed the proposal. They were not swayed by the FBI argument that it has extensive powers to obtain evidence when conducting criminal investigations and should be able to do the same in terrorism and national security cases. "The problem," says Howell, "is that in a criminal investigation there are procedures built in to counterbalance any FBI overreaching. A subpoenaed party can complain to a judge. Grand jury investigations proceed under court supervision. These safety valves do not exist in national security investigations, which tend to be broader investigations than criminal investigations. That's why members of Congress--Republicans and Democrats--have been skeptical of granting the FBI this power." And as Kate Martin points out, if the FBI is investigating suspected terrorists as part of a criminal investigation, it can use all the available criminal tools. A Senate aide who worked on this matter adds, "Given all the concerns regarding Section 215 and the sensitivity of third-party records, people recognized that if you take judges out of the equation--which is what an administrative subpoena does--that would be a step back."

Sensenbrenner, a conservative Republican, and Specter, a moderate Republican, ended up crafting different versions of the new Patriot Act legislation. The bill produced by Sensenbrenner's committee (and approved by the full House) preserved the controversial parts of the Patriot Act and extended these measures for ten years. The bill written by Specter's committee (and OK'd by the Senate) applied several new restrictions to these provisions and gave them four more years of life. But both pieces of legislation left out administrative subpoena authority. (The Senate Intelligence Committee's Patriot Act legislation was essentially shoved aside.) Next, the two measures will go to a House-Senate conference, where Specter, Sensenbrenner and other senators and representatives will attempt to produce a compromise bill acceptable to both houses. This might offer the FBI one more shot at obtaining administrative subpoena authority, but Congressional aides say it's unlikely the bureau can overcome opposition from the chairmen of the judiciary committees.

But before the House approved its Patriot Act update, Representative Jeff Flake, a Republican, passed a little-noticed amendment that would bolster national security letters. This amendment, according to civil liberties advocates, could eventually become a backdoor for administrative subpoena authority. "The only difference between Flake's amendment and Roberts's administrative subpoena proposal," says Kate Martin, "is that Roberts would permit the seizure of every kind of record and thing, and the Flake amendment only involves those categories of records covered by the existing national security letters. If the Flake amendment gets passed in the final version of this legislation, the FBI will simply try to expand its coverage to everything else."

While civil liberties advocates appear to have thwarted the FBI on outright administrative subpoena authority, the bureau has not declared this case closed. The latest tussle is just another round in a battle that is expected to continue. "It's hard to see stopping something bad as a win," says an aide for a Democratic senator who opposed the administrative subpoena proposal. "But we're going to have to come back again and again to keep stopping it." Indeed, in late July--after the House and Senate had produced versions of the Patriot Act legislation without administrative subpoena authority--FBI director Robert Mueller was still urging Congress to hand the FBI such power. "The FBI is always persistent," says Beryl Howell. "They don't give up."

Posted by David Corn at September 23, 2005 10:17 PM

http://www.iwar.org.uk/news-archive/2005/09-22-6.htm

Remarks by Director of the Central Intelligence Agency Porter J. Goss to CIA Employees


Thursday, 22 September 2005

It is important—especially at a time of change—to meet and talk about the direction of our Agency, and the great things you have done, and the next steps that we need to take together. I have been looking forward to this opportunity actually now for several weeks, and I want to take your questions—because I believe strongly in two-way communications. But first, I want to make some remarks.

As you know, the single greatest change that the Agency has embraced as the leader in the Intelligence Community is the creation of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The President studied the results of the 9-11 Commission and took the opportunity to reorganize the Intelligence Community, as we all know. This was long overdue, because as the last DCI, I can say that the job had become frankly too big for one person. Especially, given that the DCI had limited capabilities and authority to manage anything but the CIA. And the DCI job had simply changed since its inception, which actually was more than a half century ago, as you know. The DNI was established to:

Gain coherence from an ever-larger Intelligence Community; we all know the Community is bigger.


Get some control of the budget process, which we all know is far from perfect.


And most critically, increase the sharing of intelligence so we can hopefully avoid the kinds of problems upon which the 9-11 Commission, and the other commissions, have reported.
So thus, I became the first Director to be responsible for the direction of the CIA, without Community responsibilities attached. Ironically, in this new design, among the first things the DNI is doing is assigning to the DCIA, the community role as the National HUMINT Manager. And the reason for this is actually quite simple. CIA is the gold standard when it comes to human intelligence collection. CIA will have the authority to set standards for the entire Intelligence Community on things relating to HUMINT. Thus, CIA remains the flagship of the IC for HUMINT. I expect we will be making an announcement about the particulars of this very soon. Meanwhile, I want to recognize my deputy, Admiral Bert Calland, for his smart leadership in representing the Agency on this matter. And I am grateful to him. Thank you, Bert. Do you want to stand?

This is a time of great opportunity for the Agency. I am excited about the years ahead. We are rebuilding our human resources—not just in sheer numbers, but we've also addressing things like our language shortfalls. That applies to the way that we train our newcomers, our middle management, and even our senior management. In short, more quantity, more quality are in our future.

Now, in order to accomplish our core mission, we access plans and intentions of our enemies and then we analyze those secrets, identifying and gaining access to the mischief makers and the leaders of the future; providing our customers with a product that they can rely on to make the very tough decisions they have to make. There is no question in my mind as to my priority for this Agency. Improving our global capabilities is our main job. After all, how can you disrupt terrorist actions without first knowing their plans and intentions?

And, you're dealing with the explosion of information endlessly circling our globe in today's technological society. How to filter the nuggets is not an easy job.

So, the bottom line is: The CIA is being asked to do better what it has always done—to provide objective, unbiased, and independent intelligence to policymakers without being policy prescriptive. The President expects the CIA to be able to do well what the Agency does uniquely. We are seekers of truth, not owners, and it is an endless task.

And now I want to give you my sense of how we are proceeding when it comes to transformation. And, an understanding of where I see things going next.

We have been making real progress in all the areas that have called out for improvement. Such as:

We've been having substantial, but quiet success in our efforts in the Global War on Terror. We have provided intelligence support that has resulted in the capture or killings of dozens of high-level Al Qa'ida operatives, and our efforts have unquestionably saved American lives at home and abroad.


We have gotten more unilateral, though still not as much as I'd like. It's getting the right kind of people trained in the right places under the right cover against the right targets with the understanding that there is the right kind of political will and leadership to give them the time and the backing to do the jobs they need to do. This is breaking some molds.


We have been having great success recruiting agents on all the target sets. We have continued various initiatives to stock our asset pool for future anticipated needs and challenges. We continue to look for ways to increase both the analyst's and the case officer's time on target, and this includes revising old guidelines that limit artificially an officer's tour, and expanding our expert base around the globe.


We are getting more and more global. We opened new stations and bases and we've reopened some old ones. We are developing new and creative ways to get more and more of our officers out of Washington.


The exceptional work of the DS & T is one of the Agency's and America's best kept secrets, a critical pillar of our success in human operations and an often unacknowledged catalyst for some of the IC's most important technical intelligence. This is another directorate in which we are having success in pushing more of its technology, its infrastructure, and its most valuable resource—its people—to the field to bring its unique blend of technology, tradecraft, and innovation to bear against our adversaries.


We have been reducing Headquarters bureaucracy. There is no better example of this than the Directorate of Support. We continue to look for ways to get Headquarters out of the way of field activities and back where it belongs. Headquarters’ operational primacy is an outmoded philosophy.


We are incentivizing language skills and cultural awareness. We recognize the need for diversity in all our disciplines throughout the Agency. Having the knowledge base and these skill sets enhances all of our capabilities and improves our work product. To understand the world around us, we've got to reflect that world in house more faithfully than we do now. We are bringing in new case officers into the inner core of our Agency family. They are going to include more recent arrivals to the United States and those with a lot of foreign travel and exposure to different kinds of experiences. That's a good thing for CIA, for its mission, and for this workforce as a whole. This makes a lot of sense, but it is a huge divergence from the way we have always done things—and, it is critical that we do it without neglecting counterintelligence, of course.
When I was in case officer training, I was advised to beware of recruiting in my own image—back then we were indeed a small old boys network—and that is changing, but we are still not where we need to be on that.

We are rewarding and promoting positive impact on mission, not just time spent at Headquarters. I have asked the Executive Director to begin the process to establish a more flexible track for the Senior Intelligence Service—the DI has done some innovative things in this regard worth noting. In other words, this would be an "Expert Track" so that experts in their field can be rewarded for their impact on mission without being forced to hold management positions.


We have focused our need for a first class and state of the art global infrastructure worthy of the global enterprise that is CIA. I have seen this first hand. Too much of our aging infrastructure has been run to ruin. And, it is not just headquarters—this includes our other area facilities and those that are elsewhere. There are too many critical nodes that are single points of failure for an Agency on which so much depends. We cannot allow ourselves to fall any further behind.


And we have put the spotlight on creativity and the exercise of one's ingenuity. The creation and establishment of the Director's Mission Innovation Center is quickly becoming the place where one's imagination is allowed to exercise and where the challenges of tomorrow are met and overcome. I will shortly announce a Director’s Group that will work in conjunction with this center, and to make permanent our transformation efforts—no backtracking here.
Intelligence is and always has been a people business. Knowing what makes people tick and exploiting that knowledge to our national security advantage is really how our craft is practiced.

And to that end, I have required that CIA's people be a priority issue for all members of my leadership team. We are renewing our commitment to our people by fostering a work environment that supports diverse and flexible career track, flexibility in assignments, empowers officers to build expertise, sparks innovation, and provides strong support and training initiatives and programs that will enhance their quality of life and the quality of their service to our nation.

To help our people go global, we are finding novel ways to integrate our key disciplines across directorates. We will work to reduce and remove bureaucratic obstacles. Again, breaking some molds.

I have placed a refreshed emphasis on the CIA as a global agency. We do not serve our policymakers if we are not in the places that they need us to be today, and are not reporting from places they don't expect us to be—but where they may need us to be tomorrow.

Our people being global enhances our capability to provide better intelligence and better insight. Through a focus on fundamentals of tradecraft, time on target, and the creation of innovative capabilities, approaches, and tools, the CIA will be better positioned to meet emerging challenges and deal with emerging threats and trends.

As many of you know, I have been very pleased to spend a lot of my time and attention on a multitude of liaison relationships. These are important opportunities and I will continue to do so. But, without ignoring our vital liaison relationships and partners, we will not rely solely on this stream of intelligence to inform our policymakers. Unilateral operations will return to be part of the governing paradigm for the CIA.

I have said this before, and I talk about it a lot when I am in the field, but I cannot say it enough. I expect and encourage calculated risk taking—and, it will be rewarded. I also expect it to go right, but I know it won’t go right all the time. And when it goes wrong, I will support you.

At a recent leadership off-site, we again reviewed and reaffirmed the priorities of our Agency directorate by directorate.

Let me start with the Directorate of Intelligence. Analysis is the engine that drives the CIA. In my view, it is analysis that must drive collection. Collection for collection's sake is exciting and interesting, but if it is not put into context and synthesized with the other available pieces of information on the topic, it's again interesting to policymakers, but it’s probably not of much utility. I know there are a few of you from the DI who may have this quote hanging above your desk:

"Casting aside the perceived—and I must admit the occasionally real—excitement of secret operations, the absolute essence of the intelligence profession rests in the production of [analysis] on which sound policy decisions can be made." So Richard Helms said, and I agree with him.

First, I want to commend the DI for its exemplary work in transitioning to much improved product and helping to support the DNI. It has mattered.

In the area of Improved Collection—We do need to get the analysts more information. Collection is job one in support of our analytic capabilities. Getting the right kind of collection, overt as well as secret, for our analysts is, and must be, a big part of the way forward for our agency.

Improved Training—It is something we need to talk about and I do feel some of our tradecraft was not what it could have been. Perhaps, it was because of the press of business; perhaps, because we had been thinned out so badly. A lot of reasons come to mind that could explain why it might have happened. But, the DI leadership is fully committed to making improvements. And their efforts have indeed been recognized.

Improved Integration with the DO—I expect a closer symbiosis between the DI and the DO. It makes for better taskings, better understanding, and better product.

Part of it is increasing our benchstrength, putting more of our DI people overseas, and giving our analysts the tools, the support, and the information they need to do their jobs.

Another part is fostering an environment that lends itself to competitive analysis. We are not afraid to publish opposing perspectives, if they exist. This gives policymakers more with which to work. When two groups of smart people come to different conclusions about what a set of facts means, this is—in my view—much more honest, less-biased, and true to our profession.

I do believe we are on the right track with our intelligence product and getting it to a level where it is not just timely, but relevant to our policymakers’ concerns, and as accurate as we can make it, without assuming that it is the objective truth not to be forsaken. We must not lose sight of the notion that our policymakers are not obligated to accept at face value any intelligence estimate we put before them. And, they are not required to follow it.

Again, I will quote from DCI Helms:

[I]t is a serious mistake for any intelligence service ever to assume that it has achieved absolute wisdom.

This point is worth noting, because in my view, this is where many intelligence observers and pundits get lost. No one at CIA believes that it has cornered the market on objective truth. If they do, they're in the wrong business.

The Directorate of Operations . . . HUMINT, as we know, can be difficult, dangerous, time consuming work. And, the priority is to get back to the fundamentals. Patience. Persistence. Time on target. You’ve all heard me say that before.

I have talked much about Field forward. You cannot understand people overseas, much less influence them, from Langley. You cannot develop deep and trusting relationships with individuals and with governments overseas by flying in and flipping out a US passport. We are working to change the ratio so that we have more of our case officers out in the field under new kinds of cover in places where they can do what they need to do for us.

I’m not worried about having too few people at headquarters.

Global coverage. Our national interests, and our national security needs, are global. There is no doubting this anymore. "Surging" CIA officers instead of having an established presence, an expertise, and developed relationships at hand, is a poor formula, in my opinion. When I say we need to be global, this is an admission that we are not in all of the places we should be. We don't have this luxury anymore.

Aligning capabilities with the threats as they exist today and will be tomorrow cannot be understated. Operating around today’s troubled world requires different capabilities in different places. One size fits all doesn't work and neither does a lot of the old technology. We may need a case officer with a CPA to work in Europe against terrorist funding, we might need a pretty good engineer or physicist someplace to work proliferation issues. I'm still taken with the idea of our case officers riding across the terrain—the very harsh terrain—of Afghanistan on horseback, bringing in precision aircraft ordnance from our military on specific targets is an amazing sight. Hiring and deploying the right case officers, with the right capabilities—this is exactly what I have directed the DO leadership to do.

We are definitely going to be using new cover arrangements overseas, because we have to. That doesn't mean we're going to abandon our old ways. Pinstripes work in some places—and they'll still be fashionable there—but not everywhere. One thing about intelligence work is that things are seldom mutually exclusive. We are going to be in places people can’t even imagine.

As to unilateral operations, I have already mentioned we are doing better here. The CIA credo is that the US must always have the place of primacy among our interests.

Moving on to the Directorate of Science and Technology. The technical revolutions of the past 50 years have brought obstacles and opportunities equally revolutionary to the world of clandestine operations and all-source analysis. The breadth of DS&T capabilities ranges from the most personal of technologies, such as a disguise, to the most expansive collection technologies available today. Tubes, transistors, digitalization, the Internet—each technical advance used by our adversaries has been some mix of obstacle and opportunity for the bright minds in S&T who support our operations.

The DS&T has an equally long history—over 60 years—of innovative and comprehensive open source coverage. FBIS is our "global safety net." Their considerable contribution to mission will be magnified in the coming months through the creation of a National Open Source Center—a fitting acknowledgment to the critical role of Open Source activity.

And these are amazing folks. We must continue to encourage their efforts, because this is an area we have to succeed in and lead in, if we are going to continue to keep America safe. Staying current with technology is expensive, and anticipating the path of tomorrow's technology is to some extent quite speculative. But as Director, I have to ensure that S&T has the resources, training, and inspiration it needs to stay in the forefront.

Last, but certainly not least, our Directorate of Support is a revitalized support cadre, and a reenergized "Mission First" paradigm. There is nothing that CIA accomplishes, hopes to accomplish, or can even begin to accomplish, without our Directorate of Support being engaged and fully partnered with the action element involved.

The Mission centered zeal of the DS's leadership doesn't just trickle down, it flows down in waves—and Stephanie won’t let it be any other way—or allow us to have it any other way. They are forward deployed officers in some of our most dangerous places working alongside our ops officers, our analysts, our engineers and scientists, and our military colleagues. I have personally seen this with my own eyes.

This is also the directorate that I will be working closely with to tackle some of our biggest challenges: Strengthening our Infrastructure, our IT, and frankly our Hiring Practices.

In conclusion, when looking at the directorates, it is critical that we strengthen the relationships between the career services, and, recognize that there is but one mission at CIA. We all serve one flag. I find that when you get the conversation going between the directorates, where they're very proud of their good espirit, there is more understanding and a little light is shed back and forth. This is always helpful to do, because otherwise, though they might be using English, something always seems to get lost in translation if they are not working with each other.

So, these are my guiding principles and what I've asked my leadership team to focus on in the years ahead. People, Global Reach, and Capabilities—just as I’ve been saying since I arrived.

This is a major time of opportunity for the Central Intelligence Agency, and shame on us if we don't live up to what is expected of us. We have a legacy of some amazing work. We are being asked to do more amazing work, and we will get it done. And now, I'd be very happy to take your questions and then we will get back to our other jobs.

###

http://www.iwar.org.uk/news-archive/2005/09-22-6.htm

CIA: 'An Agency Version of the "Jerry Springer Show"'

Newsweek
Oct. 3, 2005 issue - Personal and political feuding at CIA headquarters is turning into a soap opera. Morale has declined for months as CIA chief Porter Goss has purged senior managers and critics have assailed the agency for fumbling intelligence on Al Qaeda and unconventional weapons in Iraq. And last week frustrations at Langley, Va., boiled over as career spies lobbed broadsides against Goss's stewardship.

Only sketchy accounts are available of what may have been the most telling critique of Goss's leadership, presented to a closed-door meeting of the Senate Intelligence Committee by veteran operative Rob Richer. Richer served nine months as deputy chief of the CIA's spy branch before resigning earlier this month. He told senators he was unhappy about how Goss ran the agency, including the director's absentee style of management, say three sources familiar with his testimony who declined to be identified because it's classified. Richer "struggled mightily to be respectful but did not pull punches," says one of the sources. (A supporter says Richer isn't speaking to the media.)

The day after Richer sat before the committee, Goss appeared at a previously scheduled "Town Hall Meeting" open to all CIA employees and broadcast by closed-circuit video to agency outposts. In a speech, the CIA chief declared the agency had made "real progress" in recruiting new agents and chasing terrorists. The speech was distributed to the media, but in a private Q&A afterward, Goss faced awkward questions from the ranks. Asked why veteran officers like Richer were walking out, Goss said, "I don't do personnel," and blamed the media for inaccurate reporting, say three sources with firsthand knowledge of the proceedings who requested anonymity since the broadcast was private. The CIA's operations chief, known as Jose because he works under cover, then stated that Richer "had good reasons for leaving." (A CIA official familiar with Goss's view, who doesn't discuss it for attribution, says Goss believes that CIA division chiefs should have the right to choose their own personnel—and that Jose said CIA operations would emerge "even stronger" from Goss's reforms.) Another member of the audience, say the sources with first-hand knowledge, asked Goss about why the director brought a former congressional staffer with him to the CIA who, as a junior CIA officer, once got into trouble for shoplifting food. Goss responded that people make mistakes.

Not every audience member was hostile to Goss, the sources say. A Goss sympathizer complained: "People are turning this into an agency version of the 'Jerry Springer Show'." CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano tells NEWSWEEK: "The director is a strong believer in candor and open communication within the CIA family."

—Mark Hosenball

© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.

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CIA Getting Intel Tips From Congress
--------------------

By KATHERINE SHRADER
Associated Press Writer

September 27 2005, 12:27 PM PDT

WASHINGTON -- The CIA is gleaning intelligence from an unusual source: Congress. House Intelligence Chairman Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., said the agency has become more willing to consider sensitive information that comes from his oversight committee -- a shift he's seen in recent months under CIA Director Porter Goss.

The complete article can be viewed at:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/po...itics-headlines

http://www.wpherald.com/storyview.php?Stor...28-013814-9468r

CIA makes progress but does Goss?
By Martin Sieff
UPI Senior News Analyst
Published September 28, 2005


WASHINGTON -- The Central Intelligence Agency under Porter J. Goss is going through arguably the most wrenching, traumatic but potentially productive transformation in its history.

Four years after the mega-terrorist attacks of Sept.11, 2001, the agency is indeed being rapidly transformed into a leaner, meaner, more adaptable organization. But it is also being roiled by unprecedented internal dissension, bitterness and turmoil.


Not since the notorious endless mole hunts of James Jesus Angleton that turned the agency inside out in the 1960s and effectively paralyzed it for years has there been so much dissension in Langley. And in a development that never occurred even during Angleton's long and futile witch hunts, some currently serving senior officers have been leaking stories critical of Goss to the media. Journalists and media outlets supportive of the Bush administration and Goss have retaliated in kind.

Goss, the former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, is determined to downsize the agency's traditionally massive bureaucracy and to get more agents out into the field developing sources among the Iraq insurgents and the Islamist terror groups worldwide who are now the agency's primary target.

The agency has traditionally been exceptionally weak in these areas. Many Langley veterans trace the problems back to the gutting of the agency's HUMINT, or human intelligence, assets under the directorship of Adm. Stansfield Turner during the Carter administration. President Jimmy Carter was a great enthusiast for high-tech espionage or ELINT, electronic intelligence.

During the Reagan administration, then Director of Central Intelligence Bill Casey lamented that his greatest failure was his inability to revive CIA HUMINT operations in any significant way. However, it was under Reagan and Casey that the agency suffered its most catastrophic defeats in the Middle East, the kidnap, interrogation and torture to death of its Beirut station chief William Buckley by Iranian agents and their allies, and the slaughter of the agency's top Middle East experts in a car-bomb attack on the U.S. Embassy in Beirut.

The event was traumatic and had long-lasting consequences. To this day, the agency yet to recover the old confidence and élan that marked its 1950s and '60s operations throughout the Middle East.

Today, the CIA benefits from vastly increased budgets after the lean years that followed the collapse of communism and the end of the Cold War. It is actively recruiting a new generation of permanent staff and rapidly expanding its ground presence in crucial areas around the world, especially the Middle East.

Goss is also determined to cut down the agency's reliance on HUMINT from sister agencies, especially the British Secret intelligence Service, or MI6 and the Israeli Mossad that has marked much of its work since the Reagan-Casey era.

Negroponte has also confirmed and strengthened the CIA's old role as America's main source for HUMINT. Goss told a gathering of CIA employees at Langley on Sept. 22, "The DNI is doing is assigning to the DCIA, the community role as the National HUMINT Manager. And the reason for this is actually quite simple. CIA is the gold standard when it comes to human intelligence collection. CIA will have the authority to set standards for the entire Intelligence Community on things relating to HUMINT. Thus, CIA remains the flagship of the IC (Intelligence Community) for HUMINT."

Goss in his speech also celebrated the agency's recent "substantial, but quiet success in our efforts in the Global War on Terror. We have provided intelligence support that has resulted in the capture or killings of dozens of high-level al-Qaida operatives, and our efforts have unquestionably saved American lives at home and abroad."

He also said the agency had "gotten more unilateral, though still not as much as I'd like. It's getting the right kind of people trained in the right places under the right cover against the right targets with the understanding that there is the right kind of political will and leadership to give them the time and the backing to do the jobs they need to do. This is breaking some molds."

However, Goss said, "We have been having great success recruiting agents on all the target sets. We have continued various initiatives to stock our asset pool for future anticipated needs and challenges."

However, there is another side to the picture, the CIA director is no longer the director of central intelligence. The job of coordinator and director for the entire vast, sprawling and overlapping bureaucracies of the U.S. intelligence community is now held by Negroponte, the first DCI. And agency insiders say he is in many key respects overshadowing Goss by his decisiveness, force of personality and immense experience in government

Veteran agency insiders in both operations and analysis fault Goss for being inexperienced, an amateur, and a know all. They say he ignores institutionalized expertise and operates in a closed circle of politically loyal aides who served him in his time as a congressman on Capitol Hill. They claim that he is show rather than substance.

Many of these criticisms may be unfair, and the natural blowback from long-established bureaucrats whose old ways of doing things are being shaken up. And the lack of any mega-terrorist attack against the U.S. Mainland or U.S. targets around the world outside Iraq and Afghanistan since Sept. 11, 2001, strongly suggests that the CIA and its sister agencies in the U.S. intelligence community have been doing quite a lot of things right since then.

In the secret world of intelligence and counter-intelligence, where nothing is ever as it seems and most of the truth never sees the light of day at all, it is always dangerous to rush to rash conclusions, especially positive ones. The CIA may be in far better or far worse state than anyone dreams, and quite possibly both at the same time. The best metric to judge it remains the lack of major terrorist attacks on the U.S. mainland. Even the agency's fiercest critics must hope that is a tribute to its success.

CIA Makes Progress But Does Goss?
http://www.spacewar.com/news/terrorwar-05zzza.html

Washington (UPI) Sep 28, 2005 - The Central Intelligence Agency under Porter J. Goss is going through arguably the most wrenching, traumatic but potentially productive transformation in its history.

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/n...negroponte_dc_1


US trying to understand Iraq insurgency: Negroponte By David Morgan
Thu Sep 29, 2:54 PM ET



WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. intelligence is still struggling to understand the nature of Iraq's insurgency more than two years after the fall of Saddam Hussein, U.S. intelligence chief John Negroponte said on Thursday.

Negroponte, a former ambassador to Iraq who became director of national intelligence five months ago, said not enough had been done to come to grips with the insurgents who by some estimates have killed more than 5,000 Iraqi civilians and security forces.

Some 1,780 U.S. troops have also died in Iraq since U.S. President George W. Bush declared an end to major combat operations.

"It's a very, very difficult issue," Negroponte told an audience of intelligence officials in Washington.

"There's no analytical issue that is more important, no intelligence issue more important, than understanding the nature of the insurgency in all of its aspects.

"There's a desirability, a thirst really, to get as much fidelity about what is happening within the insurgency, and I think also a feeling that much more could still be done in terms of finding out now what the nature of that insurgency is," he said.

Negroponte was speaking at a Defense Department intelligence conference, where he also addressed the task of moving the 15-agency intelligence community further into an era of post-September 11, reform.

The Iraq insurgency, which U.S. forces have yet to stamp out despite repeated attempts, began months after the fall of Saddam Hussein in April 2003 and spans a disparate collection of groups from Baathists and former regime elements to the Al Qaeda-linked network of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Negroponte's remarks come at a time of growing concern about the spiral of violence in Iraq as voters prepare to cast ballots in a constitutional referendum on October 15.

Zarqawi recently raised the specter of widening civil unrest by declaring all-out war against Iraq's Shi'ite population.

TERRORIST TRAINING GROUND

The CIA has also warned in a classified report that Iraq was becoming a more effective training ground for foreign terrorists than Afghanistan was during the war against Soviet occupation in the 1980s, which gave rise to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda.

"We've got major challenges in Iraq," Negroponte told his audience. "It's (an issue) that occupied me when I was up there as ambassador, and continues to be one of great concern to me in this new position."

Negroponte took up his position in April as a result of congressionally enacted reforms aimed at overhauling the intelligence community after huge lapses over Iraq and the September 11, 2001, attacks.

He said U.S. intelligence also needed to assume greater risks in order to share more sensitive information with allies such Australia, Britain, Canada and New Zealand in order to address threats.

"Sometimes we've been a bit too categorical in withholding information from partners and allies," he explained.

Negroponte said that task of reforming the intelligence community's culture would require a generation but pointed to early successes in the FBI's creation of a national security division and the emergence of new intelligence centers devoted to counterterrorism and proliferation.

"It's a challenging job to say the least," Negroponte said of his own position. "We're up and running and I think we're starting to have an impact."

CIA faces spy shortages as staffers go private By David Morgan
Fri Sep 30,12:46 PM ET



WASHINGTON (Reuters) - As CIA Director Porter Goss tries to rebuild the agency's global operations, he faces a shortage of experienced spies created by a post-September 11 stampede to the private sector, current and former intelligence officials say.

Goss, who a year ago inherited a CIA wracked by criticism of intelligence failures over Iraq and the September 11, 2001, attacks, has come under fire from critics about the publicized departures of several high-level clandestine officers.

Reform advocates see the loss of senior officials as a natural consequence of changes intended to root out an old guard blamed for lapses that prompted Congress to put the CIA under a new director of national intelligence, John Negroponte.

"The CIA and the intelligence community failed this country pretty badly. That's why there's new leadership at the CIA. Change is not easy," said Rep. Peter Hoekstra (news, bio, voting record) of Michigan, the Republican chairman of the House of Representatives intelligence committee.

But current and former officials say Goss does face problems stemming from the agency's reliance on a robust private contracting market for skilled intelligence and security workers that has grown more lucrative since the September 11, 2001, attacks and the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

"Goss realizes he has a major problem in the (clandestine service) because he's having major bailouts among the old guard and also retention problems all the way down the ranks," said a former clandestine officer.

Experienced spies have been surrendering their blue staff badges and leaving the CIA in droves, often to return the next day as better paid, green-badged private contractors, current and former officials say.

But as contractors, they can no longer supervise fresh recruits at a time when the CIA is pursuing a 50 percent increase in spies. Nor can they supplement a pool of experienced operatives from which the agency traditionally draws its top leaders.

"You've got a seismic shift with the contractor issue," said a intelligence official who views the trend as byproduct of low morale among clandestine staff officers.

"It's frankly scary to look at the number of middle managers that are diving out with 10, 15, 20 years in because they're going to make $175,000 or $200,000. It reduces what we call the 'blue badges' -- government people with clearances."

PAY IS BETTER FOR PRIVATE CONTRACTORS

A $200,000-a-year contracting salary compares with annual pay of about $135,000 for experienced CIA staffers at the very top of the scale used to set federal salaries in Washington.

"Often you leave behind the deadwood. The deadwood gets in charge, and then even more people move on," the official said.

CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Millerwise Dyck said Goss is determined to stem the trend toward private contracting by rebuilding the blue-badged workforce as CIA operations expand worldwide.

"He believes we should be primarily a blue-badged workforce, and he intends to build that way," she said.

Officials say the U.S. Congress set the stage for today's shortage of experienced staff by ordering a 17 percent across-the-board reduction in agency personnel in the mid-1990s after the Cold War.

The Directorate of Operations, which runs CIA clandestine activities, has dwindled to fewer than 5,000 staff members from a peak of over 7,000 in the 1970s, intelligence sources say.

To supplement the clandestine ranks, Goss issued an appeal to former senior intelligence officers over the summer to consider returning to help train new recruits.

But already, inexperienced clandestine officers have shown up at the CIA's Baghdad and Kabul stations in numbers that some current and former officials find worrying.

"They're great places to learn. But where are the people to lead?" complained a former senior clandestine officer. "Running around Afghanistan trying to recruit Afghans is a piece of cake compared with trying to recruit an Iranian nuclear scientist."

But Goss' success could depend on how he is perceived by the remaining clandestine staff.

He has been portrayed as a director struggling against opposition from clandestine officers who some say are offended by his reliance on a personal staff known to insiders as the "Gosslings."

"We hear people feel like there's no strategic vision coming out of Goss. He's behind a wall of staff and his staff are disruptive," said a congressional aide briefed by CIA officials.

Added a former clandestine officer with long experience in world hot spots: "The old CIA is finished. What happens now, I don't know."

Prosecutor Tightlipped About Plame Case Washington Post
It has been two years since a grand jury began looking into the Valerie Plame CIA identity case, a criminal investigation that could close up shop shortly or cause more pain for the Bush White House.
Journalists Fear Impact on Protecting Sources New York Times
Reporter testifies in probe of CIA leak Indianapolis Star
Financial Times - Minneapolis Star Tribune (subscription) - Xinhua - CNN - all 1,515 related »

GOP Senators Look to Shift Spy Management From CIA

By Walter Pincus

Republicans on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence want to strip from the CIA its primary role as manager of overseas collection of human intelligence, suggesting that Director of National Intelligence John D. Negroponte take over that responsibility.

The CIA's Directorate of Operations, the agency's clandestine arm, which now coordinates spying overseas by all U.S. intelligence agencies, in the past "did not effectively exercise the authorities of the national HUMINT [human intelligence] manager often focusing instead on its own structure and operations," the committee majority said in its report on the fiscal 2006 intelligence authorization bill released late Thursday.

Citing past failures in averting the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and in overstating Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, the Republican majority said U.S. spying operations "have lacked strong leadership and effective mechanism to resolve conflicts."

The Republicans, led by Sen. Pat Roberts (Kan.), the panel chairman, urged Negroponte "to directly manage and oversee the conduct of HUMINT operations across the intelligence community," saying the need is "imperative" because the Pentagon and the FBI are placing "greater emphasis" on spying.

Democrats on the committee opposed the suggestion, calling it in their section of the report a "misguided solution" and noting that the CIA has recently reached agreements with the FBI and Pentagon to "avoid confusion and ensure smooth coordination" of spying operations at home and abroad. They also noted that the DNI -- a position created by Congress last year to oversee and coordinate the government's intelligence community -- "was not established as a new bureaucracy to assume the responsibility for day-to-day intelligence operations."

The Republican call for change comes as a plan by CIA Director Porter J. Goss to create a CIA coordinator for all human intelligence carried out abroad by U.S. agencies, including the Pentagon and FBI, sits in Negroponte's office awaiting his approval. Though the proposal originated with the President's Commission on Intelligence, there is no timetable for Negroponte to make that decision, an official in Negroponte's office said yesterday.

The majority report accompanies the Senate version of the intelligence authorization bill, which carries about $44 billion for the 15 agencies and Office of the Director of National Intelligence. It will now go to the Senate Armed Services Committee and later to the Senate floor for a vote. The report explains various sections of the bill and includes a broad committee review of the intelligence community, its weaknesses and strengths. The House has already passed its version of the measure. The Democrats' remarks were carried as "additional views" in the report.

The report includes two additional indications of the Pentagon's sharply increasing activities in the intelligence field at home and abroad.

While the CIA is waiting for DNI approval of its plan for coordinating intelligence activities overseas, the Pentagon has created a Defense Humint Management Office to coordinate increased spying activities by the Defense Intelligence Agency's human intelligence section, as well as clandestine operations by the separate services, area commanders and counterintelligence arms. One role for this office, which will be run under the supervision of Undersecretary for Intelligence Stephen A. Cambone, will be to "deconflict" intelligence operations, meaning to ensure that activities by various Pentagon groups do not overlap or interfere with each other, a Pentagon official said.

The committee report recommends that the new office have authority to direct and control all Defense Department collection of information from human sources -- as opposed to technical sources such as electronic intercepts -- in the United States and overseas.

Another proposal reflected increased Pentagon interest in intelligence operations in the United States involving American citizens. The proposal included in the bill would give a "limited" exemption to defense intelligence personnel, allowing them to recruit sources and collect personal information on U.S. citizens clandestinely, without disclosing they worked for the government, when "significant" foreign intelligence is being sought. They would have to coordinate such collection with the FBI.

A similar exemption was sought last year and dropped from the bill because of opposition in the Senate Armed Services Committee, said a senior congressional staff member. This year the committee said, "Current counterterrorism and other foreign intelligence operations highlight the need for greater latitude to assess potential intelligence sources, both overseas and within the United States." The panel noted the limited exemption is similar to that enjoyed by the CIA "when assessing and recruiting sources."

The committee said it "will closely monitor the DoD's [Defense Department's] use of the authorities provided."

In other areas, the panel approved establishment of a DNI inspector general with authority to investigate matters in any of the 15 agencies that make up the intelligence community. That person would be nominated by the president and subject to Senate confirmation.

Another proposal would require that the deputy director of central intelligence be a civilian and not an active-duty military officer, as is now the case. The committee said Vice Adm. Albert M. Calland III could continue to serve until President Bush nominates a successor or he retires.


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Roles Of Rove, Libby In CIA Leak Case Begin To Clarify
Posted on Sunday, October 02 @ 13:00:34 PDT by Intellpuke (75 reads)

As the CIA leak investigation heads toward its expected conclusion this month, it has become increasingly clear that two of the most powerful men in the Bush administration were more involved in the unmasking of operative Valerie Plame than the White House originally indicated.


With New York Times reporter Judith Miller's release from jail Thursday and testimony Friday before a federal grand jury, the role of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, came into clearer focus. Libby, a central figure in the probe since its earliest days and the vice president's main counselor, discussed Plame with at least two reporters but testified that he never mentioned her name or her covert status at the CIA, according to lawyers in the case.



His story is similar to that of Karl Rove, President Bush's top political adviser. Rove, who was not an initial focus of the investigation, testified that he, too, talked with two reporters about Plame but never supplied her name or CIA role.



Their testimony seems to contradict what the White House was saying a few months after Plame's CIA job became public.



In October 2003, White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters that he personally asked Libby and Rove whether they were involved, "so I could come back to you and say they were not involved." Asked if that was a categorical denial of their involvement, he said, "That is correct."





What remains a central mystery in the case is whether special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has accumulated evidence during his two-year investigation that any crime was committed. His investigation has White House aides and congressional Republicans on edge as they await Fitzgerald's announcement of an indictment or the conclusion of the probe with no charges. The grand jury is scheduled to expire Oct. 28, and lawyers in the case expect Fitzgerald to signal his intentions as early as this week.



Fitzgerald is investigating whether anyone illegally disclosed Plame's name or undercover CIA job in retaliation against her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV. In the summer of 2003, Wilson, a former diplomat, accused the White House of using "twisted" intelligence to justify the invasion of Iraq.



He claimed firsthand evidence: At the behest of the CIA, he had flown to Niger in February 2002 to investigate the administration's assertion that Iraq was trying to purchase uranium in the African nation for use in its nuclear weapons program. Wilson returned unconvinced the assertion was true. However, Bush himself made the charge in his 2003 State of the Union address, prompting Wilson to spread word throughout the government and eventually make public his rebuttal.



Many lawyers in the case have been skeptical that Fitzgerald has the evidence to prove a violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which is the complicated crime he first set out to investigate, and which requires showing that government officials knew an operative had covert status and intentionally leaked the operative's identity.



But a new theory about Fitzgerald's aim has emerged in recent weeks from two lawyers who have had extensive conversations with the prosecutor while representing witnesses in the case. They surmise that Fitzgerald is considering whether he can bring charges of a criminal conspiracy perpetrated by a group of senior Bush administration officials. Under this legal tactic, Fitzgerald would attempt to establish that at least two or more officials agreed to take affirmative steps to discredit and retaliate against Wilson and leak sensitive government information about his wife. To prove a criminal conspiracy, the actions need not have been criminal, but conspirators must have had a criminal purpose.



Lawyers involved in the case interviewed for this report agreed to talk only if their names were not used, citing Fitzgerald's request for secrecy.



One source briefed on Miller's account of conversations with Libby said it is doubtful her testimony would on its own lead to charges against any government officials. But, the source said, her account could establish a piece of a web of actions taken by officials that had an underlying criminal purpose.



Conspiracy cases are viewed by criminal prosecutors as simpler to bring than more straightforward criminal charges, but also trickier to sell to juries. "That would arguably be a close call for a prosecutor, but it could be tried," a veteran Washington criminal attorney with longtime experience in national security cases said yesterday.



Other lawyers in the case surmise Fitzgerald does not have evidence of any crime at all and put Miller in jail simply to get her testimony and finalize the investigation. "Even assuming ... that somebody decided to answer back a critic, that is politics, not criminal behavior," said one lawyer in the case. This lawyer said the most benign outcome would be Fitzgerald announcing that he completed a thorough investigation, concluded no crime was committed and would not issue a report.



The campaign to discredit Wilson's accusations came at a critical moment in the Bush presidency. It occurred a few months after the United States invaded Iraq and at a time when Bush, Cheney and the entire administration were under extraordinary pressure to back up their prewar allegations that Iraq had large stockpiles of chemical weapons and was working on a nuclear weapons program.



The Niger claim was central to the White House's rationale for war, and Wilson was on a one-man crusade to disprove it. Early on, his actions caught the eye of the vice president's office, which was often the emotional and intellectual force pushing the United States to war based on fears of potential weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Cheney and Libby were intimately involved in building the case for the war, which included warnings that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was actively pursuing nuclear weapons.



Cheney's staff was looking into Wilson as early as May 2003, nearly two months before columnist Robert D. Novak identified Wilson's wife as a CIA operative, according to administration sources familiar with the effort. What stirred the interest of the vice president's office was a May 6 New York Times column by Nicholas D. Kristof in which the mission to Niger was described without using Wilson's name. Kristof's column said Cheney had authorized the trip.



According to former senior CIA officials, the vice president's office pressed the CIA to find out how the trip was arranged, because Cheney did not know that a query he made much earlier to a CIA briefer about a report alleging Iraq was seeking Niger uranium had triggered Wilson's trip. "They were very uptight about the vice president being tagged that way," a former senior CIA official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation. "They asked questions that set [off] a chain of inquiries."



By early June, several weeks before Libby is said to have known Plame's name, the State Department had prepared a memo on the Niger case that contained information on Plame in a section marked "(S)" for secret. Around that time, Libby knew about the trip's origins, though in an interview with The Washington Post at the time, he did not mention any role played by Wilson's wife.



By July 12, however, both Rove and Libby and perhaps other senior White House officials knew about Wilson's wife's position at the CIA and, according to lawyers familiar with testimony in the probe, used that information with reporters to undermine the significance of Wilson's trip.

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles...003/3natsec.htm


National Security Watch: Republicans seek shift in control of spies
Posted 10/3/05
By Kevin Whitelaw

The 2006 authorization bill for the intelligence community, passed unanimously by the Senate Intelligence Committee last week, reveals a behind-the-scenes debate that has been raging in the committee for many months about the performance of the CIA's directorate of operations, which is the main source of human intelligence (HUMINT), or traditional spying activities.

Specifically, several Republicans on the panel, who have been unhappy with the DO's performance in recent years, inserted language into the bill that says the director of national intelligence should be responsible for ensuring that analysts in all intelligence agencies have access to the appropriate human intelligence reports.

Explaining this change in the bill's report, the Republican majority says that the DO does not "effectively exercise the authorities of the National HUMINT manager, often focusing on its own structure and operations instead of coordinating a strong, Intelligence Community-wide HUMINT effort." The report goes on to suggest that "the DNI, as 'national HUMINT manager' . . . provides a level playing field for all elements engaged in HUMINT operations." But other sources note that the CIA remains the coordinator of human intelligence and indeed is supposed to be the primary HUMINT agency.

"I think this reflects a bias against the CIA," says one committee source. In a dissent in the report on the bill, the Democrats on the panel are critical.

"The CIA must remain in charge," they write. "The DNI was not established as a new bureaucracy to assume the responsibility for day-to-day intelligence operations." They add that the DNI already has authority to ensure information sharing for all types of intelligence.

--------------------
CIA Won't Seek Punishment for Failures Before Sept. 11
--------------------

By Greg Miller
Times Staff Writer

October 5 2005, 6:22 PM PDT

WASHINGTON -- CIA Director Porter J. Goss said Wednesday that he would not consider punishing agency officials for failures leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks, rejecting pressure from lawmakers, victims' families and the CIA inspector general to hold those responsible for well-documented breakdowns accountable.

The complete article can be viewed at:
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CIA Rejects Discipline For 9/11 Failures

By Dafna Linzer and Walter Pincus

The CIA will not seek to hold any current or former agency officials, including ex-director George J. Tenet, responsible for failures leading up to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, CIA Director Porter J. Goss said yesterday, despite a recommendation by the agency's inspector general that he convene an "accountability board" to judge their performance.

Goss's decision, coming four years after hijackers commandeered four jets and killed nearly 3,000 people, appeared to end the possibility that a high-level official will be held responsible for what several investigations found to be significant failures throughout the government. The inspectors general of the departments of State, Justice and Defense completed their own investigations without publicized disciplinary actions taken against anyone.

The CIA's report, which severely criticized actions of senior officers, will remain classified, Goss said in his announcement, which was welcomed by some former officials mentioned in the document but assailed by families of victims of the attacks.

Goss said in his statement that the voluminous report by CIA Inspector General John L. Helgerson "unveiled no mysteries," and that making it public would only bring harm to the agency when it is trying to rebuild. Goss said the report in no way suggests "that any one person or group of people could have prevented 9/11."

"Of the officers named in this report," he said, "about half have retired from the Agency, and those who are still with us are amongst the finest we have."

Goss had supported an internal CIA review in December 2002, while he was chairman of the House intelligence committee. The CIA report, which was mostly completed in February, is the last known government inquiry on the counterterrorism failures ahead of the attacks and has been the most secretive.

It also had the potential to pit Goss against his own agency. Convening a review board could have embarrassed his predecessors and renewed questions over President Bush's decision to award Tenet the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

"I think it is utterly reprehensible for Director Goss to be hinting towards not holding anyone accountable, particularly since he was in an oversight capacity as house chairman and is now in a position to atone for his own failures," said Kristin Breitweiser, whose husband, Ron, was killed at the World Trade Center. "He is either avoiding embarrassment or trying to hide something."

More than a dozen intelligence officials, including Tenet; his former director of operations, James L. Pavitt; and J. Cofer Black, former head of the counterterrorism center, are faulted in the CIA report, said officials who have read the classified findings. Tenet vigorously disputed the findings, arguing that he and his officers had done more than anyone else in the intelligence community to warn about al Qaeda.

The report also names some current undercover operatives working in the counterterrorism center. Officials had said exposing them to public criticism would harm their work and the agency during a time of war.

Tenet had no comment yesterday. Pavitt said he was relieved. "He did what was right for the institution and its people, and for their work," Pavitt said of Goss.

Goss's former congressional colleagues, who have urged that the report be declassified, reacted coolly to his decision to forgo accountability reviews. They said Goss and John D. Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, will be summoned to appear before the Senate intelligence committee to answer questions this month.

"I am concerned to learn of the Director's decision to forego this step in the process," Sen. Pat Roberts, (R-Kan.) said in a statement. "However, I spoke with Director Goss and Negroponte earlier today and they both strongly believe that this is the correct course of action."

The CIA's internal report was done in response to a recommendation of the House-Senate committee that looked into the attacks. The committee called on the CIA's inspector general to conduct an investigation "to determine whether and to what extent personnel at all levels should be held accountable for any omission, commission or failure to meet professional standards" to prevent or disrupt the attacks.

Based on those findings, the CIA director was to "take appropriate disciplinary and other action," with the result to be passed on to the president and to the House and Senate intelligence committees.

But Goss declined. He noted that before Sept. 11, when he was chairman of the House intelligence panel, the CIA suffered from cutbacks and reduced budgets. "Stars" were singled out and asked "to take on some tough assignments," he said. "Unfortunately, time and resources were not on their side, despite their best efforts to meet unprecedented challenges."

"Risk is a critical part of the intelligence business. Singling out these individuals would send the wrong message to our junior officers about taking risks -- whether it be an operation in the field or being assigned to a hot topic at headquarters," he said.

Citing classified information about intelligence sources and methods, Goss said the report should not be made public.

Rep. Jane Harman (Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the House intelligence panel, said she will work to get some elements declassified and said Goss has a responsibility to "persuade the public that he has dealt fairly with his agency's past mistakes."


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OPEN SOURCES GET CLOSED AT CIA

The CIA this month will establish a new unit devoted to analysis of
"open source" intelligence, referring to unclassified information
that is openly and legally collected, Time magazine reported on
August 15.

But at the CIA, even open source material is often treated as
secret.

Last week, the CIA denied a request for a copy of a compilation of
published statements made by Osama bin Laden between 1994 and 2004
on grounds that release of the material would compromise
"intelligence sources and methods" (FOIA exemption b(3)) and that
the material was obtained on a privileged basis (exemption b(4)).
See:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/news/2005/09/cia092705.pdf

But as it happens, the same material will be published next month
under the title "Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin
Laden" edited by Bruce Lawrence and published by Verso
(www.versobooks.com).

"Over the last ten years, bin Laden has issued a series of carefully
tailored public statements, from interviews with Western and Arabic
journalists to faxes and video recordings. These texts supply
evidence crucial to an understanding of the bizarre mix of Quranic
scholarship, CIA training, punctual interventions in Gulf politics
and messianic anti-imperialism that has formed the programmatic
core of Al Qaeda," according to the publisher's announcement.

"In bringing together the various statements issued under bin
Laden's name since 1994, this volume forms part of a growing
discourse that seeks to demythologize the terrorist network. Newly
translated from the Arabic, annotated with a critical introduction
by Islamic scholar Bruce Lawrence, this collection places the
statements in their religious, historical and political context."

Meanwhile, "In a move mirroring the recruitment process at the
Central Intelligence Agency," an Al Qaeda website is openly
soliciting applicants who can serve as researchers and linguists,
according to a report in the London-based Al Sharq al Awsat. See
"Al Qaeda Website Openly Hiring New Recruits" by Mohammed Al
Shafey, October 3:

http://www.asharqalawsat.com/english/news....ction=1&id=1987

Open Source Solutions (www.oss.net), a proponent of open source
intelligence, reported that Dr. James Billington, the Librarian of
Congress, had rejected an invitation from the Director of National
Intelligence to serve as the first Director of the new Open Source
Agency.

Request for Domestic Covert Role Is Defended

By Walter Pincus

As part of the expanding counterterrorism role being taken on by the Pentagon, Defense Intelligence Agency covert operatives need to be able to approach potential sources in the United States without identifying themselves as government agents, George Peirce, the DIA's general counsel, said yesterday.

"This is not about spying on Americans," Peirce said in an interview in which he defended legislative language approved last week by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The provision would grant limited authority for DIA agents to clandestinely collect information about U.S. citizens or emigres in this country to help determine whether they could be recruited as sources of intelligence information.

"We are not asking for the moon," Peirce said. "We only want to assess their suitability as a source, person to person" and at the same time "protect the ID and safety of our officers." The CIA and the FBI already have such authority, he added, and the DIA needs it "to develop critical leads" because "there is more than enough work for all of us to do."

The legislative proposal has been controversial on Capitol Hill and has drawn criticism from groups concerned with privacy and civil liberties. The House's intelligence authorization bill, which passed in June, does not include the provision, which is similar to a proposal that was eliminated last year from the legislation.

The Senate intelligence panel approved the new authority for the DIA last week and forwarded it to the Senate Armed Services Committee, which reviews sections related to the Defense Department. One senior Armed Services Committee staff member said yesterday that the DIA provision "will get close review here."

"I'm pretty alarmed" by the proposal, said Timothy Edgar, the American Civil Liberties Union's national security policy counsel, saying it could conceivably be used by Pentagon intelligence officers "as a loophole to attend political or other meetings as part of an initial assessing contact."

Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Securities Studies, said the language in the Senate intelligence committee bill is part of a Pentagon effort to loosen already weak legal restrictions that "are meant to ensure that Americans' privacy is not threatened by Pentagon spying." Martin said she is concerned that the language was approved without hearings that could explore "the actual practices and necessity and justification for the program."

In the interview, Peirce said the new authority "would not be used very often and only on an exceptional basis." He pointed out there are requirements in the Senate committee language that the intelligence sought be "significant" and that it "cannot be reasonably obtained by overt means." It also dictates that collecting the information may not be undertaken "for the purpose of acquiring information concerning the domestic activities of any U.S. person."

Noting that there are large emigre and expatriate populations in the United States, Peirce described as a hypothetical case a situation in which the DIA learns that a new U.S. citizen is about to be visited by close relatives who are high-ranking officers in a foreign military service. To assess whether the new citizen would serve as a source of information obtained from the relatives, or even to attempt to recruit him, the DIA might feel that an open approach, in which an intelligence officer identifies himself as such, would not work. "We want to protect the identity and assess his willingness to help," he said.

The DIA and other Pentagon agencies are increasing their human intelligence activities in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and threats to U.S. military bases and facilities at home and abroad. Peirce said one reason the new authority is needed is that there is "evidence the enemy is inside the U.S. perimeter."


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Agency Seeks Freer Hand to Recruit Spies in U.S.

By DOUGLAS JEHL
Published: October 8, 2005
WASHINGTON, Oct. 7 - The Defense Intelligence Agency is seeking an exemption from American law to give officers greater latitude in interviewing potential intelligence sources inside the United States, the agency's top lawyers said Friday.

The provision, already approved by the Senate, would allow defense intelligence officers to interview potential intelligence sources inside the United States without first identifying themselves as American government officials.

The lawyers said the agency's efforts to recruit spies inside the country, an increasing part of the agency's mission, had been hamstrung by provisions of the Privacy Act, which require that government employees notify Americans when they are collecting information from them.

In a telephone interview, the lawyers said the change would merely give the Defense Intelligence Agency an authority already granted to the Central Intelligence Agency and law enforcement agencies for their intelligence-collection missions. They said the D.I.A. had no intention of spying on Americans, but needed the new authority to help identify and recruit sources knowledgeable about terrorist groups, weapons proliferation or other activities of interest to American military commanders.

The House has not yet approved any measure that would provide the Defense Intelligence Agency with the exemption, but the agency lawyers said they hoped a House-Senate conference committee would agree to include the exemption in a final version of the Intelligence Authorization Act already passed by the Senate.

"Our collectors have come in, and said this just isn't working," Jim Schmidli, the agency's deputy general counsel for operations, said of the current rules, which he said amounted to a "cold shower" for a potential source. Under the change being sought by the agency, the D.I.A. officer would not need to disclose his affiliation until he actually sought to recruit a potential source.

A Democratic Congressional official said the proposal had won backing from Democrats on the Senate intelligence committee. But the official said there was some concern among Democrats that civil liberties groups might see the proposal as a way to allow defense intelligence officers to play an overly broad role in intelligence-gathering within the United States. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity, saying that the role played by the Defense Intelligence Agency within the United States involved classified issues.

In the interview, the general counsel for the agency, George A. B. Peirce, said it needed to overcome "a serious misunderstanding" that defense intelligence officers intended to spy on Americans. Mr. Peirce and Mr. Schmidli said that the agency did not conduct wiretaps or surveillance of Americans and that its officers would be allowed to disguise their affiliation only with the agency director's written permission. "We're not in the business of spying on American citizens," Mr. Peirce said.

http://news.findlaw.com/ap/o/51/10-07-2005...0da2734728.html


Ex-CIA chief urges new reorganization of intelligence system
By RICHARD PYLE Associated Press Writer

(AP) - NEW YORK-The recently revamped U.S. intelligence structure needs a further and more radical overhaul that would combine all intelligence-gathering under one roof, separate from the analytical function, a former chief of intelligence said.

The present system of 15 separate agencies is "dysfunctional," in that each agency tends to value its own intelligence findings ahead of all others, retired Adm. Stansfield Turner, who headed the CIA during the Carter administration, said in a speech Thursday to a business group.



Turner told his audience that constant "tweaking" of the spy agencies' functions and interplay by successive administrations "has not left us today with a coherent intelligence structure," nor is there any assurance, even now, that fresh intelligence on a specific terrorist threat or individual "would be shared by all those intelligence agencies."

Turner also said the U.S. military exercises "excessive control" over the collection of intelligence in a situation where terrorism has replaced war as the nation's primary security concern.

During the Cold War, he said, "it was critical to keep the military's intelligence very, very good, but that was when the primary threat to our country was war," he said. "Today, as we all know, the primary threat is terrorism. That is not a primary concern for the military."

The recent creation of the new post of national director of intelligence, separate from chief of the CIA, to oversee the entire field of 15 agencies was "a good move," Turner said, "but also a bad move."

That's because, he said, "largely due to resistance by the military, the new law did not give the new director any meaningful authority. ... His role is uncertain."

Turner has outlined his concepts in a new book, "Burn Before Reading," that traces the history of American presidents and their intelligence chiefs from Franklin Roosevelt to George W. Bush.

He said Thursday that he had not discussed his ideas on reorganization with members of Congress or with John Negroponte, the veteran diplomat chosen by President George W. Bush as the first national director of intelligence.

2005-10-07T03:45:24Z

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/a..._pe/goss__cia_1

Porter Goss Makes Changes, Waves at CIA By KATHERINE SHRADER, Associated Press Writer
Sat Oct 8, 3:22 AM ET



WASHINGTON - It's no secret that the CIA's spooks are in turmoil. To some, the intelligence agency's future looks bleak under the leadership of Director Porter Goss. Fights between top CIA managers and Goss' inner circle are spilling into public view. Veterans are retiring early. Report after report is critical of the CIA's performance.

In a town hall-style meeting late last month, Goss endured some uncomfortable moments when agency employees criticized his leadership, demanding more details about where Goss intends to take the CIA.

One worker politely asked for more detail after Goss' opening remarks, which she deemed rather "vanilla." Goss returned to that word in responses to later questions: "Is that too vanilla for you?" he asked.

Goss, a former Republican congressman from Florida who replaced George Tenet in September 2004, is making waves as he fulfills promises to the White House and Congress that he would make the CIA respond better to terrorism and other modern threats.

Supporters say it is exactly what is needed at an agency wanting to looking ahead, not back. Detractors hope he'll retire.

Goss curried some favor among the rank and file when he announced Wednesday that he would not form review boards to consider punishing individuals for failures before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

President Bush has directed the CIA to hire 50 percent more analysts and officers over the next several years. That could mean the addition of several thousand people.

At the staff meeting, Goss said the CIA will bring in recruits who have traveled abroad and "more recent arrivals to the United States." Historically, such backgrounds would make it difficult to get a CIA job because of security risks and other concerns.

Goss also plans to reduce the bureaucracy at headquarters, send more people into the field for traditional spying, rely less on foreign allies for intelligence, take more risks and encourage employees to improve their foreign language skills.

"As we start out today in the intelligence world ... we start out a little behind the curve," Goss said Thursday at the opening of the University of Maryland's language institute. "Not enough people speak the languages we need."

Jim Pavitt, who headed the CIA's clandestine service from 1999 to 2004, said the agency was already making many of the changes Goss is pushing, including boosting the number of officers overseas. He said Goss, as the former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, was told about the CIA's strategy.

"We've been working on this since 1997," said Pavitt, now with the Scowcroft Group, an international business consulting firm. "Stop saying that this is something new."

CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Millerwise Dyck agreed that in some cases Goss is building on critical initiatives, but she said there's a ways to go.

Still, some in Congress say the plan they were given is vague.

"I want to know the specifics," said California Rep. Jane Harman (news, bio, voting record), the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. She also is concerned about low morale at the CIA, especially among officers in the field.

Goss' moves are known to be causing heartburn among CIA personnel, but defenders said that is to be expected with any major organizational changes.

"I am not surprised at all by a public food fight," House Intelligence Chairman Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., said in an interview. "In some ways, I take that as Porter doing his job."

The commotion began almost as soon as Goss took over, bringing along committee aides.

Within weeks, CIA managers with decades of intelligence experience left after fighting with Goss' advisers. Only last month, the No. 2 official in the clandestine service, Robert Richer, quit. Details of the disputes spilled into the news.

Goss' allies said it was time for new blood — and a new director — after seven years with Tenet in change. Some Democrats, however, wondered aloud whether Goss was too political for the job.

He arrived in time for change. Last fall, congressional efforts begun after Sept. 11 to reorganize the 15 U.S. intelligence agencies gained momentum.

By December, lawmakers had created a national intelligence director who would oversee all those agencies. Until then, the CIA director had that job.

Goss acknowledged that his responsibilities for running the CIA and other agencies were massive. "I'm a little amazed at the workload," he said in March.

In a brief interview this summer, Goss said he spends considerable time on management issues and the fight against terrorism.

That includes "staying up on what is going on around the world — the eyes and ears of it — and what we do about it," Goss said. "The nature of the threat is changing dramatically. When you get right down to it, there are still unknowns."

Under Goss, the clandestine service has scored victories. It provided Pakistan with information that led to the capture of al-Qaida's No. 3 leader, Abu Farraj al-Libbi, in May. Shortly thereafter, his associate Haitham al-Yemeni was killed by a missile fired from a CIA drone aircraft.

But Goss wants to lower the agency's profile. He learned early on that officials generally make news when they speak publicly. Among other changes, he has ordered new rules governing how agency employees can publish books and articles, centralizing the decisions under one office.

Richard Kerr, a former CIA deputy director who led a review of the Iraq intelligence for Tenet, said he does not have the impression that Goss has inspired the organization's full confidence.

"It's a leadership issue. How do people perceive you?" Kerr said. "I am concerned about people with limited experience running large and complex organizations."

___

CIA Leak: Karl Rove and the Case of the Missing E-mail Newsweek
The White House's handling of a potentially crucial e-mail sent by senior aide Karl Rove two years ago set off a chain of events that has led special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald to summon Rove for a fourth grand jury appearance this week. His return has created heightened concern among White House officials and their allies that Fitzgerald may be preparing to bring indictments when a federal grand jury that has been investigating the leak of a CIA agent's identity expires at the end of October. Robert Luskin, Rove's lawyer, tells NEWSWEEK that, in his last conversations with Fitzgerald, the prosecutor assured Luskin "he has not made any decisions." But lawyers close to the case, who asked not to be identified because it's ongoing, say Fitzgerald appears to be focusing in part on discrepancies in testimony between Rove and Time reporter Matt Cooper about their conversation of July 11, 2003. In Cooper's account, Rove told him the wife of White House critic Joseph Wilson worked at the "agency" on WMD issues and was responsible for sending Wilson on a trip to Niger to check out claims that Iraq was trying to buy uranium. But Rove did not disclose this conversation to the FBI when he was first interviewed by agents in the fall of 2003—nor did he mention it during his first grand jury appearance, says one of the lawyers familiar with Rove's account. (He did not tell President George W. Bush about it either, assuring him that fall only that he was not part of any "scheme" to discredit Wilson by outing his wife, the lawyer says.) But after he testified, Luskin discovered an e-mail Rove had sent that same day—July 11—alerting deputy national-security adviser Stephen Hadley that he had just talked to Cooper, the lawyer says. In the e-mail, Rove said Cooper pushed him on whether the president was being hurt by the Niger controversy. "I didn't take the bait," Rove wrote Hadley, adding that he warned Cooper not to get "far out in front on this." After reviewing the e-mail, Rove then returned to the grand jury last year and reported the Cooper conversation. He testified that the talk was initially about "welfare reform"—a topic mentioned in the e-mail—and that Cooper then changed the subject. Cooper has written that he doesn't recall a discussion of welfare reform. Why didn't the Rove e-mail surface earlier? The lawyer says it's because an electronic search conducted by the White House missed it because the right "search words" weren't used. (The White House and Fitzgerald both declined to comment.) But the e-mail isn't the only belatedly discovered document in the case. Fitzgerald has also summoned New York Times reporter Judith Miller back for questioning this week: a notebook was discovered in the paper's Washington bureau, reflecting a late June 2003 conversation with Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis (Scooter) Libby, about Wilson and his trip to Africa, says one of the lawyers. The notebook may also be significant because Wilson's identity was not yet public. A lawyer for the Times declined to comment.
NY Times reporter turns over notes from 2003 Seattle Times
White House aide denies involvement in CIA leak Taipei Times
Editor & Publisher - Concord Monitor - Daily Breeze - CNN International - all 1,121 related »

http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?sectio...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.

More importantly, however, Goss is treading lightly around Tenet. According to John B. Roberts II, a former aide to President Reagan who wrote an article last month for The Washington Times headlined “Potential Bush-CIA crisis,” after the completion of the inspector general’s report, Tenet wrote a detailed, 20-page rebuttal. Should Goss release the report, and especially if he were to reprimand Tenet and his top aides -- including James Pavitt, former chief of the Directorate of Operations -- it is likely that Tenet would fire back. And some of that fire could burn the White House.

When Tenet resigned from the CIA in June 2004, it was clear to all observers that the loyalist was taking one for the (Bush) team. By quitting and admitting some responsibility for the CIA’s misguided conclusions about Iraq’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, Tenet allowed the White House to blame the CIA for the fiasco. (It was, of course, heavy pressure from the White House, from Vice President Dick Cheney, and from the Pentagon that swayed the CIA in its Iraqi weapons-of-mass-destruction conclusions -- pressure that Tenet caved in to.) To reward Tenet for his obsequiousness, Bush pinned a Presidential Medal of Freedom on his chest.

But if Goss were to slap Tenet with a reprimand, the Bush-Tenet gentleman’s agreement of 2004 might unravel. According to Roberts, “Mr. Tenet’s rebuttal to the report is detailed and explicit. In defending his integrity as CIA director, Tenet treads perilously close to affirming the account of Richard Clarke, the former [National Security Council] terrorism official whose public disclosure of the Bush administration’s delay [early in 2001] in adopting a strategy against al-Qaeda stirred controversy last summer.” The last thing Bush wants now, as Iraq unravels, is for Tenet to renege on his Medal of Freedom deal and to start lobbing hand grenades at Bush’s bungled war on terrorism. And the White House, which remembers the impact of Clarke’s stinging allegations, wants that ugly can of worms to remain shut tight.

So Goss, ever the Bush hatchet man, has opted to let Tenet off the hook -- at least so far. There’s no telling if and when all or part of the report might see the light of day. If that happens, Tenet’s rebuttal will make interesting reading.

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, has just been published by Henry Holt/Metropolitan (New York, 2005).

Copyright © 2005 by The American Prospect, Inc. Preferred Citation: Robert Dreyfuss, "Tenet's Revenge", The American Prospect Online, Oct 7, 2005. This article may not be resold, reprinted, or redistributed for compensation of any kind without prior written permission from the author. Direct questions about permissions to permissions@prospect.org.

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20051012/...ntelligence.php

Director Of Censored Intelligence
John Prados
October 12, 2005


John Prados is a senior fellow of the National Security Archive in Washington, DC, and author of Hoodwinked: The Documents that Reveal How Bush Sold Us a War (The New Press).

Two recent developments at the CIA make it clear that America’s premier intelligence-gathering agency is a mess. The first, CIA director Porter Goss' refusal to implement the disciplinary recommendations contained in the agency's inspector general 9/11 performance review, will no doubt attract far more attention.

But the second development is equally significant. That is the release, with no public fanfare at all, of a version of the CIA's internal inquiry into prewar Iraq intelligence. Conducted by a panel under former CIA Deputy Director Richard Kerr, the Iraq inquiry was supposed to get to the bottom of the hype on the now-notorious claims that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. Both of these events says a great deal about political power, self-censorship and the Bush administration's determined effort to evade accountability for either the 9/11 attacks or its premeditated war against Iraq.

Inspector Generally Ignored

Way back in December 2002, the joint congressional committee investigating 9/11 requested that the CIA's inspector general make his own review and look into the specific roles of individuals, thus going beyond the congressional inquiry's institutional focus. The 9/11 Commission adopted the same focus and made the same request. The House and Senate intelligence committees also petitioned for the report to be released. The CIA inspector general, John L. Helgerson, subsequently spent 17 months exploring every nook and cranny of the agency’s performance prior to 9/11, completing the report in June 2004. The study fell into the pile in the interregnum between the resignation of George J. Tenet and appointment of Porter J. Goss as agency director in late September.

How did Goss handle the Helgerson report? As chairman of the House intelligence committee, Porter Goss had been among those requesting the study. As CIA director, however, Goss displayed much less interest in it, treating at it as a draft document, refusing to forward the report to the committees. All this after Goss swore under oath his commitment to accountability, openness to congressional oversight, and assertion that "I will be a working stiff taking directions." The House committee, at least, sent the CIA a letter demanding the document be provided to Congress. At the time, Goss was criticized for an action that kept a negative report from the public just before the 2004 election, but he argued the individuals named in the report had not had the opportunity to respond to it, and Goss held it back from the committee.

After nearly a year of stalling, Goss finally released the report to Congress last month. He refuses to release the report to the public. Although Goss insists the report unveiled no mysteries, the indications are otherwise.

The Helgerson report is variously said to implicate a dozen CIA officers or up to 20. All agree those named include agency counterterrorism chief J. Cofer Black, Deputy Director for Operations James L. Pavitt, and top boss George Tenet. All those mentioned responded to the criticisms in the report—Tenet's denunciation is said to extend to 20 pages—and changes were made in the IG report as a consequence. By then, it was August 2005. Goss gave the report to Congress but waited another six weeks—and spurned appeals from both congressional intelligence committees—to reject making it public, or indeed taking any action against the individuals named by the inspector general. In a statement on October 5, Director Goss declared that "after great consideration" he would take no personnel actions. One reason for this lack of accountability is that Goss cannot proceed further without convening personnel review boards that would be required to adjudicate the IG claims and the individuals’ responses. Clearly, this administration wants no further formal investigations.

The spin game around the Helgerson report would be amusing were it not infuriating. Goss made out the study as just another routine post-mortem. "This report unveiled no mysteries," Goss declared, and the 20 systemic problems it identified were already being addressed "through a series of reforms identified by our own workforce." That was not surprising since the "systemic" problems were largely the same ones identified already in the investigations by the joint congressional panel and the 9/11 Commission.

But Inspector General Helgerson had specifically been tasked to pursue individual accountability. By rejecting action there, Porter Goss is effectively deep-sixing the entire report, which undoubtedly contains new data on the Bush administration's pre-9/11 counterterrorism policy.

How does Goss get away with it? Presumably, Director Goss tossed the Helgerson report into the circular file out of a desire to protect CIA agents. An advocate of risk-taking by the clandestine services, at the beginning of his watch Goss promised to support spooks caught out on a limb when the going gets rough. Clearly this is what he thinks he is doing. But he leaves the public with the distinct impression the CIA is covering up for the Bush administration. Nor is the public offered any evidence to support the CIA's claims that it went to extraordinary lengths to neutralize Al Qaeda before 9/11. Instead, the denial of this report to the public gives the impression that the CIA has the same approach to accountability as the military with its interrogations at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.

A Crack In Cheney's Firewall

The other example of CIA secrecy and obfuscation is the new study on prewar intelligence about Iraq. Although the study appears at first glance to shield the Bush administration from claims it manipulated intelligence to fit its policy on Iraq, it doesn’t fully succeed. Released in the CIA journal Studies In Intelligence , the review was completed in July 2004 under the direction of former CIA deputy director Richard J. Kerr. It purports to offer an overall assessment of U.S. intelligence performance. There is much in here on data collection, how requirements are set for data collection, and the techniques for drawing conclusions, but that’s not what should interest most Americans. The Kerr report's commentary on the politicization of intelligence, a criticism it rejects, is the key content. Kerr notes that the case is less one of a pre-fabricated policy seeking out only useful intelligence judgments than it is of "policy deliberations deferring to the [Intelligence] Community in an area where classified information and technical analysis were seen as giving [intelligence] unique expertise."

This might have been the case if the CIA and other agencies had developed their judgments unfettered by Bush administration officials, but the report itself notes the wide variety of contacts and the constant push for data-demands that were "numerous and intense." The Kerr report tries to finesse the issue by noting that in major crises "serious pressure from policymakers almost always accompanies serious issues." That is certainly true but it does not excuse the CIA from caving to the pressure, or Richard Cheney, Scooter Libby, Condi Rice, Robert Joseph, Donald Rumsfeld, Douglas Feith and others from making the kinds of demands they did in the way they made them. The Kerr report argues that pressures were more "nuanced" because intelligence judgments on Iraqi WMD were in accord with policy preferences. But, significantly, the Kerr panel could not bring itself to fully exonerate Bush officials despite the sensitivity it knew attached to this issue. Rather, the report ultimately punted: "Whether or not this climate contributed to the problem of . . . analytic performance . . . remains an open question."

Still, the Kerr report for the first time breaks the wall of denial: admitting the effects of pressure are an open question concedes that pressures existed. Boltonization is real. That is a most important development. Nevertheless, self-censorship remains at work here—the Kerr group could not bring itself to express a clear conclusion. That too says something about readiness to speak truth to power, and the level of candor that watchdogs and the American public should expect from their intelligence community.

http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7000494896


CIA Report Criticizes Bush Over Iraq War

October 12, 2005 3:01 p.m. EST


Andrea Moore - All Headline News Staff Reporter

Washington, DC - (AHN) According to USA Today, a report published and released by the CIA strongly criticizes the Bush administration for not listening to pre-war intelligence that predicted the factional rivalries now threatening to split Iraq.

The report says the administration was more concerned with making the case for war, particularly with the claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, than intelligence on cultural and political issuses and planning for the aftermath.

In what the report calls, "an ironic twist," it says the analysis on weapons of mass destruction was wrong, but on cultural and political issues the analysis was correct.

Former CIA director George Tenet commissioned the report, which was completed as Tenet ended his tenure at the agency. It was written by a team of four former CIA analysts who had access to highly classified intelligence data.

"CIA Report Slams Bush Administration For Ignoring Iraq War Intelligence."

http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1511357/2...?headlines=true

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/20...aq-report_x.htm

CIA review faults prewar plans
By John Diamond, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — A newly released report published by the CIA rebukes the Bush administration for not paying enough attention to prewar intelligence that predicted the factional rivalries now threatening to split Iraq.
Policymakers worried more about making the case for the war, particularly the claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, than planning for the aftermath, the report says. The report was written by a team of four former CIA analysts led by former deputy CIA director Richard Kerr.

"In an ironic twist, the policy community was receptive to technical intelligence (the weapons program), where the analysis was wrong, but apparently paid little attention to intelligence on cultural and political issues (post-Saddam Iraq), where the analysis was right," they write.

White House spokesman Fred Jones said Tuesday that the administration considered many scenarios involving postwar instability in Iraq. The report's assertion "has been vehemently disputed," he said.

Then-CIA director George Tenet commissioned the report after the invasion of Iraq. The authors had access to highly classified intelligence data and produced three reports concerning Iraq intelligence.

Only the third has been released in declassified form. It is published in the current issue of Studies in Intelligence, a CIA quarterly written primarily for intelligence professionals. The report was finished in July 2004 just as Tenet was ending his tenure as CIA director.

The report determined that beyond the errors in assessing Iraqi weaponry, "intelligence produced prior to the war on a wide range of other issues accurately addressed such topics as how the war would develop and how Iraqi forces would or would not fight."

The intelligence "also provided perceptive analysis on Iraq's links to al-Qaeda; calculated the impact of the war on oil markets; and accurately forecast the reactions of ethnic and tribal factions in Iraq."

The postwar struggle pitting Sunni Arabs against Shiite and Kurdish factions has led some analysts, including Saud al-Faisal, foreign minister of neighboring Saudi Arabia, to conclude Iraq is at risk of splitting into three pieces.

Kerr's report agrees with other government reviews in concluding that prewar intelligence on Iraqi weapons was faulty. Costly U.S. spy satellites were of little help, providing "accurate information on relatively few critical issues."

Intelligence analysts, the report says, failed to question their assumptions that Iraq had maintained chemical and biological weapons and had reactivated nuclear weapons development. Doubts about the intelligence received little attention, "hastening the conversion of heavily qualified judgments into accepted fact."