http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/view.php?Stor...27-083458-2602r

CIA warns ex-agents away from media
WASHINGTON, April 27 (UPI) -- The Central Intelligence Agency is clamping down on current and former staff with warnings against speaking to the media without clearance.

One former official told Britain's Financial Times the agency had warned several retired employees who have consulting contracts with the agency that they could even lose their pensions by talking to reporters without permission.

However, Jennifer Millerwise Dyke, spokeswoman for CIA director Porter Goss, called the allegation "rubbish," saying under current law, "termination of a contract does not affect pensions."

Larry Johnson, a former CIA official who blogs at TPMCafe.com, said he recently received a "threatening" letter reminding him about his confidentiality agreements.

"They are trying to intimidate the press and trying to intimidate employees," said Johnson. "Anybody who has been critical of the Bush administration is getting letters."

Meanwhile, Goss has increased the number of "single issue" lie detector tests aimed at discovering employees who are talking to the media, the newspaper said.



© Copyright 2006 United Press International, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Want to email or reprint this story? Click here for options.

Suspected U.S. Spies Targeted

KABUL, Afghanistan - Taliban militants and their allies are waging
a dirty war in Pakistan's unruly tribal areas, kidnapping and
executing people suspected of spying for U.S. forces across the
border in Afghanistan. By Paul Watson and Zulfiqar Ali.
http://email.latimes.com/cgi-bin1/DM/y/e2D...Io30G2B0HUcI0EU

DISFAVORED CIA REPORTS PLACED ONLINE

U.S. News and World Report reported last January that at least three
publications of the CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence, all
critical of the agency, had been withheld from the CIA web site ("A
Tangled Web Woven," by David E. Kaplan, U.S. News, January 30, 2006).

Now two of those disfavored publications are available on the Federation
of American Scientists web site. The third will follow.

"Intelligence for a New Era in American Foreign Policy" is the report of
a conference convened by the Center for the Study of Intelligence,
published in January 2004 (1.3 MB PDF):

http://www.fas.org/irp/cia/product/newera.pdf

"Analytic Culture in the U.S. Intelligence Community: An Ethnographic
Study" is an interesting and unusual effort to assess intelligence
analysis from an anthropological viewpoint, published in 2005. See
(184 pages, 8 MB):

http://www.fas.org/irp/cia/product/analytic.pdf

It is a small irony of the Information Age that by attempting to
selectively withhold these publications from the web, the CIA has
practically guaranteed that more people will read them than would have
otherwise done so.

But CIA seems to have little understanding of that fact, and the
Agency's efforts to suppress criticism are as relentless as they are
self-defeating.

"The CIA has imposed new and tighter restrictions on the books,
articles, and opinion pieces published by former employees who are
still contractors with the intelligence agency," writes Shane Harris.

See "Silencing the Squeaky Wheel" by Shane Harris, National Journal,
April 27:

http://news.nationaljournal.com/articles/0427nj1.htm

See also "Excessive Secrecy Hurting CIA Studies" by Shaun Waterman, UPI,
April 27:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/upi/20060420-121533-2221r.htm

http://news.nationaljournal.com/articles/0427nj1.htm

ISSUES & IDEAS
Silencing The Squeaky Wheels
By Shane Harris, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Thursday, April 27, 2006

The CIA has imposed new and tighter restrictions on the books, articles, and opinion pieces published by former employees who are still contractors with the intelligence agency. According to several former CIA officials affected by the new policy, the rules are intended to suppress criticism of the Bush administration and of the CIA. The officials say the restrictions amount to an unprecedented political "appropriateness" test at odds with earlier CIA policies on outside publishing.


The move is a significant departure from the CIA's longtime practice of allowing ex-employees to take critical or contrary positions in public.

The move is a significant departure from the CIA's longtime practice of allowing ex-employees to take critical or contrary positions in public, particularly when they are contractors paid to advise the CIA on important topics and to publish their assessments.

All current and former CIA employees have long been required to submit manuscripts for books, opinion pieces, and even speeches to the agency's Publications Review Board, which ensures that the works don't reveal classified information or intelligence sources and methods. The board has not generally factored political opinions into its decision-making, former CIA officials say. But in recent years, former employees have written memoirs and opinion pieces challenging the CIA and the Bush administration, particularly for its use of prewar intelligence to justify the war in Iraq. The board did not find that any of those pieces revealed secrets, a fact that makes the CIA's new review standards troubling, former officials and intelligence-community analysts said.

Many of those experts believe that public criticism provides an important source of alternative analysis -- something the CIA needs to understand terrorism, global disease, and other emerging threats. But the White House and CIA Director Porter Goss view spies-turned-authors as political liabilities who embarrass an already battered administration, former officials said. The CIA is now aggressively investigating -- using polygraphs in some cases -- employees who are suspected of leaking classified information to journalists, and last week the agency said it fired a senior official, Mary O. McCarthy, reportedly for having unauthorized contact with the news media.

The former CIA officials carefully distinguished leaks of classified information, which they acknowledged can endanger national security, from articles or speeches that challenge policy yet reveal no secrets. But several said that Goss's vigorous pursuit of leakers is philosophically connected to his desire to keep embarrassing comments by former CIA insiders out of the public domain.

"I think the [publications] that are causing the most kickback now are things that look like they're critical of the administration," said one former official who has written about intelligence policies and techniques. "The [career] agency people feel like they are regarded by the White House as the enemy." They "feel like Goss's real job is to decimate the place," said the former official, who, like others contacted for this story, asked for anonymity to avoid reprisal from the CIA.

Full-time agency employees are discouraged from expressing their political opinions, lest they taint the agency as partisan. But contractors traditionally have been free to speak their minds. The new review policy "reflects [Goss's] concern, and his personality, which seems to have minimal tolerance for dissent," said Steven Aftergood, an authority on government secrecy policies with the Federation of American Scientists.

The publications review process "was designed to assure agency personnel that their First Amendment rights would be protected as long as they did not compromise security," Aftergood said. "That relatively enlightened position has now been abandoned."

The CIA acknowledged for the first time last week that the Publications Review Board subjects former officials under contract to a two-part test. "First, material submitted for publication cannot contain classified information," CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano wrote in an e-mail. "Second, it cannot impair the individual's ability to do his or her job or the CIA's ability to conduct its mission as a nonpartisan, nonpolicy agency of the executive branch."

That new criterion is at odds with the agency's earlier rules. According to a July 2005 unclassified regulation, signed by Goss, "The [Publications Review Board] will review material ... solely to determine whether it contains any classified information. Permission to publish will not be denied solely because the material may be embarrassing to or critical of the agency."

Former officials who have been contacted by the CIA or made aware of the policy warned that it could backfire. "If this is the direction in which it's going ... the agency would be shooting itself in the foot," said one former official who was involved in contracting with outside experts to solicit reviews of draft intelligence assessments. "At a time when the agency is being criticized at least as much as it ever has for 'groupthink,' unchallenged assumptions, and not practicing alternative analysis rigorously, this is one of the last changes it ought to be making."

The former official predicted, "Those contractors who tend to express opposing viewpoints would be among the first to terminate their contracts." If they bolt, the agency's efforts will have been for naught: The CIA will have lost them, and they'll publish their writings anyway, because the new policy review doesn't apply to former employees who don't have CIA contracts, the former official explained.

Another former official under contract, who has written critically about intelligence analysis, said the policy would encourage people to share their views with journalists anonymously. "I know they did it to scare people," the former official said. "The problem is, they're not dealing with fools here.... In my case, they took someone who is reasonably familiar with [the CIA] and made it so that anytime I can torpedo them, I will."

Authors describe the former publications review process as fair, if sometimes tedious. "There was a real sense it was done on the up-and-up," said a former CIA official who is a proponent of ex-employees' writing about their expertise.

Another former employee agreed. "When I went through the process ... I certainly didn't feel like the political standpoint of my book made a difference in how the [review board] evaluated it," said Lindsay Moran, who wrote about her brief career as a CIA operative in "Blowing My Cover: My Life as a CIA Spy." Moran's book skewered agency managers as incompetent and made some officials nervous because it described aspects of training, but the Publications Review Board approved it without incident.

"It's just ridiculous that the biggest threat to the CIA seems to be the grumblings of former employees," Moran said. Aftergood concurred, saying, "It's bizarre that the CIA is in such a weakened state that it feels the need to suppress criticism."

The CIA apparently put the new rules into practice early this year. The former officials contacted for this story agreed that Goss implemented the restrictions partly to send a message about policies under his immediate predecessor, George Tenet.

"It's very clearly the result of Tenet's approving both my books," said Michael Scheuer, the former head of the CIA unit that tracked Osama bin Laden, and the author of two books on Al Qaeda and the war on terrorism. Scheuer published both books under the pseudonym "Anonymous" while he was still a CIA employee. The second book, "Imperial Hubris," sparked controversy because it was seen as a rebuke of the war in Iraq as an effective means of fighting terror. The book is more properly viewed as a critique of intelligence leadership, Scheuer said, but he acknowledged that it is mostly cited for its relatively few mentions of Bush and the war.

Scheuer, who retired from the CIA in November 2004 and has no contracts with the agency, said he faced no opposition to publishing his books. "The agency never asked me, for either book, not to publish it." But he said that if he tried to publish the books as an agency employee today, he would be denied permission. Moran worried that it may even become more difficult for former employees who, like her, don't have contracts, to publish if the CIA's new policies stand. "I got my book cleared in a unique window of opportunity that's disappearing," she said.

"It doesn't have to be that way," Aftergood contended. "One can envision an agency that is so self-confident and so willing to rethink its own positions that it actually welcomes criticism. But that's not the agency we have today."

INVISIBLE IN PLAIN SIGHT: CIA TORTURE TECHNIQUES GO MAINSTREAM - ALFRED W. MCCOY (AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL MAGAZINE): Critical loopholes in the McCain amendment show that the once-clandestine practice of torture is now an official weapon in the War on Terror.
http://www.amnestyusa.org/magazine/invisib...lain_sight.html

EUROPEAN INQUIRY SAYS C.I.A. FLEW 1,000 FLIGHTS IN SECRET - DAN BILEFSKY (NEW YORK TIMES, APRIL 27): These conclusions are likely to heighten trans-Atlantic tensions at a time when Europe and the United States are already at odds over how to balance civil liberties with the fight against terrorists.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/27/world/eu...r=1&oref=slogin

TERRORISM STILL THRIVING, STATE DEPARTMENT SAYS JIM LOBE (ANTIWAR.COM, APRIL 30)
http://www.antiwar.com/lobe/?articleid=8918

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/05/0...ligence_war.php

Iran Intelligence War
Robert Parry
May 01, 2006


Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com.

In a replay of the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction charade, neoconservative supporters of George W. Bush are pushing the U.S. intelligence community to take a more alarmist view about Iran’s nuclear program—only this time, the nation’s top spy John Negroponte is resisting the pressure unlike former CIA chief George Tenet.

Tenet joined in Bush’s hyping of the WMD evidence about Iraq—famously telling the President that the case was a “slam dunk.” But Negroponte is defying hardliners who want a worst-case scenario on Iran’s capabilities. Instead, he is citing Iran’s limited progress in refining uranium and their use of a cascade of only 164 centrifuges.

“According to the experts that I consult, achieving—getting 164 centrifuges to work is still a long way from having the capacity to manufacture sufficient fissile material for a nuclear weapon,” Negroponte said in an interview with NBC News on April 20.

“Our assessment is that the prospects of an Iranian weapon are still a number of years off, and probably into the next decade,” said Negroponte, who was appointed last year as the Director of National Intelligence, a new post that supplanted the traditional primacy of the CIA director as the head of the U.S. intelligence community.

Expressing a similar view about Iran’s nuclear program in a speech at the National Press Club, Negroponte said, “I think it’s important that this issue be kept in perspective.”

In effect, the Director of National Intelligence was splashing cold water on the fevered assessment of Iran’s nuclear progress favored by the neoconservatives. Some Bush supporters are now complaining that Negroponte has shown disloyalty to the President by siding with intelligence analysts who reject the direst predictions on Iran.

Frank J. Gaffney Jr. an original signer of the neoconservative Project for the New American Century, even called for Negroponte’s firing because of the Iran assessment and his “abysmal personnel decisions” in hiring senior intelligence analysts who were skeptics about Bush’s Iraqi WMD claims, too.

In an article for Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Washington Times, Gaffney attacked Negroponte for giving top analytical jobs to Thomas Fingar, who had served as assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research, and Kenneth Brill, who was U.S. ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency, which debunked some of the U.S. and British claims about Iraq seeking enriched uranium from Africa.

The State Department’s Office of Intelligence and Research led the dissent against the Iraq WMD case, especially over what turned out to be false claims that Iraq was developing a nuclear bomb. Gaffney specifically faulted Fingar for his testimony against neoconservative favorite John Bolton to become U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

“Given this background, is it any wonder that Messrs. Negroponte, Fingar and Brill … gave us the spectacle of absurdly declaring the Iranian regime to be years away from having nuclear weapons?” wrote Gaffney, who was a senior Pentagon official during the Reagan administration.

Gaffney accused Negroponte of giving promotions to “government officials in sensitive positions who actively subvert the President’s policies,” an apparent reference to Fingar and Brill. The neoconservatives have long believed that U.S. intelligence should fit administration policies, rather than inform them. [See Robert Parry's Secrecy & Privilege.]

Expectations

When Negroponte was appointed last year, the former ambassador to Honduras and Iraq was expected to be more of a team player. Known as an old Cold Warrior, Negroponte had overseen the U.S. Embassy in Honduras in the early 1980s when the CIA was organizing the contra paramilitary force to attack Nicaragua.

Negroponte also was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations when the Bush administration made the false case that Iraq was concealing large WMD stockpiles. Negroponte—along with CIA Director Tenet—sat behind Secretary of State Colin Powell when he made his infamous speech to the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003.

While some observers expected Negroponte to stay a yes-man for Bush as Director of National Intelligence, others who knew Negroponte suspected that he was too smart and too proud to follow the path of Tenet, who is widely disdained inside the intelligence community for letting the analytic product be thoroughly politicized and corrupted.

Having demonstrated a measure of independence on Iran, Negroponte also is under attack for allegedly creating a bloated bureaucracy around his new office, which was established to address shortcomings exposed by the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks as well as the Iraq WMD intelligence failures.

Richard Posner, a well-known advocate of “preemptive” wars who once wrote that “the essence of self-defense is striking the first blow against your assailant,” denounced Negroponte’s office as “a bureaucratic layer” that causes “delay and loss of information from the bottom up [and] delay and misunderstanding of commands from the top down.”

The Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee also has criticized Negroponte’s office for its spending. Chairman Peter Hoekstra, a Michigan Republican, said in March that he was concerned that the new office was “putting in more layers and slowing down the process.”

While some of that criticism may be valid, it’s typical of Washington’s infighting to see politicians pursuing one line of attack when they’re really upset about something else.

U.N. Report

The mounting criticism of Negroponte comes as the Bush administration seeks to make the most of a mixed report by the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency, which stated on April 28 that the lack of clarity around Iran’s nuclear program remains “a matter of concern” as do Iran’s intentions.

While Bush cited the critical aspects of the IAEA report as evidence that a tougher line must be taken against Iran, the report also bolsters Negroponte’s assessment that the Iranians are still far away from having the capacity to build a nuclear bomb.

The IAEA said it took samples of Iran’s enriched uranium and confirmed that it was processed only to an enrichment level of about 3.6 percent, when a level of at least 90 percent is needed to make a nuclear bomb. The low level of enrichment would fit better for production of nuclear energy, which is all the Iranians say they want.

But Bush and his neoconservative advisers may believe that their window for forcing regime change in Iran is closing. The November 2006 elections could bring Republican reversals and leave Bush with less flexibility for launching bombing raids against Iran should he opt for a military attack as many experts believe he will.

So, to make the case with the American people, the neoconservatives first need to secure a more frightening assessment of Iran’s nuclear weapons potential from Negroponte and the U.S. intelligence community.

As long as the intelligence analysts judge that Iran is years away from even the possibility of nuclear weapons, the argument for another “preemptive” war against a Muslim nation would be a hard sell.

The Bush administration is still reeling from disclosures that it fixed the WMD intelligence to justify the Iraq War, which so far has claimed the lives of about 2,400 U.S. soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqis.

The latest former CIA officer to speak out against the bogus intelligence was Tyler Drumheller, the chief of CIA covert operations in Europe.

“It just sticks in my craw every time I hear them say it’s an intelligence failure,” Drumheller told CBS’s “60 Minutes” in an interview broadcast April 23, 2006. “This was a policy failure. … The idea of going after Iraq was U.S. policy. It was going to happen one way or the other.”

Drumheller said the White House even ignored intelligence that the CIA got from Saddam Hussein’s foreign minister, Naji Sabri. The information was rebuffed because Sabri said Iraq didn’t have WMD.

“The policy was set,” Drumheller said. “The war in Iraq was coming. And they [White House officials] were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy, to justify the policy.”

Now, the first battle in a prospective “preemptive” war with Iran may be fought over ousting or intimidating Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte—which would then be followed by a whole new round of making the intelligence fit the policy.

http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/ExCIA_sa...hance_0501.html

Bush turned down chances to kill Zarqawi: ex-CIA spy
A former top CIA spy says the United States deliberately turned down several opportunities to kill terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in the lead-up to the Iraq war.

Mike Scheuer headed the CIA's bin Laden unit for six years before resigning in 2004.

He has told the ABC's Four Corners program the Bush administration had Zarqawi in its sights almost every day for a year.

He says a plan to destroy Zarqawi's training camp in Kurdistan was abandoned for diplomatic reasons.

"The reasons the intelligence service got for not shooting Zarqawi was simply that the President and the National Security Council decided it was more important not to give the Europeans the impression we were gunslingers," he said.

"Mr Bush had Mr Zarqawi in his sights for almost every day for a year before the invasion of Iraq and he didn't shoot because they were wining and dining the French in an effort to get them to assist us in the invasion of Iraq."

The full story will air on Four Corners tonight on ABC television.

Planning defended

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has defended the Bush administration's Iraq war planning after her predecessor, Colin Powell, said he had made a case to send more troops to deal with the war's aftermath.

Ms Rice also says she does not "specifically remember" what instance Mr Powell was referring to on his recommending to President George W Bush that more troops be sent.

In an interview with a private British television station on Sunday (local time), Mr Powell said there had been debates about the size of the force and how to deal with the aftermath.

"I don't think we had enough force there to impose order," he said on ITV's Jonathan Dimbleby program.

"The aftermath turned out to be much more difficult than anyone had anticipated.

"I made the case to General (Tommy) Franks, to (Defence) Secretary (Donald) Rumsfeld and to the president that I was not sure we had enough troops."

But Mr Powell said the military leaders felt they had the appropriate number.

Ms Rice, appearing on several Sunday talk shows, was responding to Mr Powell's comments that fanned the controversy over the administration's plans for the invasion's immediate aftermath.

Critics say violence and looting set the stage for a bloody insurgency and sectarian killings over the last three years.

Asked on CNN's Late Edition if she remembered Mr Powell's dissent, Ms Rice said, "I don't remember specifically what Secretary Powell may be referring to, but I'm quite certain that there were lots of discussions about how best to fulfil the mission when we went into Iraq."

She said Mr Bush relied on his military advisers, and that he "asked time and time again" whether everything needed to execute the plan was available, "and he was told 'yes'."

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?...INGSIIFB0E1.DTL
The CIA exposed on Web
Agency offers a peek at intelligence errors
Jonathan Curiel, Chronicle Staff Writer

Sunday, April 30, 2006

The Web site of the Central Intelligence Agency (www.cia.gov) is less sober-sided than you might expect. For starters, there's a homey virtual tour of CIA headquarters. And then there's the smorgasbord of patriotic and pseudo-propagandistic offerings -- whether it's the heart-tugging tale of Nathan Hale (the Yale grad and CIA precursor who, just before being hanged by British soldiers in 1776, said, "I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country"), the agency's mission statement ("We are the eyes and ears of the nation. ... In pursuit of our country's interests, we put Nation before Agency"), or its video plug from Hollywood actress Jennifer Garner (she urges online visitors to consider applying for one of the CIA's "important, exciting jobs. ... If you're an American citizen and seek a challenging, rewarding career where you can make a difference in the world and here at home, contact the agency").

Given the patriotic gushing, what seems odd is that the spy agency also would willingly tell visitors about America's intelligence failures past and present. But that's what the CIA does -- though not with the same ebullience of Garner's slick job-recruitment pitch. Instead, Washington's spy masters have published dry, formerly classified documents that challenge America's image as a self-assured, competent, morally correct power.

These unvarnished Web pages are the missing link in American history. Together, they form a kind of confessional that good intelligence can be corrupted (or ignored) by higher-ups with steadfast agendas.

Take, as one example, Washington's pre-Iraq War analysis (www.cia.gov/nic/special_keyjudgements.html), which reveals the State Department doubted that Saddam Hussein was trying to acquire nuclear weapons. And take, as another example, the CIA's Vietnam collection (www.foia.cia.gov/nic_vietnam_collection.asp), which shows the agency was pessimistic that the United States could win the Vietnam War in March 1968, when publicly, the federal government still trumpeted its resolve.

The government is releasing its documents to satiate the growing demand -- among scholars, researchers, journalists and others -- to study Washington's historic war-related papers and transcripts. The State Department, for example, has released a treasure trove of information relating to foreign policy and the presidencies of John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.

In a January 1970 memo to Nixon on vice-presidential stationery (www.state.gov/documents/organization/47902.pdf), Spiro Agnew writes about his private meeting with Afghanistan's "intense" king, and suggests the White House could use him to bring about a Cold War detente with the Soviet Union. The letter is a window into the convoluted relationship that would connect the three countries for the next three decades.

In an October 1962 letter typed during the height of the Cuban missile crisis (www.state.gov/www/about_state/history/frusXI/51_75.html), Kennedy tells Nikita Khrushchev (he addresses him, "Dear Mr. Chairman") that the Soviets started the contretemps by supplying Havana with weapons. At the same time he's being accusatory, Kennedy preaches restraint, telling Khrushchev that "I am concerned that we both show prudence and do nothing to allow events to make the situation more difficult to control than it already is." As a whole, the missive reveals Kennedy's forceful diplomacy at a moment when nuclear war was a serious threat.

In a March 7, 1968, memo to Johnson (www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/frus/johnsonlb/vi/13698.htm), special assistant Walt Rostow suggests the president suppress his optimism about the Vietnam War. Rostow emphasizes the advice of then-Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford, who urges "great caution" about presenting a rosy picture of the Vietnam War, which was then turning against U.S.-backed forces.

Presidents, of course, can ignore their advisers, which is what Johnson did with Rostow -- and the CIA specialists who warned him about the military power of the Viet Cong and its allies. In an 11-page memo dated March 1, 1968 (go to www.foia.cia.gov/nic_vietnam_collection.asp and type in 3/1/68), the CIA cautioned that, without an increase in American troops, "there is a high risk that both the ARVN (South Vietnam's army) and GVN (South Vietnam's government) will be seriously weakened in the next months, and perhaps decisively so."

What did Johnson and his Cabinet say publicly? On March 12, 1968 -- five days after getting Rostow's note and 11 days after the CIA issued its dire warning -- Johnson gushed in a White House ceremony, "I think if we are steady, if we are patient, if we do not become willing victims of our own despair, if we do not abandon what we know is right when it comes under mounting challenge -- we shall never fail." A day earlier, Secretary of State Dean Rusk told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (and a national audience watching on TV) that there were "grounds for encouragement" about Vietnam, that the U.S.-backed South Vietnamese were "recapturing the initiative," and that "no one in the world wants peace more than the president of the United States."

A few days later, Sen. Eugene McCarthy, D-Minn., rode a wave of anti-war sentiment to make a stronger-than-expected showing against Johnson in New Hampshire's Democratic presidential primary. Within weeks, Johnson decided to withdraw his candidacy for another term. In Vietnam, the government's intelligence seemed to be prescient.

"In the 1980s, at (Harvard's) Kennedy School of Government, we used to teach about Vietnam using the impact of the Pentagon Papers and the summer of 1965 documents, and what you came away with from those documents was how good the intelligence actually was," says Gregory F. Treverton, a senior policy analyst at the Rand Corp. and former vice chair of the government's National Intelligence Council, as well as a frequent contributor to Insight. "But policymakers either didn't believe the intelligence -- they thought they were getting worst-case military analysis -- or they didn't understand the implications of what they were reading."

With the Iraq War that started in 2003, much of the intelligence was wrong, as we now know. Saddam Hussein didn't have weapons of mass destruction, negating Washington's main stated reason for going to war. These intelligence mistakes are now posted on the Web, for all the world to see at www.cia.gov/nic/special_keyjudgements.html. There, we see the October 2002 conclusion from the National Intelligence Estimate: "We judge that Iraq has continued its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs in defiance of U.N. resolutions and restrictions. Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of U.N. restrictions; if left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade."

According to the CIA, the National Intelligence Estimate is "the most authoritative written judgment concerning a national security issue prepared by the Director of Central Intelligence." Iraq has forced a widespread reassessment of America's intelligence capabilities.

The legacy of American spy-gathering is a mixed one. For better or worse, both the blemishes and high points of Washington's once-secret vaults are now open for public inspection on the Internet.

E-mail Jonathan Curiel at jcuriel@sfchronicle.com.

http://www.aljazeerah.info/Opinion%20edito...e%20Whitney.htm

Bush's hand in the Terror War, as Told by Robert Fisk

By Mike Whitney

Al-Jazeerah, May 2, 2006

“’Unknown Americans’ are provoking civil war” Robert Fisk, UK Independent

“The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.” William Butler Yeats; “The Second Coming”

Robert Fisk has pulled the shroud off Bush’s Iraq policy and exposed the rotting corpse below. In his latest article “Seen through a Syrian Lens” (UK Independent 4-29-06) Fisk fingers the US as the driving force behind the present “alleged” sectarian violence in Iraq. He’s produced information from a trusted “security source” that America is “desperately trying to provoke a civil war around Baghdad in order to reduce its own military casualties”. It is a charge we’ve heard before but never quite as persuasively as from a veteran journalist who his relied on for “getting it right”.

"I swear to you that we have very good information," Fisk recounts, "One young Iraqi man told us that he was trained by the Americans as a policeman in Baghdad and he spent 70 per cent of his time learning to drive and 30 per cent in weapons training. They said to him: 'Come back in a week.' When he went back, they gave him a mobile phone and told him to drive into a crowded area near a mosque and phone them. He waited in the car but couldn't get the right mobile signal. So he got out of the car to where he received a better signal. Then his car blew up."

Americans are sending unsuspecting Iraqis in vehicles to crowded areas, detonating the explosives, and then pinning it on Zarqawi or some other racist invention.

Can we believe Fisk?

As incredible as it seems, Fisk assures us that he’s heard the same story many times from different sources.

Again:

"There was another man, trained by the Americans for the police. He too was given a mobile and told to drive to an area where there was a crowd - maybe a protest - and to call them and tell them what was happening. Again, his new mobile was not working. So he went to a landline phone and called the Americans and told them: 'Here I am, in the place you sent me and I can tell you what's happening here.' And at that moment there was a big explosion in his car."

There’s been a great deal of speculation on whether the US is directly involved in the massive terror campaign that is sweeping through the Sunni heartland. Max Fuller has made a valuable contribution to the topic in his article “Crying Wolf: Media disinformation and Deaths squads in Occupied Iraq”. Fuller has documented CIA involvement in training Iraqi death squads operating in the Interior ministry.

So far, there have been at least three separate incidents where occupation forces have been either caught or connected to bombings in Iraq.

The most famous of these was an incident in Basra where two British paramilitaries were caught disguised as Arabs with a truck-full of explosives in their vehicle. Panicky British forces destroyed the Basra jail to release the two captured SAS soldiers apparently afraid that their cover would be blown and Blair would be implicated in attacks on civilians.

The bombing of the Golden-domed mosque has also produced a number of suspicious leads which point to US involvement. The AFP reported that the bombing “was the work of specialists” and the “placing of explosives must have taken at least 12 hours”. The report continues:

“Construction Minister Jassem Mohammed Jaafar said, “Holes were dug into the mausoleum’s four main pillars and packed with explosives. Then charges were connected together and linked to another charge placed just under the dome. The wires were then linked to a detonator which was triggered at a distance.”

Clearly the bombing was not carried out by rogue elements in the disparate Iraqi resistance but highly trained saboteurs executing a precision demolition to incite sectarian violence. The blast bears all the hallmarks of an Intelligence agency operation. Eyewitness accounts verify that American troops and Iraqi National Guard were active in the area throughout the night and that their cars could be heard running “the whole night until next morning”. People living around the mosque were told “to stay in your shop and don’t leave the area”.

At 6:30 AM the American troops left, just 10 minutes before the bombs went off.

So far, there’s been no independent investigation of the bombing even though the media has used the incident as proof of the growing sectarian divide. But, perhaps, there is no divide. Perhaps, as Fisk implies Bush is conducting a massive “dirty war” similar to earlier operations in El Salvador and Nicaragua. After all, that’s where Negroponte, Cheney and Rumsfeld “cut their teeth” in the intricacies of clandestine warfare; learning the ropes of destabilizing regimes through the “application of extreme violence.”

The implications of Fisk’s article are shocking. The war on terror is the rickety scaffolding upon which the entire Bush presidency rests; there are no other accomplishments or programs. If the present allegations are true, then Bush and his cadres can be placed in the same category as Bin Laden and al Zarqawi; although those “alleged” villains could be just scratchy shreds of celluloid produced in the Pentagon basement.

There is no civil war in Iraq; it’s all been fabricated to split the country apart. The violence we see is emanating in waves from its ultimate point of origin…1600 Pennsylvania Ave; the epicenter of global terrorism. Fisk’s article just punctuates that point.

Top CIA Official Under Investigation :

The CIA inspector general has opened an investigation into the spy agency's executive director, Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, and his connections to two defense contractors accused of bribing a member of Congress and Pentagon officials.
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/story?id=1684086&page=1

CIA: the terrible history of the terrorists within:

There is a terrorist organisation operating in Britain today with the full knowledge and support of Tony Blair and the New Labour government.
http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/article.php?article_id=8759

===
Spies Among Us:

Despite a troubled history, police across the nation are keeping tabs on ordinary Americans
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12929.htm

http://www.amnestyusa.org/magazine/invisib...lain_sight.html

Amnesty International Magazine

Invisible in Plain Sight: CIA Torture Techniques Go Mainstream


Azmat Begg speaks with reporters about the return of his son Moazzam Begg from U.S. military custody in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Moazzam Begg was released from Guantanamo Bay in January 2005 and returned to England. He was never charged with a crime. © AFP/Getty Images/Jim Watson

Critical loopholes in the McCain amendment show that the once-clandestine practice of torture is now an official weapon in the War on Terror.

BY ALFRED W. MCCOY

Alfred W. McCoy is professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is the author of several books, including the recently published "A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror," "Closer Than Brothers" and "The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade." He is also a member of Amnesty International USA.

Watch the multimedia feature, "Torture and U.S. Impunity."

Just before Christmas last, President Bush and Senator John McCain appeared in the Oval Office to announce an historic ban on torture by any U.S. agency, anywhere in the world. Looking straight into the cameras, the president declared with a steely gaze that this landmark legislation would make it “clear to the world that this government does not torture.”

This meeting was the culmination of a tangled legislative battle that had started six months before when Senator John McCain introduced an amendment to the must-pass Defense Appropriation Bill, calling for an absolute ban on “cruel, inhumane and degrading” treatment. The White House fought back hard, sending Vice President Cheney to Capitol Hill for a wrecking effort so sustained, so determined that a Washington Post editorial branded him “The Vice President for Torture.” At first, Cheney demanded that the amendment be dropped. The senator refused. Next, Cheney insisted on an exemption for the CIA. The senator stood his ground. Then, in a startling rebuke to the White House, the Senate passed the amendment last October by a 90-9 margin, a victory celebrated by Amnesty International and other rights groups. With the White House still threatening a veto, the appropriation gridlocked in an eyeball-to-eyeball standoff.

Then came that dramatic December 15th handshake between Bush and McCain, a veritable media mirage that concealed furious back-room maneuvering by the White House to undercut the amendment. A coalition of rights groups, including Amnesty International, had resisted the executive’s effort to punch loopholes in the torture ban but, in the end, the White House prevailed. With the help of key senate conservatives, the Bush administration succeeded in twisting what began as an unequivocal ban on torture into a legitimization of three controversial legal doctrines that the administration had originally used to justify torture right after 9/11.

In an apparent compromise gesture, McCain himself inserted the first major loophole: a legal defense for accused CIA interrogators that echoes the administration’s notorious August 2002 torture memo allowing any agents criminally charged to claim that they “did not know that the practices were unlawful.”

Next, the administration effectively neutralized the McCain ban with Senator Lindsey Graham’s amendment stipulating that Guantanamo Bay detainees cannot invoke U.S. law to challenge their imprisonment. Complaining that detainees were filing trivial lawsuits over the quality of their food, Graham’s amendment thereby attempted to nullify the Supreme Court decision in Rasul v. Bush that had allowed detainees to pursue habeas corpus appeals in U.S. courts. In sum, McCain’s original amendment banned torture, but Graham’s later amendment , as finally approved by the Senate, removed any means for enforcement. For a mess of bipartisan pottage, Congress thus bartered away this nation's constitutional birthright of habeas corpus, a foundational legal protection born, ironically, of the British Parliament's long struggle to ban royal torture writs by the infamous Court of Star Chamber.

For the final loophole, on December 30 President Bush issued a “signing statement” insisting that his powers as commander-in-chief and head of the “unitary executive branch” still allowed him to do whatever is necessary to defend America—the same key controversial doctrine the administration had first used to allow torture. Instead of marking closure to the Abu Ghraib scandal, the McCain torture ban has thus sparked a renewed campaign by human-rights advocates to end the use of torture in Washington’s War on Terror—an effort that may well prove to be a long, uphill battle.

Only days after Bush signed the legislation containing the McCain amendment, the White House used a portion of the new law, now called the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, to quash any judicial oversight of its actions. On January 3 the Justice Department notified federal judges that it would seek the immediate dismissal of all 160 habeas corpus cases filed by Guantanamo detainees. One week later, the U.S. Solicitor General, citing this law, told the Supreme Court it no longer had jurisdiction over Guantanamo and asked the justices to dismiss the potential landmark “unlawful combatant” case, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. In late March, when the court began to hear oral arguments in this critical test case of U.S. military tribunals, several justices appeared to reject the solicitor general’s argument after vigorously questioning him.

In retrospect, McCain’s proposed torture ban seems another victim of the Bush administration’s unrelenting drive to win unchecked wartime powers. In response to continuing controversy over Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, the White House has thus initiated what seems an historic shift in US interrogation policy—from the highly secretive tortures by the Central Intelligence Agency during the Cold War to an open, even defiant use of coercive interrogation as an official weapon in the arsenal of American power during the “war on terror.” Until 9/11, the United States government had successfully protected its intelligence community from censure by outsourcing torture to foreign allies and using subtle psychological techniques that elude ready detection—in striking contrast to the crude physical methods once favored by dictators around the world.

Even now, the continuing use of these psychological techniques has complicated efforts to prohibit torture. Right after Congress approved McCain’s torture ban, Attorney General Gonzales parsed the word “severe” to insist the new law adds only “clarification” to the existing definition of torture as “intentional infliction of severe physical or mental pain,” echoing Justice Department subordinates who were arguing anonymously that the ban would still allow "water boarding”—the harshest of the agency’s enhanced psychological techniques. When future investigators try to judge the slippery signs of psychological torture, whether by the military or CIA, each of the Attorney General’s words—“intentional,” “severe,” and “mental”—will open yet another loophole.

Indeed, these psychological techniques are so elusive that they remain, even today, invisible in plain sight. After CBS broadcast those notorious photos from Abu Ghraib prison in the April 2004, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld dismissed them as unrepresentative acts "by a small number of U.S. military," whom the conservative New York Times columnist William Safire branded "creeps."

If, however, we read these prison photos carefully, they reveal CIA torture techniques that have metastasized like an undetected cancer inside the U.S. intelligence community over the past half-century. That iconic photo of a hooded Iraqi with fake electrical wires hanging from his arms shows, not the sadism of a few “creeps,” but the telltale signs of sophisticated torture. The prisoner is hooded for sensory deprivation. His arms are extended for self-inflicted pain. These are the key components of the CIA’s psychological paradigm, first developed during the Cold War and then disseminated within the U.S. intelligence community and among allied agencies around the world.

Indeed, over the past 40 years, psychological torture, as practiced by US intelligence community, has proven destructive, elusive, and adaptable. Although seemingly less brutal than physical methods, this "no touch" torture is highly destructive of the human psyche, leaving searing psychological scars experts consider more crippling than physical pain. And the lack of visible physical evidence eludes detection, greatly complicating attempts at investigation, prosecution, or prohibition.

Moreover, each extended application of this psychological method has produced innovation—an adaptability evident today in the war on terror. Under the command of General Geoffrey Miller, Guantanamo became an ad hoc behavioral laboratory for innovative interrogation techniques that, in sum, perfected the CIA’s psychological paradigm. Moving beyond the agency’s original, generic attack on sensory receptors universal to all humans, Guantanamo’s interrogators intensified the psychological assault by exploiting Arab cultural sensitivities to sexuality, gender identity and fear of dogs. Miller also formed teams of military psychologists to probe each detainee’s phobias. Significantly, after repeated visits to Guantanamo in 2002-2004, the International Committee of the Red Cross described these practices as “an intentional system of cruel, unusual and degrading treatment and a form of torture.”

With his new Guantanamo methods codified in a top-secret manual, General Miller exported these techniques with a personal visit in September 2003 to Iraq, where the U.S. commander, General Ricardo Sanchez, incorporated them into his orders for aggressive interrogation at Abu Ghraib. Beyond Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, the administration has also built a global network for torture at a half-dozen “black sites” worldwide that used these techniques and even more extreme methods, including one particularly cruel CIA technique called “water boarding.”

Outside its own black sites, the CIA, continuing a tactic used against Al-Qaeda suspects since the 1990s, engaged in “extraordinary rendition”—that is, the practice of sending detainees to nations notorious for torture, including Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Uzbekistan. Knitting this far-flung prison network together, the agency shuttled detainees around the globe in a fleet of some two dozen jets operated by thinly veiled front companies responsible for some 2,600 rendition-related flights since 2001. Despite a formal ban on rendition in the U.N. Convention Against Torture, the United States has persisted in a practice which is, in fact, illegal. “Renditions,” as Amnesty International explains in its recent report Below the Radar, “involve multiple layers of human rights violations. Most victims…were arrested and detained illegally in the first place; some were abducted; others were denied access to any due process.”

The United States is at a fateful crossroads, both in its relations with the international community and in the relationship between its own executive and judicial branches. In its aggressive defense of presidential prerogatives over “unlawful combatants,” exemplified by its handling of Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and the hundreds of habeas corpus cases in federal courts, the Bush White House seeks to exempt its actions from any judicial oversight. And just last February, the actions of our executive branch have earned an unprecedented rebuke from United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, who called for the closure of Guantanamo.

In the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib scandal, the White House has defended torture as a presidential prerogative and blocked reform efforts. By contrast, a loose coalition of civil-liberties lawyers and human rights groups has mobilized to stop the abuse. In June 2004 the Supreme Court ruled in a landmark case, Rasul v. Bush, that Guantanamo detainees were, in fact, on territory leased to the United States and thus deserved access to U.S. courts. Leading U.S. law firms responded by filing 160 habeas corpus cases for 300 detainees.

Since 9/11, the White House and its media allies have shaped the debate over detainees as a false choice between tortured intelligence and no intelligence at all. Yet there are, in fact, alternatives to torture such as an approach we might call empathetic interrogation—first used by the U.S. Marine Corps to extract accurate intelligence from Japanese prisoners during World War II and practiced by the FBI with great success in the decades since. After the East Africa bombings of U.S. embassies in 1998, for example, the FBI employed this method to gain some of our best intelligence on Al Qaeda and won convictions of all the accused in U.S. courts.

For the human rights community, the first steps to reform are surprisingly simple: call upon our legislators to heed Kofi Anan’s call for closure of Guantanamo and transfer the detainees to the US courts for trial. More ambitiously, the human rights community can press Congress to amend the Detainee Treatment Act 2005, banning torture without reservations, loopholes, or qualifications. Yet even if we close Guantanmo and prohibit abuse by U.S. authorities, the CIA can still elude the force of this prohibition, as it has done so often over the past 40 years, by outsourcing torture to foreign allies like Morocco, Egypt, or Uzbekistan. For real reform, Congress must close the ultimate loophole: the rendition of detainees to foreign security services that torture systematically and savagely.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20...10459-4728r.htm

U.S. 'disrupted' al Qaeda WMD efforts
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
May 3, 2006


U.S. and international programs to defeat al Qaeda have limited the terrorist group's ability to acquire weapons of mass destruction, the No. 2 U.S. intelligence official said.
Air Force Gen. Michael V. Hayden, principal deputy director of national intelligence, said in a recent speech that al Qaeda remains dangerous but has grown more diffuse.
In explaining successes in the global war against terrorists in the past 4? years, Gen. Hayden noted that the United States and its allies "disrupted [al Qaeda?s] efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction."
He and other intelligence officials declined to provide specifics of the disruption.
However, administration officials said operations in Afghanistan and a few recent incidents show that al Qaeda continues to seek nuclear, chemical, biological and radiological weapons.
One official said the killing of al Qaeda explosives specialist Abu Marwan in Pakistan last month was one of the successes. Marwan was thought to be linked to al Qaeda's efforts to build nuclear and other unconventional explosives.
U.S. and allied intelligence agencies have stepped up monitoring of the sale and movement of goods that could be used to produce weapons of mass destruction, including high explosives and chemical precursors, the officials said.
The surveillance has led to instances in which al Qaeda members or those linked to its affiliates were spotted making inquiries about purchases, the officials said.
Gen. Hayden also said in the little-noticed speech to the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association in Texas on Wednesday that key successes in the war on terrorism include denying al Qaeda safe haven in Afghanistan, killing or capturing large numbers of its leaders, cutting funding sources and forcing terrorists to spend more time protecting themselves.
"Most fundamentally, we have prevented any further attacks against the homeland," he said.
"The global jihadist movement is evolving in many ways," Gen. Hayden said. "The movement is spreading and adjusting to our counterterrorism efforts, and it is also exploiting the communications revolution, the Internet and media sensationalism."
A State Department report on terrorism made public last week said the connection between terrorism and weapons of mass destruction is one of the "gravest potential risks to the national security."
Al Qaeda has stated openly its goal of acquiring and using nuclear weapons, the report said. The spread of information about nuclear arms development, including data on the Internet, poses an increased risk that "a terrorist organization with the right material could develop its own nuclear weapon."
Although making nuclear weapons is likely beyond the capability of most terrorists for the immediate future, "terrorists may seek to link up with a variety of facilitators to develop their own nuclear capability," the report said.

Ex-CIA analyst condemns Bush 'manipulation campaign' on Iraq

A former Middle East specialist of the US Central Intelligence Agency has condemned what he called an organised campaign of manipulation by the Bush administration to justify the Iraq war.

Paul Pillar, a former CIA analyst specialising in counter-terrorism in the Middle East and Asia, said in an interview with the Spanish newspaper El Pais that the United States had particularly wanted to prove a link between Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.

"That was not the case," he was quoted as saying. "I suppose by some definitions that could be called a lie."

"There was an organised campaign of manipulation," El Pais also quoted Pillar as saying. "That would be the proper way to define it."

The decision to invade Iraq was taken as early as the beginning of 2002, a year before hostilities began, Pillar said.

It was decided "for other reasons and did not depend on weapons of mass destruction or the results of United Nations inspections," he said, according to the interview published in Spanish.

"As far as weapons of mass destruction were concerned, there was a generally false perception in the American, British and other intelligence services that Iraq possessed these. We were wrong."

"The problem was the wider message, the attempt to spread the impression that there was a terrorist alliance between Iraq and Al-Qaeda," Pillar was also quoted as saying.

The theory of the link interested the government of President George W. Bush because "it was this that most strongly affected public opinion in the United States, and which would keep alive the images of September 11, 2001.

"The administration's voracious appetite to obtain material about this non-existent alliance cost a great deal of time and work to senior intelligence staff and the most highly experienced analysts in the CIA," Pillar said in the interview.




Copyright © 2006 Agence France Presse. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AFP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of Agence France Presse.


Copyright © 2006 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.
Questions or Comments
Privacy Policy -Terms of Service - Copyright/IP Policy - Ad Feedback

CIA row hits US-Europe intelligence work: US lawyer
By David Brunnstrom
Thu May 4, 9:23 AM ET

Allegations that CIA flights through Europe carried people bound for ill-treatment are damaging transatlantic intelligence cooperation, a lawyer acting for the State Department said on Thursday.

Speaking before heading the defense of U.S. practices at the U.N. Committee against Torture in Geneva, John Bellinger reiterated Washington's position that it does not outsource torture or transfer people it suspects of being involved in terrorism to places where it can expect them to be tortured.

Bellinger was responding to a European Parliament probe which, while producing no firm evidence, concluded last month that more than 1,000 CIA flights had transited the EU and that the CIA had been responsible on several occasions for kidnapping and illegally detaining people on EU soil.

"The suggestion that intelligence flights are somehow engaged in illegal activity really undermines the cooperation between the United States and Europe," he told a news briefing.

EU lawmakers are due in Washington next week to probe allegations of secret detention centers and flights in Europe for terrorism suspects. Bellinger is among those they will meet.

He said he did not know how many flights there had been, but the suggestion or implication that a large number had detainees aboard was "absurd."

"Someone needs to challenge that," he said. "It's not possible for the United States to prove a negative, but responsible European governments or responsible European officials simply need to say this has gotten out of hand."

"There is no evidence for the suggestion or implication that however many flights there have been that they have all got detainees on them or that an intelligence flight is engaged in some sort of improper activity."

He said there had been "very few" cases of renditions, or the transfer of terrorism suspects from one country to another, but declined to provide details.

"NOT TOURIST FLIGHTS"

Claudio Fava, author of the EU parliamentary report, told a news conference the suggestion was not that all flights carried detainees, but "some" had been used for detainees and often had routes linking Guantanamo, Kabul and Baghdad.

"These were not tourist flights," he said.

Bellinger said so many allegations about intelligence flights were incorrect Washington had decided not to respond to specific charges, nor to give details of the purpose of every flight, given operational security requirements.

"Intelligence activities by their very nature are simply carried out in secret because you don't want to tell the al Qaeda people that you may have captured their material or you are engaged in cooperation," he said.

A Washington Post report last year which said that the CIA had run secret prisons in Europe and flown suspects to states where they would have been tortured unleashed a spate of investigations, but none have so far produced solid proof.

The United Nations' torture investigator Manfred Nowak told the EU parliamentary committee probing the allegations there was evidence of secret detention centers outside the United States, but there was no definite proof they had existed in Europe.

"Whatever stronger action could be taken from the European Union, be it in relation to Guantanamo, or secret places in detention -- here, or whatever -- would be, in my opinion, most welcome," he said.

Bellinger said there was "understandable uncomfortableness" about the holding of al Qaeda suspects at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, but there were not many suggestions as to an alternative.



Copyright © 2006 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters. Reuters shall not be liable for any errors or delays in the content, or for any actions taken in reliance thereon.


Copyright © 2006 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.
Questions or Comments
Privacy Policy -Terms of Service - Copyright/IP Policy - Ad Feedback

US Faces UN Questioning On Torture CBS News
Questions To Focus On Secret CIA Prisons, War On Terror
The U.N. Committee Against Torture, the global body's watchdog for a 22-year-old treaty forbidding prisoner abuse, will quiz U.S. officials on a series of issues ranging from Washington's interpretation of the absolute ban on torture to its interrogation methods in prisons such as Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. The United States, like the 140 other nations that have signed the Convention Against Torture, must submit reports to the committee to show it is applying the rules. "U.S. officials from four Executive Branch agencies are in the hot seat," said CBS foreign affairs analyst Pamela Falk. "Both the issue of torture of detainees in U.S. custody and reports of secret prisons have created an atmosphere of distrust of the United States by both allies and adversaries and the testimony of key U.S. officials will be scrutinized," she said. The U.S. mission to the U.N.'s European headquarters in Geneva said it has sent a written reply to the committee's questions, but that it would refrain from commenting ahead of its sessions with the committee on Friday and Monday. Its 25-member team for the hearings will be headed by State Department legal adviser John B. Bellinger III, and includes officials from the Defense, Justice and Homeland Security departments. "Obviously this is a difficult time for the United States with numerous allegations that have been made, but we don't shrink away from answering the questions," Bellinger told reporters in Brussels on Thursday, where he was meeting European Union and NATO officials. "We've taken the process very seriously." In its 87-page report filed in January — some four years behind schedule — Washington insisted it is "unequivocally opposed" to torture and that its commitment to the ban "remains unchanged" since the U.S. Senate ratified the convention in October 1994. But the Geneva-based committee, a panel of 10 independent experts who meet twice a year, said the United States' legal interpretation of torture in Department of Justice memorandums in 2002 and 2004 "seems to be much more restrictive than previous United Nations standards." The committee is demanding the United States explain why it established secret prisons, what rules and methods of interrogation it employs, and whether the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush assumes responsibility for alleged acts of torture committed by American agents outside U.S. territory. "In view of the numerous allegations of torture and ill-treatment of persons in detention under the jurisdiction of (the United States) and the case of the Abu Ghraib prison, what specific measures have been taken to identify and remedy problems in the command and operation of those detention facilities?" the committee has asked. It has also questioned more specifically whether there has been any "independent investigation regarding the possible responsibility of the high-ranking officials of the administration, including the CIA, the Department of Defense, the Department of Justice and the armed forces, for authorizing or consenting in any way" to acts of torture. Criticism by the U.N. panel brings no penalties beyond international scrutiny. The committee is expected to issue conclusions when it wraps up its session May 19. Washington's report said President Bush "has made clear that the United States stands against and will not tolerate torture under any circumstances." It noted that it has a separate system of military justice for its armed forces personnel, which is responsible for handling claims of abuse from detainees in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Allegations concerning CIA activities are currently under review by the agency's Inspector General, the report said. "When allegations of abuses arise, they in all cases will be investigated and, if substantiated, prosecuted," the report said. Washington neither confirms nor denies allegations of secret prisons on grounds that it refuses to comment on intelligence matters. But the committee cautioned that enforced disappearances of suspects "can be considered a form of torture" and asked for details on the U.S. policy of "rendition." U.S. officials have acknowledged flying up to 150 of the most serious terror suspects from one country to another, but said they receive "diplomatic assurances" from authorities that they won't use torture on the detainees they receive. But rights groups say some have been tortured anyway and that the United States is violating the treaty in other ways. "There are certain things that are not permissible no matter what," said Jennifer Daskal, who heads Human Rights Watch's U.S. advocacy program. "Torture is one of those things, and there is no justification for torture."

CIA Director Porter Goss Resigns
By JENNIFER LOVEN, Associated Press Writer
4 minutes ago

CIA Director Porter Goss resigned unexpectedly Friday, leaving behind a spy agency still battling to recover from the scars of intelligence failures before America's worst terrorist attack and faulty information that formed the U.S. rationale for invading Iraq.

It was the latest move in a second-term shake-up of President Bush's team.

Making the announcement from the Oval Office, Bush called Goss' tenure one of transition.

"He has led ably," Bush said, Goss at his side. "He has a five-year plan to increase the analysts and operatives."

Goss said the trust, confidence and latitude that Bush placed in him "is something I could have never imagined."

" I believe the agency is on a very even keel, sailing well," Goss said. "I honestly believe that we have improved dramatically."

The president did not name a successor, but said that person would continue Goss' reforms.

"As a result, this country will be more secure," Bush said. "We've got to win the war on terror, and the Central Intelligence Agency is a vital part of the war. So I thank you for your service."

When Bush nominated Goss in August 2004, in the midst of the president's re-election campaign, he said he would rely on the advice of the CIA officer-turned-politician on the sensitive issue of intelligence reform.

"He knows the CIA inside and out," Bush said in a Rose Garden announcement at the time. "He's the right man to lead this important agency at this critical moment in our nation's history."

Goss, a former congressman from Florida, head of the House Intelligence Committee and CIA agent, had been at the helm of the agency only since September 2004.

He came under fire almost immediately, in part because he brought with him several top aides from Congress who were considered highly political for the CIA.

He had particularly poor relations with segments of the agency's powerful clandestine service. In a bleak assessment, California Rep. Jane Harman (news, bio, voting record), the Intelligence Committee's top Democrat, recently said, "The CIA is in a free fall," noting that employees with a combined 300 years of experience have left or been pushed out.

Under Goss and the sweeping intelligence overhaul Congress approved in December 2004, the CIA lost considerable clout among U.S. spy agencies. With the installation of the country's first national intelligence director, John Negroponte, Goss no longer sat atop the 16 intelligence agencies. Negroponte took that role — and many of the CIA director's responsibilities. That includes Bush's morning intelligence briefings.

Goss also had some public blunders. In March 2005, just before Negroponte took over, Goss told an audience at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library that he was overwhelmed by the many duties of his job, including devoting five hours out of every day to prepare for and deliver the presential briefings.

"The jobs I'm being asked to do, the five hats that I wear, are too much for this mortal," Goss said. "I'm a little amazed at the workload."

Goss has pressed for aggressive probes about leaked information.

"The damage has been very severe to our capabilities to carry out our mission," he told Congress in February, adding that a federal grand jury should be impaneled to determine "who is leaking this information."

Just two weeks ago, Goss announced the firing of a top intelligence analyst in connection with a Pulitzer Prize-winning story about a network of CIA prisons in Eastern Europe. Such dismissals are highly unusual.

The realignment of Bush's team amid the president's sagging poll standings started with the resignation of Andrew Card as chief of staff and his replacement by Joshua Bolten, who had been the budget director.

There has been rampant speculation that Treasury Secretary John Snow would be leaving.



Copyright © 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.


Copyright © 2006 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.
Questions or Comments
Privacy Policy -Terms of Service - Copyright/IP Policy - Ad Feedback

http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/000505.php

CIA Director Goss Abruptly Resigns Los Angeles Times
CIA Director Porter Goss, who was unable to lift the cloud that hung over the agency since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, resigned today. His resignation brought an unexpected twist to the White House staff shakeups of the past month under new White House chief of staff Joshua Bolten. There was no indication of who would succeed Goss. Goss became Bush's director of Central Intelligence in August 2004, four months before Congress created a new layer of bureaucracy between the CIA and the White House. Bush named John Negroponte to the new post of national intelligence director, supplanting Goss as overseer of the nation's 16 spy agencies and leaving Goss with authority over only the CIA. Negroponte also assumed responsibility for the president's daily intelligence briefing. In brief remarks at the White House, Bush announced Goss' resignation and thanked him for instilling "a sense of professionalism" within the CIA's ranks. "I've established a very close, personal relationship with Porter, which is very important for the director of the CIA," Bush said. "He's spent a lot of time here in the Oval Office. He's given me his candid advice. I appreciate his integrity. I appreciate the honor that he brought to the job." Goss, appearing with Bush, took satisfaction in what he called dramatic improvements in the nation's intelligence capabilities, which he said had kept the United States "very safe." He added: "I would like to report back to you that I believe the agency is on a very even keel, sailing well." Under Goss, the CIA could not shake the reputation it had gained after the Sept. 11 attacks for an inability to sort through the mountains of intelligence it gathers and clearly communicating threats to the president and the American public. Symptomatic was a CIA inspector general's decision this year to investigate alleged ties between the agency's executive director, Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, and a defense contractor accused of seeking to bribe former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R-San Diego), who is serving eight years and four months in prison on bribery charges. Foggo is third in command at the CIA. Goss, a former Republican member of Congress, represented a Florida Gulf Coast district from 1989 until his appointment as CIA director nearly two years ago. He served as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, starting in 1997, and was a co-sponsor of the post-Sept. 11 USA Patriot Act, which gave the government broad new power in its war on terrorism. Before his election to the House, Goss was a CIA clandestine agent for 10 years, retiring in 1971 after nearly dying from blood poisoning and a heart infection. Now 65, Goss graduated from Yale University, where he majored in Greek, in 1960.
By Joel Havemann, Times Staff Writer
CIA director Goss resigns KXLY
CIA Director Porter Goss Resigns San Francisco Chronicle
Xinhua - BBC News - MSNBC - Voice of America - all 443 related »

CIA chief Goss quits Yahoo! News
CIA chief Porter Goss, assigned to rebuild the U.S. spy agency after the twin intelligence breakdowns of September 11 and Iraq, quit under pressure on Friday after less than two years on the job. President George W. Bush gave no explanation for the move, which a senior administration official said Bush had been discussing with Goss' boss, national intelligence director John Negroponte, for the last few weeks. No replacement was named for Goss, who has come under fire inside and outside the agency during a difficult tenure. But an administration official said Negroponte could recommend a successor as early as Monday. Bush is pursuing a shake-up of his staff in an attempt to present a new face on his team and rebound from sagging poll numbers. He now faces the difficult task of finding a high-profile candidate prepared to take over an agency in turmoil. The CIA lost clout when it fell under a newly-created director of national intelligence as part of reforms enacted in response to intelligence failures over the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Some bureaucratic wrangling resulted as the new intelligence arm sought to assert itself over the CIA and met opposition from the spy agency. At his confirmation hearing in September 2004, Goss said the CIA chief should have direct access to the president, a role the national intelligence director adopted for himself. But he also pledged to restore luster to the agency where he once worked. "My attitude toward the intelligence community and, I guess, my alma mater, the CIA, is one of tough love," he told Congress. White House officials sought to put the best face possible on the Goss resignation. "The best way to describe it is when you ask somebody to do very difficult things during a period of transition, it often makes sense to hand off the reins to somebody else to take the agency forward," the senior administration official said. The announcement was made in the Oval Office, with Goss and Negroponte by the side of the president. "Porter's tenure at the CIA was one of transition. He's helped this agency become integrated into the intelligence community. That was a tough job. He's led ably," Bush said. Goss quickly became the object of intense dislike among some career intelligence officers, particularly those in the clandestine service, who left the agency in large numbers. "Thank God," was the reaction of one former senior spy who spoke on condition of anonymity. "It's gotten so bad there, it's just a charade at the moment. There's no senior leadership."

IRAQ INTELLIGENCE FAILURES
Goss, brought in after George Tenet resigned in the face of mounting criticism of his handling of intelligence before the Iraq war, said the CIA was "on a very even keel, it's sailing well." "I honestly believe that we have improved dramatically your goals for our nation's intelligence capabilities, which are in fact the things that I think that are keeping us very safe," Goss said with Bush at his side. But Goss had his critics, including a number of former colleagues on Capitol Hill, where he served between 1989 and his appointment to the CIA post. "I've never been as concerned about our nation's security as I am this week," U.S. Rep. Jane Harman (news, bio, voting record) of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said on the floor of the House last week. "We still don't have a handle on al Qaeda," she said. "Our intelligence reorganization is in a slow start-up, and the CIA is in free fall." Asked who should be the next CIA chief, former CIA director Stansfield Turner told Reuters: "I think they want someone with managerial experience, not an academic, not a politician. Somebody who has managed sizable organizations." Former CIA agent and author Melissa Boyle Mahle said she believed Goss had been thinking about leaving for a while "and given that his whole stewardship has been troubled over there, that now is the time." Kevin O'Connell, a former CIA analyst who is director of the Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis, said Goss' departure was an important development because the CIA has had "a bit of an identity crisis over the last year" in past because of the new directorate of national intelligence.
By Tabassum Zakaria and David Morgan

CIA Chief Goss Leaves CIA in Latest Change Yahoo! News
CIA Director Porter Goss resigned suddenly Friday, nudged out after a turmoil-filled 18 months at the spy agency as it struggled to forge a new identity in an era of intelligence blunders and government overhauls. Goss offered little explanation in a brief appearance with President Bush and a televised address to agency personnel. "CIA remains the gold standard," he said. "When I came to CIA in September of 2004, I wanted to accomplish some very specific things, and we have made great strides on all fronts." But the agency, as well as the Bush administration, has been far from peaceful. Goss' departure was the White House's third major personnel move in just over a month, aimed at reinvigorating Bush's second term. Among those talked about as possible replacements are Bush's homeland security adviser, Frances Fragos Townsend; David Shedd, chief of staff to National Intelligence Director John Negroponte, and Mary Margaret Graham, Negroponte's deputy for intelligence collection. Goss said he was willing to stay awhile for a smooth transition, but there also was talk that an acting chief could be named. Making Friday afternoon's announcement from the Oval Office, Bush said Goss' tenure had been one of transition. The director, a former CIA agent and then Florida congressman, had been given the job only a little over a year and a half ago. The president said, with Goss at his side, "He's instilled a sense of professionalism. He honors the proud history of the CIA, an organization that is known for its secrecy and accountability." It was not entirely clear why Goss resigned so unexpectedly. An intelligence official, speaking only on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of his position, said Goss had stood up for the agency when there were differences with National Intelligence Director John Negroponte's office, which was created about a year ago. Goss was taking a stand against "micromanagement," the official said and wanted the agency to "remain what its name says, the 'Central' Intelligence Agency." With the backing of the White House, Negroponte recently raised with Goss the prospect that he should leave, and the two talked about that possibility, a senior administration official said. That official also spoke on condition of anonymity, in order to give a fuller account of events. Agency officials dismissed suggestions that the resignation was tied to controversy surrounding the CIA's executive director, Dusty Foggo. The FBI is investigating whether Foggo's longtime friend, defense contractor Brent Wilkes, provided prostitutes, limousines and hotel suites to a California congressman who pleaded guilty to taking bribes from Wilkes and others in exchange for government contracts. CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano said Goss' resignation also was not related to the recent firing of a CIA officer the director said had unauthorized contacts with the press — a firing that found support within the agency and the White House. Bush nominated Goss in 2004, in the midst of a re-election campaign that was riddled with accusations about the botched prewar intelligence on Iraq. Bush said he would rely on the advice of Goss on the sensitive issue of intelligence reform. Goss, the former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, came under fire almost immediately, in part because he brought with him several top aides from Congress who were considered highly political for the CIA. They developed particularly poor relations with segments of the agency's clandestine service. By December, Congress passed the most sweeping intelligence overhaul in 50 years. One result: The CIA that took pride in being the premiere element of the spy community found itself relegated to a crowded second tier of 15 other agencies. In a bleak assessment, California Rep. Jane Harman (news, bio, voting record), the Intelligence Committee's top Democrat, recently said, "The CIA is in a free fall," noting that employees with a combined 300 years of experience had left or been pushed out. Goss also had some public missteps. In March 2005, just before Negroponte took over, he told an audience at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library that he was overwhelmed by the duties of his job. "The jobs I'm being asked to do, the five hats that I wear, are too much for this mortal," Goss said. "I'm a little amazed at the workload." A number of former congressional colleagues released statements praising Goss Friday, but not all were kind. Sen. Ron Wyden (news, bio, voting record), D-Ore., said his concerns about Goss, whose nomination he opposed, were never resolved. "Mr. Goss resisted efforts to lift the veil of secrecy around the intelligence failures of 9/11," he said, urging public release of the CIA inspector general's report on the Sept. 11 attacks. Bush aides have been looking for ways to rescue his presidency from sagging poll ratings and difficulties with the Iraq war and his agenda in Congress. The shake-up began with the resignation of Andrew Card as chief of staff and his replacement by Joshua Bolten. Other changes have included the replacement of press secretary Scott McClellan with Fox News commentator Tony Snow. It wasn't immediately clear what's next for Goss, 67. He was supposed to retire after representing a Republican district on Florida's West Coast for 16 years, but became CIA director when Bush called in 2004. Many former directors take consulting positions on various corporate boards. Goss and his wife own a central Virginia farm, where they raises cattle, sheep and chickens.
By KATHERINE SHRADER, Associated Press Writer

Bush Ends Goss's Stormy Tenure By Forcing Him Out as CIA Chief

By Dafna Linzer and Walter Pincus

Porter J. Goss was forced to step down yesterday as CIA director, ending a turbulent 18-month tenure marked by an exodus of some of the agency's top talent and growing White House dissatisfaction with his leadership during a time of war.

To view the entire article, go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...er=emailarticle

The Fix-It Man Leaves, but The Agency's Cracks Remain

By Dana Priest

Porter J. Goss was brought into the CIA to quell what the White House viewed as a partisan insurgency against the administration and to re-energize a spy service that failed to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks or accurately assess Iraq's weapons capability.

To view the entire article, go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...er=emailarticle

http://news.monstersandcritics.com/northam...s_failed_at_CIA

How Goss failed at CIA
By Martin Sieff May 6, 2006, 0:22 GMT

WASHINGTON, DC, United States (UPI) -- J Porter Goss took over the CIA, confident he had all the answers. He did. The problem was they weren`t the answers to the questions he had to deal with.

Porter`s shock resignation Friday took Washington by surprise. He had served for little more than a year head of the nation`s main intelligence gathering organization.

President George W. Bush announced Goss`s resignation with the outgoing CIA chief sitting beside him in the Oval Office. 'He has led ably,' the president said. 'He has a five-year plan to increase the analysts and operatives.'

Bush also praised Goss for helping to 'make this country a safer place.' And Goss, a former veteran Republican congressman from Florida and long-time Bush loyalist, was also upbeat and on-message. 'I would like to report to you that the agency (CIA) is back on a very even keel and sailing well,' he said.

But no amount of spin could disguise the fact that Goss was the latest casualty of new White House Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten`s ambitious plan shake up and revitalize an administration hammered by $70 a barrel plus oil prices, rising casualties and violence in Iraq and tumbling opinion poll ratings.

Goss`s resignation was announced the same day that White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan gave his last press briefing. He is being replaced by veteran Fox News commentator Tony Snow. And even Karl Rove, the president`s chief political strategist has given up the hands-on detailed control of administration policy he had enjoyed since the beginning of the president`s second term of office.

Goss had the vision of transforming the CIA into a lean, mean intel machine that would focus on the war on terror, put thousands more human agents into the field and provide the U.S. armed forces, especially the Army and Marine forces fighting the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, with real time intelligence that could be of far greater operational use to them.

Goss had a background serving in the CIA back in the 1960s, and he had long been regarded on Capitol Hill as one of the most knowledgeable and respected figures in Congress in dealing with intelligence issues. He also enjoyed the president`s full confidence. And expectations were high when he got the job. Unlike so many of his predecessors, he was given a literal blank check in terms of funding and resources by a sympathetic, ask-no-questions GOP majority in Congress. He pushed through an ambitious five year plan that -- on paper -- will transform the agency.

However, Goss leaves office with no striking intelligence achievements to his credit, the most remarked upon structural and cultural problems within the CIA still crippling its effectiveness, and a senior staff far more demoralized and stripped of influence than when he arrived.

Despite his long experience in Congress, Goss had never had any serious management experience in government or out of it. He proved a very weak administrator at the CIA and rapidly alienated many senior staffers. He was confident from his own service in the agency that he knew street-smart details of operational realities, but his own espionage experience was three and a half decades ago at the height of the Cold War.

His arrival and early heavy hand set off so much personal and political feuding at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia that agency insiders told reporters was turning the venerable, globe-spanning institution into a soap opera.

Goss tried to ride above the turmoil. Newsweek magazine reported that in a private question and answer session with agency employees on Sept. 22, 2005, Goss was asked why veteran agency officers were resigning in numbers unprecedented for since the Carter administration. He replied, 'I don`t do personnel.'

The answer was reminiscent of the high-handed, confident, publicly abrasive way Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has repeatedly shrugged off criticism of his conduct of the Iraq war. But Goss did not prove as fortunate as Rumsfeld.

'That answer killed him. It destroyed his credibility,' a source with close agency ties told UPI Friday. 'What else is there for a CIA chief to do? The job is all about choosing the right personnel and evaluating them accurately.'

Goss also had an adversarial relationship with the media, despite the greatly increased sense of national responsibility that pervaded the nation, including the media following the mega-terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Goss purged senior managers from the agency but he did not appear to have a firm grasp on veteran senior staff and their intelligence assets. Critics charged him with relying too much on his old inner circle of congressional staffers. In his Sept. 22, question and answer session, Newsweek reported, Goss was asked why he had brought to Langley with him a former congressional staffer who, as a junior CIA officer, once got into trouble for shoplifting. He replied that everyone made mistakes. Senior staff compared that answer with Goss`s relentless criticisms of their own more impressive careers and were not impressed, agency insiders told UPI.

Goss clashed with senior officials in the agency`s Directorate of Operations. His supporters told the press and sympathetic lawmakers in Congress that the officials had been opposing Goss`s reform efforts. But in the private world of the U.S. intelligence community, this reaction was widely seen as irresponsible, and as a lack of loyalty by Goss towards the troops he led.

Goss could not even retain the confidence of senior staff he had promoted himself. He made Robert Richer deputy director of operations. Richer resigned less than a year later and later informed the Senate Select Committee on intelligence that he had told Goss to his face in a private meeting on Sept. 22, 2005 that the CIA director was out of touch with his own agency.

More veteran Middle East officers resigned before their retirement or career stints required during Goss`s brief tenure than under any previous CIA director since Adm. Stansfield Turner, who held the job for President Jimmy Carter.

Copyright 2006 by United Press International

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/05/05/...in1592486.shtml


Sources: CIA Director Forced Out
Porter Goss Steps Down After Leading The Embattled Agency Since 2004

(Page 1 of 2)WASHINGTON, May 5, 2006
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
President Bush, right, announces that CIA Director Porter Goss, left, will be resigining in a statement in the Oval Office of the White House, Friday, May 5, 2006 in Washington. (AP)

Agency officials dismissed suggestions that the resignation was tied to controversy surrounding the CIA's executive director and allegations that his friend provided prostitutes and limos to a congressman who pleaded guilty to taking bribes.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(CBS/AP) CIA Director Porter Goss resigned unexpectedly Friday, and although President Bush says the decision was mutual, CBS News chief White House correspondent Jim Axelrod reports that U.S. officials familiar with the CIA say Goss was forced out.

The sources tell Axelrod that the White House was unhappy with the lingering tensions between Goss and National Intelligence Director John Negroponte. Goss was miffed at being passed over for the top intelligence job when it was created last year. He no longer briefed the president each morning; Negroponte did.

Inside CIA headquarters, sources say, they couldn't be happier, reports Axelrod. Goss, a former CIA operative brought in 18 months ago to reform the agency, was disliked intensely. The former congressman was also supposed to smooth over relations between the White House and the CIA, strained in the run-up to the war in Iraq.

Goss leaves after a turmoil-filled 18 months at the agency as it struggled to forge a new identity in an era of intelligence blunders and government overhauls. He offered little explanation in a brief appearance with President Bush, a televised address to agency personnel and a written statement.

“CIA remains the gold standard,” he said. “When I came to CIA in September of 2004, I wanted to accomplish some very specific things, and we have made great strides on all fronts.”

But the agency, as well as the Bush administration, has been far from peaceful. Goss' departure was the White House's third major personnel move in just over a month. The moves are aimed at reinvigorating Bush's second term.

But CBS News consultant Michael Scheuer, a former CIA analyst, told said that Goss’ abrupt departure will do more harm than good at an agency already hampered by rapid turnover.

“Goss at least was a sign of stability and now that's gone,” said Scheuer. “The American intelligence community is in a terrible state of disarray at the moment, much weaker than it was on 9-11.”

Goss’ resignation, says Scheuer, “is just another problem that American security as a whole did not need.”

Sources say that Air Force Gen. Mike Hayden, Negroponte's top deputy, is the most likely candidate to replace Goss, reports Axelrod. An announcement could come as early as Monday.

Hayden served as National Security Agency director until becoming the nation's No. 2 intelligence official one year ago. Since December, he has aggressively defended the Bush administration's warrantless surveillance program. Hayden was one of its chief architects.

Goss said he was willing to stay for a while for a smooth transition, but there also was talk that an acting chief could be named.

Making Friday afternoon's announcement from the Oval Office, Bush said Goss' tenure had been one of transition. The director, a former CIA operative and then a Florida congressman, got the job only a little over a year and a half ago.

With Goss at his side, the president said, “He's instilled a sense of professionalism. He honors the proud history of the CIA, an organization that is known for its secrecy and accountability.”

An intelligence official, speaking only on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of his position, said Goss had stood up for the agency when there were differences with Negroponte's office, which was created about a year ago.

Goss was taking a stand against “micromanagement,” the official said and wanted the agency to “remain what its name says, the 'Central' Intelligence Agency.”

With the backing of the White House, Negroponte recently raised with Goss the prospect that he should leave, and the two talked about that possibility, a senior administration official said. That official also spoke on condition of anonymity, in order to give a fuller account of events.

Agency officials dismissed suggestions that the resignation was tied to controversy surrounding the CIA's executive director, Kyle “Dusty” Foggo. The FBI is investigating whether Foggo's longtime friend, defense contractor Brent Wilkes, provided prostitutes, limousines and hotel suites to a California congressman who pleaded guilty to taking bribes from Wilkes and others in exchange for government contracts.

CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano said Goss' resignation also was not related to the recent firing of a CIA officer the director said had unauthorized contacts with the press — a firing that found support within the agency and the White House.

Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., an Intelligence Committee member, said many in Washington want to know the full story. “I suspect that his decision could be based on any number of things that weren't stated, including a strong desire just to get on with his personal life after many years of public service,” Issa said.

Bush nominated Goss in 2004, in the midst of a re-election campaign that was riddled with accusations about the botched prewar intelligence on Iraq. Bush said he would rely on the advice of Goss on the sensitive issue of intelligence reform.

Goss, the former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, came under fire almost immediately, in part because he brought with him several top aides from Congress who were considered highly political for the CIA. They developed particularly poor relations with segments of the agency's clandestine service.

By December, Congress passed the most sweeping intelligence overhaul in 50 years. One result: The CIA that took pride in being the premier element of the spy community found itself relegated to a crowded second tier of 15 other agencies.

California Rep. Jane Harman, the Intelligence Committee's top Democrat, said CIA employees with a combined 300 years of experience have left or been pushed out. “This has left the agency in free fall,” she said.

Goss also had some public missteps. In March 2005, just before Negroponte took over, he told an audience at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library that he was overwhelmed by the duties of his job.

“The jobs I'm being asked to do, the five hats that I wear, are too much for this mortal,” Goss said. “I'm a little amazed at the workload.”

A number of former congressional colleagues released statements praising Goss on Friday, but not all were kind. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said his concerns about Goss, whose nomination he opposed, were never resolved.

“Mr. Goss resisted efforts to lift the veil of secrecy around the intelligence failures of 9/11,” he said, urging public release of the CIA inspector general's report on the Sept. 11 attacks.

Bush aides have been looking for ways to rescue his presidency from sagging poll ratings and difficulties with the Iraq war and his agenda in Congress.

The shake-up began with the resignation of Andrew Card as chief of staff and his replacement by Joshua Bolten. Other changes have included the replacement of press secretary Scott McClellan with Fox News commentator Tony Snow.

It wasn't immediately clear what's next for Goss, 67. He was supposed to retire after representing a Republican district on Florida's West Coast for 16 years, but he became CIA director when Bush called in 2004.

Many former directors take consulting positions on various corporate boards. Goss and his wife own a central Virginia farm, where they raise cattle, sheep and chickens.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/na...-home-headlines
From the Los Angeles Times
NEWS ANALYSIS
Negroponte Still Faces Uphill Battle to Change System
By Doyle McManus and Peter Spiegel
Times Staff Writer
8:34 PM PDT, May 5, 2006

WASHINGTON — After a little more than a year in his newly created job, John D. Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, has won an initial battle to establish authority over the vast U.S. intelligence community -- Porter J. Goss, who resisted Negroponte's moves to limit the autonomy of the CIA, is gone.

But Negroponte faces a larger and much more difficult challenge: a struggle with Donald H. Rumsfeld's Department of Defense, which runs more than 80 percent of the nation's intelligence budget and is busy expanding its role even further.

Negroponte's job is to coordinate the work of 16 different intelligence agencies, including the CIA and the giant National Security Agency, which eavesdrops on international communications, as well as the Energy Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration. The post was created in 2005 in response to charges -- made most tellingly by the commission that investigated the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 -- that the federal government's intelligence effort was uncoordinated and needed central direction.

When he took office in April 2005, Negroponte, a veteran diplomat, moved quickly to exert his authority over the CIA. He took over the job of giving President Bush his daily intelligence briefing, a task that once allowed CIA directors to bond with the presidents they served. He took a central role in briefing Congress on intelligence issues. He transferred some CIA officers to new joint intelligence centers. And when it appeared that Goss was not fully on board, officials said, Negroponte and his deputy, Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, quietly complained to the White House -- apparently contributing to Goss' decision to resign Friday.

But Negroponte, who once worked as an aide to former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, has been much more cautious in confronting the Pentagon, officials and members of Congress have said. (Kissinger once complained that Rumsfeld was the toughest bureaucratic warrior he ever met.)

When Negroponte has sought to push through changes at the Defense Department, "They told him to take a flying leap," said one U.S. intelligence official who said he was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter. "If you get the shove from DOD, where else can you go?"

The Pentagon has said it is cooperating with Negroponte. But even before the intelligence director's job was created, Rumsfeld made it clear he thought its power should be limited, and he lobbied successfully in Congress to curtail much of Negroponte's clout over personnel and budgets.

Rumsfeld explained at the time that he did not want to weaken the Pentagon's ability to deliver tactical military intelligence to soldiers in the field by involving a new authority outside the military.

"We would not want to place new barriers or filters between the military combatant commanders and (defense intelligence) agencies when they perform as combat support agencies," Rumsfeld said in congressional testimony at the time.

But in recent months, the Pentagon has asserted its authority to expand its own intelligence operations far beyond tactical support for soldiers. The move that has drawn criticism from some members of Congress, who say they worry about an effort to create parallel intelligence-gathering capabilities -- including reportedly setting up covert special operations teams to spy in foreign countries.

The Pentagon is in the middle of a wide-reaching restructuring of its own intelligence gathering and analysis abilities, run by Stephen A. Cambone, a close Rumsfeld aide who is the department's intelligence chief, and his deputy, Lt. Gen. William Boykin. Some critics have warned that the effort is turning into a bid for even more control over national intelligence assets.

"They started from an advantageous position because, even 10 years, ago they had about 85 percent of the intelligence budget," said Steven Aftergood, a civilian analyst who tracks intelligence issues for the Federation of American Scientists. "But with the onset of war in Iraqi, intel (intelligence) support for military operations has only increased, and the Pentagon has been increasingly assertive about its role as an intelligence gatherer and analyst."

Last month, Rumsfeld approved a new Defense Joint Intelligence Operations Center, which officials have described as an effort to centralize all military intelligence to better serve commanders in the field.

In a briefing to reporters, Boykin said military officials were in talks with the CIA to allow the new center to win access to the agency's raw intelligence, a move he characterized as an effort to get analysts in combat zones all the information they might need about potential threats.

"We want access to databases from other agencies, where appropriate," Boykin said.

Already, the Pentagon's intelligence budget dwarfs that of the CIA. Although the budgets remain classified, the CIA is believed to get about $5 billion annually, less than the Pentagon's NSA, which gets $6 billion to $8 billion a year. The Defense Department's National Reconnaissance Office, the operator of military satellites, also gets $6 billion to $8 billion a year.

Other Pentagon agencies -- like the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the department's mapping office with a budget of about $3 billion, and the Defense Intelligence Agency, which gets $1 billion to $3 billion annually -- also have sizable budgets, as do the individual military services, which all have their own intelligence-gathering operations.

Negroponte declined to speak about these issues in the wake of Goss' resignation Friday. But in a speech last month, he said -- in an implicit criticism of at least some of the 16 intelligence agencies he supervises -- that his basic goal is to "optimize the (intelligence) community's total performance as opposed to optimizing its members' individual operations."

"We are in the process of remaking a loose confederation into a unified enterprise," he added.

His key weapon, he said, would be control over the intelligence budget, which he called "a powerful integrating force." By controlling which agencies and which programs are funded, he said, he can nudge the separate agencies toward greater collaboration.

Still, Negroponte acknowledged at a Senate hearing in March, there has been open conflict with the Pentagon over at least one issue: personnel. The law setting up his job gave Negroponte the authority to transfer professionals from individual intelligence agencies into joint centers or other agencies to make the integration process work. But the Pentagon has made that process difficult, officials said, in part by issuing a directive that any such transfer required the "concurrence" of its intelligence chief, Cambone.

"We look at those people as intelligence people, and the secretary (Rumsfeld) certainly looks on those as DOD folks," Negroponte said.

"I think we'll work our way through it," he said.

Times staff writer Greg Miller contributed to this report.

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_le...iven_for_go.htm

May 5, 2006

Reasons given for Goss resignation are but lipstick on a pig!
A political appointment goes awry
by Len Hart


http://www.opednews.com

The abrupt "resignation" of Porter Goss is proof of Bush's failure to lead; his appointment, however, may have compromised national security.

The official story is that Goss called it quits because he failed to address the reasons he was named to the post. In mainstream media speak, Goss quit after 19 months of trying to "mend" the agency "…embattled over the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and the faulty intelligence about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction."

That's lipstick on a pig.

Bush appointed Goss amid great ballyhoo. It was, however, a political appointment from the get go. Goss's real job was to purge the CIA of anyone daring to question Bush's bogus and various rationales for waging aggressive war against a nation that had never attacked the United States and, in fact, posed no strategic threat to the United States whatsoever. His was a partisan appointment and because it was, his efforts to politicize the CIA may have compromised national security.

Now —if Goss was not up to the job, the responsibility must lie with the man who made the appointment: George W. Bush. Clearly -Bush wanted a toady at Langley and sadly, for the nation, he got one. That Goss is now out after a short 19 months of making enemies is nothing short of an indictment of Bush's utterly failed regime.

What intelligence failures?

Much is made in the MSM of "intelligence failures" leading up to 911. It has since been learned that Bush had numerous warnings about 911 and did nothing. There is a growing body of evidence that there was specific information even up to the very day of the attacks. Still, the United States failed to scramble fighters until after it was too late. In view of the fact that Dick Cheney was in charge of gaming a terrorist attack that very day, serious consideration should be given to bringing criminal charges against Dick Cheney. Instead, the Bush administration sought to make the CIA the scapegoat. Most certainly, Goss -as partisan as they come -was seen to be the man to bring the CIA to heel. It would appear that another nefarious plan has failed.

Since Bush tried shift the all the blame for 911 intelligence failures, it has been learned that Bush and Blair literally conspired to "fix" the intelligence to support a decision already made. Bush and Blair, according to the famous Downing Street Memos, had decided to attack Iraq but needed a pretext. WMD was it. The timeline of events supports that view: Colin Powell's address to the United Nations was known at the time to have consisted of old, out of date satellite photos and at least one plagiarized student paper. There was also the case of U.S. Ambassador Joe Wilson who blew the whistle on the bogus "yellow cake" story.

It's hard not to conclude that Bush appointed a GOP partisan who took with him to the CIA not only Bush's political agenda but also his numerous justifications for carrying on a perpetual, so-called "war on terrorism". That the war itself is may be a fraud has not kept Bush from citing it as justification for his arrogant and arbitrary abrogations of due process of law and the other "freedoms" for which we are said to be waging this so-called "war". Goss was supposted to turn the CIA into a partisan outfit, an organization that would tell Bush what he wanted to hear. Does that make you feel safer?

If that is the case -and I think it is -then it should be considered among the many impeachable offenses that will be charged to George Bush. Any attempt to politicize the CIA weakens the nation, compromises national security, and, in many ways, weakens the militarily by compromising the very intelligence upon which defense decisions are made.

Bush Likely to Nominate Hayden as New CIA Head, Official Says Bloomberg
Michael Hayden, a veteran intelligence official who has strongly defended the government's warrantless eavesdropping on suspected terrorists, is likely to be nominated by President George W. Bush to run the Central Intelligence Agency, a senior administration official said. Hayden, 61, is currently the principal deputy director in the Office of National Intelligence, which was formed last year to coordinate all U.S. intelligence functions. Previously, he served as director of the National Security Agency, which is responsible for monitoring and evaluating foreign electronic communications. Hayden would replace Porter Goss, who resigned yesterday as CIA director after serving less than two years in that post. The job of CIA director has become less important since the creation last year of the national intelligence office, whose director, John Negroponte, has taken over a number of functions once performed by the CIA chief. Hayden is a logical choice to run the CIA because of his long experience in the intelligence community, said James Bamford, whose 1982 book, "The Puzzle Palace,'' explored the secretive domain of the NSA. "Hayden's looked at as the most professional person in the world of intelligence,'' Bamford said in an interview. "NSA, which he ran, is the largest intelligence agency in the world.'' The one disadvantage of the appointment for Bush, Bamford said, would be Hayden's central role in devising the eavesdropping program. It has been highly controversial since it was revealed last year, and some Democrats are calling for a congressional inquiry.

Investigation Possible
"Would you really want him to be DCI and then have a congressional investigation if the Democrats retake Congress?'' Bamford said. Bush's intention to nominate Hayden to the CIA post was first reported by Time magazine, which said in an article posted last night on its Web site that the announcement could come as early as Monday. The White House didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. Hayden first came to public prominence in 1999 when he was named NSA director. The NSA was so secretive that it had been dubbed "No Such Agency.'' Yet Hayden decided to change what he saw as public misconceptions about it and began courting the press and inviting reporters to off-the-record talks in his home, James Risen wrote in his book, "State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration.'' After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Hayden authorized a comprehensive effort to conduct surveillance on phone calls without warrants. Known simply as "The Program,'' the initiative has generated an intense debate about its legality.

Program Defended
Bush has defended the program's legality, saying that a 1978 law designed to allow surveillance of suspected terrorists was outdated and outmoded -- even though the act allowed the government to install wiretaps with a 72-hour grace period before formally seeking a warrant. Government statistics show that of the more than 18,000 wiretap requests made under the law since its inception, only 5 were rejected. In an unusual step, Hayden publicly defended the new spying program in a January speech at the National Press Club in Washington. "It's focused, it's targeted and it's very carefully done,'' Hayden said. "You shouldn't worry.'' Experts on telecommunications and the NSA have said the agency specializes in wide-ranging monitoring of electronic communications. More targeted wiretaps are usually left to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

`Humint'
If Hayden becomes CIA head, Bamford said, it would be his first venture into the area of "humint,'' or human intelligence, as opposed to electronic surveillance. "Hayden spent his entire career as an intelligence techie,'' Bamford said. "So this will be the first time he's heavily involved in humint.'' In April 2005, Hayden became principal deputy director of national intelligence. In that post, he has run the daily operations of the office, which was created last year by Congress in response to the failure to thwart the Sept. 11 attacks. Earlier in his career, Hayden, an Air Force lieutenant general, served at the Headquarters U.S. European Command in Stuttgart, Germany; with the White House National Security Council; and with U.S. forces in South Korea. He's the recipient of a Bronze Star.
By Richard Keil
Goss resigns as CIA director after 18 months MSN Money
The Next Head of the CIA? TIME
MTV.com - Wall Street Journal - The Grand Rapids Press - FOX News - all 970 related »

CIA Chief Goss Resigns

WASHINGTON-CIA Director Porter J. Goss resigned under pressure,
ending a tumultuous 19-month tenure marked by clashes with the
nation's new intelligence chief over the CIA's reduced role in the
restructured spy community. By Greg Miller.
http://email.latimes.com/cgi-bin1/DM/y/e2V...Io30G2B0HVzA0Ed

Spy Czar, Rumsfeld in a Turf War
http://email.latimes.com/cgi-bin1/DM/y/e2V...Io30G2B0HVzB0Ee

http://www.military.com/NewsContent/0,13319,96416,00.html

General Favored to Get CIA Post
Associated Press | May 06, 2006
WASHINGTON - The White House planned to quickly nominate a new CIA director to replace outgoing Porter Goss, who offered little explanation in announcing his resignation from the embattled agency.

The leading candidate to replace him is Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, top deputy to National Intelligence Director John Negroponte, said a senior administration official. An announcement could come as early as Monday.

Hayden was National Security Agency director until becoming the nation's No. 2 intelligence official a year ago. Since December, he has aggressively defended the Bush administration's warrantless surveillance program. He was one of its chief architects.

Goss was scheduled to deliver a commencement speech Saturday at Ohio's Tiffin University, one of a growing number of schools to offer national security studies programs.

Goss spent 40 years in federal and local government, including 16 years as a congressman and 10 years as a CIA operative in the 1960s and '70s. He stepped down as the agency's director after 19 tumultuous months, as the agency struggled to forge a new identity in an era of government overhauls stemming from Sept. 11 and the flawed prewar intelligence on Iraq.

He offered little publicly to explain his decision.

"CIA remains the gold standard," he said in a statement. "When I came to CIA in September of 2004, I wanted to accomplish some very specific things, and we have made great strides on all fronts."

But the agency, like the Bush administration, has been far from peaceful. Goss' departure was the White House's third major personnel move in just over a month, aimed at reinvigorating President Bush's second term.

Knowledgeable Republicans said Friday night that Hayden was thought to top Bush's short list of candidates to replace Goss. Among others mentioned were Bush's homeland security adviser, Frances Fragos Townsend; David Shedd, Negroponte's chief of staff; and Mary Margaret Graham, Negroponte's deputy for intelligence collection.

It was not clear why Goss resigned so unexpectedly. An intelligence official, speaking only on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of his position, said Goss had stood up for the agency when there were differences with Negroponte's office, which was created about a year ago.

Goss was taking a stand against "micromanagement," the official said, and wanted the agency to "remain what its name says, the 'Central' Intelligence Agency."

With the backing of the White House, Negroponte recently raised with Goss the prospect that he should leave, and the two talked about that possibility, a senior administration official said. That official also spoke on condition of anonymity, in order to give a fuller account of events.

Negroponte, Goss' classmate at Yale University, said in a statement that Goss worked tirelessly during a CIA transition period. "As my friend for almost 50 years, I will miss Porter's day-to-day counsel," he said.

Agency officials dismissed suggestions that the resignation was tied to controversy surrounding the CIA's executive director, Kyle "Dusty" Foggo. The FBI is investigating whether Foggo's longtime friend, defense contractor Brent Wilkes, provided prostitutes, limousines and hotel suites to a California congressman who pleaded guilty to taking bribes from Wilkes and others in exchange for government contracts.

CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano said Goss' resignation also was not related to the recent firing of a CIA officer the director said had unauthorized contacts with the press - a firing that found support within the agency and the White House.

Bush nominated Goss in 2004, in the midst of a re-election campaign that was riddled with accusations about the botched prewar intelligence on Iraq. Bush said he would rely on the advice of Goss on the sensitive issue of intelligence reform.

Goss, the former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, came under fire almost immediately, in part because he brought with him several top aides from Congress who were considered highly political for the CIA. They developed particularly poor relations with segments of the agency's clandestine service.

By December, Congress passed the most sweeping intelligence overhaul in 50 years. One result: The CIA that took pride in being the premier element of the spy community found itself relegated to a crowded second tier of 15 other agencies.

Hayden, the highest ranking military intelligence officer, has been brought into management challenges before. In 1999, he was tapped to shake up the National Security Agency, as the Internet and new communications tools were frustrating the agency's eavesdroppers.

With a Hayden nomination, Democrats would be sure to seize on his intimate connection to Bush's anti-terrorist surveillance program, which has drawn the ire of even some Republicans.

Bush aides have been looking for ways to rescue his presidency from sagging poll ratings and difficulties with the Iraq war and his agenda in Congress.

The shake-up began with the resignation of Andrew Card as chief of staff and his replacement by Joshua Bolten. Other changes have included the replacement of press secretary Scott McClellan with Fox News commentator Tony Snow.

It wasn't immediately clear what's next for Goss, 67. He was supposed to retire after representing a Republican district on Florida's West Coast for 16 years, but he became CIA director when Bush called in 2004.

Many former directors take consulting positions on corporate boards. Goss and his wife own a central Virginia farm, where they raise cattle, sheep and chickens.

Bush denies CIA boss forced out BBC News
The White House has denied US media reports that the president had lost confidence in the CIA chief, after his surprise resignation on Friday. Porter Goss, who was given the job of reforming the agency after a series of intelligence failures, served in the role for less than two years. A White House spokeswoman said there was a "collective agreement" the CIA needed a new leader now. However, Mr Goss said the reason for his departure would stay a "mystery". Speaking on Saturday, Mr Goss declined to comment on his departure, telling CNN that "it's one of those mysteries."

'Move forward'
The US media was full of speculation about Mr Goss' departure. The Washington Post cited senior administration officials as saying President George W Bush had lost confidence in Mr Goss and had decided to replace him months ago. White House spokeswoman Dana Perino called such reports "categorically untrue". "There was a collective agreement that now would be a time that we could have a new CIA director come in and take the ball and move the agency forward," she said. A BBC Washington correspondent says the most likely reason for his departure is that Mr Goss objected to his boss, John Negroponte. Mr Negroponte was appointed to the post of national intelligence director last year. Correspondents say that a replacement for Mr Goss could be announced as early as Monday, with Air Force General Michael Hayden - top deputy to Mr Negroponte - widely tipped to take over.

http://fairuse.100webcustomers.com/nws/nytimes49.htm
May 7, 2006
A Long Legacy of Frustration at C.I.A. Helm
By TIM WEINER
When Porter J. Goss resigned on Friday as director of the C.I.A. he found himself in good company. In one way or another, the job of C.I.A. chief has confounded nearly every man who has held it.

With few exceptions, each of the 18 directors of central intelligence resigned in frustration, was given his walking papers by the president or was pressured out of the agency's headquarters seven miles up the Potomac from the White House.

"Here is one of the most peculiar types of operation any government can have," President Dwight D. Eisenhower once said. "It probably takes a strange kind of genius to run it."

The post was created more than 60 years ago, before the Central Intelligence Agency itself, before the cold war began. The mission was to prevent a second Pearl Harbor. The director would pull together all the military and diplomatic information the United States could gather overseas. He was to be the president's chief intelligence officer. Together they would protect the nation from surprise attack from afar.

Things did not always work out as planned. The threat of the Soviet Union quickly gave rise to the C.I.A. Its espionage operations tried to pierce the iron curtain. Its covert operations tried to change the world.

From the start, the director was supposed to serve as the editor of a secret news service and the general of a secret army, chief executive officer of the C.I.A. and the chairman of the board of the ever-expanding empire of American military intelligence.

Running the "intelligence community," a chimerical construct now made up of 16 agencies and more than 100,000 people, proved almost impossible. "The job had become frankly too big for one person," Mr. Goss said last year.

The first three directors of central intelligence are viewed in the agency's own in-house histories by many as mediocrities. The fourth, Gen. Walter Bedell Smith, was aghast when his agents failed to foresee the course of the Korean War.

He was succeeded by Allen W. Dulles, who at the end of his tenure was attacked by his own commander-in-chief, President Eisenhower, who said he had "suffered an eight-year defeat" in his fight to make the C.I.A. deliver trustworthy intelligence.

Dulles led the C.I.A. into its disastrous invasion at the Bay of Pigs; President John F. Kennedy dismissed him after a decent interval.

The next director, John McCone, was tuned out by President Lyndon B. Johnson when he tried to report the downward course of the Vietnam War. His successor, Richard Helms, was turned out by President Richard M. Nixon after he refused to conceal the crimes of Watergate.

Mr. Helms, admired by his successors as the greatest director of all, remarked on the deep disconnect between the C.I.A. and the White House in a posthumously published 2002 memoir: Except for the first President George Bush, who served for 11 months as director of central intelligence in 1976, Mr. Helms noted, no American president has had more than a slight idea how clandestine operations are conceived and run.

His critique was underscored when President Ronald Reagan authorized his director of central intelligence, William J. Casey, to sell American arms to Iran as a ransom for American hostages. The uproar paralyzed the agency at the close of the cold war. Mr. Casey's top deputy and eventual successor, Bob Gates, was asked by a photographer at his 1987 nomination hearings what he thought of the post. He replied with the title of a then-current country-and-western hit: "Take This Job and Shove It."

In an interview on the occasion of the C.I.A.'s 50th anniversary, in 1997, Mr. Helms warned that the end of the cold war had unmoored the C.I.A. "The only remaining superpower doesn't have enough interest in what's going on in the world to organize and run an espionage service," he said. "We've drifted away from that as a country."

President Bill Clinton's first director, R. James Woolsey, was hired after the briefest possible conversation and saw the president in private precisely twice in the next two years. His successor, John M. Deutch, was scorned by many of the spies who worked for him. For a while, the turnover at the top was head-spinning — directors came and went almost annually. When Mr. Goss's predecessor — the 17th director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet — took office in 1997, he was the fifth man in charge in six years.

"It is impossible to overstate the turbulence and disruption that that much change at the top caused in this organization," said Fred Hitz, the C.I.A.'s inspector general in the 1990's.

Mr. Tenet stayed on after the C.I.A.'s false conclusions that Iraq had unconventional weapons convinced millions of Americans that something was deeply flawed at C.I.A. headquarters. The flaw, two national commissions concluded, lay in the post of director itself. American intelligence was not an orchestra but a cacophony.

"We lurch from near disaster to near disaster," lamented James Monnier Simon Jr., the assistant director of central intelligence for administration from 1999 to 2003. John MacGaffin, a 31-year C.I.A. veteran and a senior White House counterterrorism consultant, warned recently that "the national counterterrorism effort more closely resembles kids' soccer than professional football."

When Mr. Goss took over in September 2004, he addressed C.I.A. officers in a state of exhilaration. His powers, he announced, would be "enhanced by executive orders" from the president. He proclaimed he would be the president's intelligence briefer, the head of the C.I.A., the director of central intelligence, the national intelligence director, and the chief of a new National Counterterrorism Center.

But within months, all those roles and missions but one were taken away. The job of director of central intelligence was dissolved a year ago in favor of a new national intelligence czar, John Negroponte, who has taken over the tasks of briefing the president and controlling American liaison with foreign intelligence services. Mr. Goss had become, literally, the last director.

And with his resignation, it may be that the Central Intelligence Agency is no longer central in the American government.

"In the wake of the Iraq war, it has become clear that official intelligence analysis was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions," Paul R. Pillar, a senior C.I.A. analyst who retired last year, wrote in the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs.

"Our intelligence is now devoid of credibility," in the words of David Kay, who as the special adviser to the director of central intelligence led the search for unconventional weapons in Iraq in 2003 and 2004. "We as a nation must address that, or Iraq is prologue to a much more dangerous time than anything we have ever seen."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...0601069_pf.html

Hayden Faces Senate and CIA Hurdles if Named
General Has Streak Of Independence And Nonconformity

By Thomas E. Ricks and Dafna Linzer
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, May 7, 2006; A06



When Gen. Michael V. Hayden took over as director of the National Security Agency in 1999, he faced a huge organization that was overwhelmingly staffed by aging white men who had spent their careers specializing in the intricacies of the Soviet Union and other aspects of the Cold War. He set out to overhaul the communications interception service and move it into the 21st century.

He came out of that anti-Soviet mold: While attached to the U.S. Embassy in Bulgaria in the mid-1980s, he would dress in workingman's clothes, ride trains and, with his cap pulled over his eyes, pretend to doze while eavesdropping on Bulgarian soldiers heading home on leave. Yet, Hayden managed to reinvent himself, and has gone on to thrive in the post-Sept. 11 world, even though he hardly would be considered an expert in terrorism or the Middle East, the two major problems on which today's Central Intelligence Agency is focused.

Despite his military background, Hayden, 61, is something of a nonconformist. There is a pattern in his career of independent thinking, probably one reason he was able to thrive in the current security environment.

During the mid-1990s, when he was an Air Force colonel overseeing intelligence at the U.S. European Command, Hayden was outspoken in arguing that U.S. policy in the Balkans was too pro-Bosnian and insufficiently understanding of the Serbs' plight. He also enjoyed talking to journalists, and when he took over the NSA, he would invite groups of them to dinner at his Fort Meade house, a marked departure for a secretive institution where people joked that its name stood for "No Such Agency" or "Never Say Anything."

If Hayden is nominated and confirmed as director of the CIA, succeeding Porter J. Goss, whose resignation President Bush accepted Friday, he will take over an institution that has been battered in recent years and even treated as an adversary at times by the Bush administration.

Agency insiders probably will be suspicious of Hayden, a career military man. They also will be skeptical that the mild-mannered Hayden can protect them from the bureaucratic maneuverings of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who in recent years has built up military intelligence and made it more independent of CIA oversight.

"Mike Hayden will have his work cut out for him," said Michael Vickers, a former CIA officer who consults with the Pentagon. "If nominated and confirmed, he will assume the most important job in the U.S. government when it comes to fighting the global war on terrorism." That will be especially difficult for someone such as Hayden, who comes out of the technical side of intelligence, not the more hands-on area of clandestine operations. Nor have military officers had much success leading the CIA in recent decades.

Even securing Senate confirmation could be tough, especially during a midterm election year in which Democrats will be seeking to regain control of Congress. Hayden has long worked at developing good relationships with members of Congress, but those ties have frayed lately, mainly because of the NSA's domestic surveillance program.

On Dec. 17, 2005, when the existence of that program was revealed in the New York Times, Rep. Jane Harman (Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the House intelligence panel, called Hayden on her cellphone.

The general was on a family outing in Annapolis, but told Harman he would drive back to Washington to brief her and any intelligence panel colleagues on the program. He promised to be there in two hours. Harman began organizing for a briefing, but within the hour Hayden called and canceled. "The White House yanked his permission to do so," Harman said in an interview.

For lawmakers accustomed to his availability, candor and nonpartisan approach, the turnaround came as a shock. "It certainly made some of us wonder whether he's the independent person we thought he was," another member of Congress said.

If confirmed, Hayden's next hurdle would be running and re-energizing the CIA. A senior intelligence official who was willing to discuss Hayden on the condition of anonymity said his qualifications for CIA director are numerous. "He is affable, he is nice and he is probably the senior most qualified intelligence officer in the United States," the official said.

But, said this and several other officials, it would be a mistake to put someone in uniform in charge of a civilian agency. Officials close to Hayden suggested that the four-star general might retire from the military to alleviate those concerns. "It would be a symbolic gesture that would go a long way in painting him as a civilian, rather than another Pentagon man, taking over," one official said.

Should Hayden be nominated, Vice Adm. Albert M. Calland III, the CIA's deputy director, is expected to be replaced by a former senior CIA officer from the clandestine service who is now in government outside the agency, according to former senior intelligence officials who have been contacted about the appointment but were sworn to secrecy. "The agency and particularly the DO [Directorate of Operations, the clandestine service] will be happy with this choice," one former senior official said yesterday.

A major test for Hayden would be how he handles Rumsfeld. In their views of the nature of contemporary war, the two men are aligned. "High-quality intelligence is the American 21st-century version of mass," Hayden said in 2003. "With it, we have replaced mass on the battlefield with knowledge and precision."

But in recent years, Hayden has clashed with the defense secretary over organizational and bureaucratic issues.

When intelligence restructuring legislation was before Congress in 2004, Hayden and James R. Clapper Jr., then head of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, told Congress that their organizations, which collect electronic intelligence and analyze imagery, should be under the proposed Director of National Intelligence for budgets and direction, and not under the defense secretary, as they were.

Rumsfeld was unhappy with their views and let them know it. Soon after, Clapper left, and Hayden became deputy director of national intelligence, under John D. Negroponte.

"How will Hayden deal with the land-grabbing from the Pentagon?" asked a former CIA station chief. "That's going to be the real fight."

Hayden probably would be aided by his relationship with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, with whom he worked on the staff of the National Security Council in the George H.W. Bush administration, from 1989 to 1991. Hayden also would benefit from his rapport with Negroponte.

Staff writer Walter Pincus and researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.


© 2006 The Washington Post Company

White House Set to Fight for Hayden
Nomination for CIA Chief Would Reopen Domestic Eavesdropping Controversy

By Peter Baker and Dafna Linzer
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, May 7, 2006; A01



The nomination of Gen. Michael V. Hayden to take over the CIA would trigger a fresh battle over the secret warrantless surveillance program he oversaw on behalf of President Bush, a debate that could help shape the contours of the fall midterm congressional elections, officials in both parties said yesterday.

Barring a change of heart, aides expect Bush to name Hayden tomorrow as his choice to succeed CIA director Porter J. Goss, who resigned under pressure Friday. Hayden, a former director of the National Security Agency and now deputy director of national intelligence, has become the most forceful defender of Bush's eavesdropping program since its disclosure in December.

Rather than steer away from a Hayden nomination because of the controversy, the White House seems ready for a new fight over it, convinced that it has public support and that Democrats opposing Hayden's confirmation would risk looking weak on terrorism. Democrats yesterday began formulating a strategy built around grilling Hayden during hearings and then determining whether any refusal to answer questions provides enough justification to oppose his confirmation.

"By nominating him, they are looking for a confrontation and forcing the Congress to take sides, so I am troubled by this," said Rep. Jane Harman (Calif.), ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee, who has a close relationship with Hayden and considers him "very professional and dedicated."

A senior White House official said Bush did not choose Hayden to pick a fight but would welcome one if it came. "We felt that we're in a position on offense," said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the nomination has not been announced. "We have no concerns about a public debate over the terrorist surveillance program."

Not only Democrats expect to use a Hayden nomination to revisit the legality of the surveillance, however. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), who has held four hearings on the matter, said he may try to hold up Hayden's confirmation if the administration does not provide more information about the eavesdropping. He said he would try to persuade fellow senators to use the confirmation as "leverage."

"I was briefed by General Hayden and I got virtually no meaningful information," Specter said in an interview. "Now with Hayden up . . . this gives us an opportunity to ask these questions and insist on some answers if the Senate is of a mind to deny confirmation."

Although Hayden has enjoyed a strong reputation among lawmakers from both parties and never encountered confirmation trouble in the past, his selection also would raise questions about the rising military influence over U.S. intelligence and about his ability to be independent from Bush and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

If he is confirmed, Hayden would face the challenge of rebuilding an agency that has gone through a tumultuous period, first by failing to prevent the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, then by misjudging Iraq's weapons program and most recently by enduring the break-the-china management of Goss, who drove many veterans out of Langley.

Hayden's appointment would come at a critical time for U.S. intelligence as the White House is ratcheting up pressure on Iran to abandon any aspirations for nuclear weapons. A presidential commission last year derided the intelligence community's understanding of Iran. And because of the flawed Iraq assessments, Bush has acknowledged that he faces a serious credibility problem in convincing the American public and the world that his intelligence on Iran is reliable.

Goss stepped down after Director of National Intelligence John D. Negroponte told him in April to leave by May. White House spokeswoman Dana M. Perino yesterday said it was "categorically untrue" that Goss lost Bush's confidence almost from the start of his 18-month tenure, but neither Goss nor the White House offered a public explanation for his resignation.

As he left his home in Washington yesterday, Goss told CNN his departure is "just one of those mysteries" and declined to elaborate. He then flew to Ohio, where he delivered a commencement address at Tiffin University. "If this were a graduating class of CIA case officers, my advice would be short and to the point: Admit nothing, deny everything and make counteraccusations," Goss, a former CIA officer, told the audience. "Clearly, that doesn't translate well beyond the world of the clandestine service, so I have some other thoughts I'd like to offer."

Goss was overshadowed soon after arriving at Langley when Congress created Negroponte's office to supervise the intelligence community and the CIA director lost his role as primary briefer to the president. As Negroponte's deputy, Bush aides believe, Hayden will be more comfortable in a subordinate position, and he has developed a good relationship with Bush and Vice President Cheney.

Bush was especially impressed with Hayden's unrelenting public defense of the surveillance program, which began under his direction at the NSA after Sept. 11. Under the program, the NSA monitors telephone calls and e-mail between the United States and overseas when one participant is suspected of links to terrorists. The administration asserted that it did not need court approval because of the president's inherent war powers, but critics on the left and right said the program violated the law.

In speeches, briefings and congressional hearings, Hayden said that the program was necessary for more "agility" in combating an elusive, underground enemy and that obtaining warrants would be impractical, even though the law permits intelligence tapping for 72 hours before getting court approval.

The White House came to see the program as a political boon because polls showed many voters are not concerned about the civil liberties issues and believe it would only target violent extremists. "When you push even the harshest critic, even they say, 'Yeah, we should be listening to al-Qaeda,' " a senior administration official said yesterday. "So from that perspective, that's a winning [issue] and we're on the side of the public."

Critics, though, took issue with Hayden's role. Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.), a member of the Senate intelligence committee, said he would be "concerned" about a Hayden nomination. "General Hayden directed and subsequently defended the president's illegal wiretapping program," Feingold said in a statement. He added that he expects "any nominee for this position to be committed to the rule of law and respectful of Congress's oversight responsibility."

A senior Senate Democratic leadership aide said Hayden would probably draw "a tough fight" and serious grilling. "It depends on how forthcoming he is answering the questions," the aide said. "Republicans have some concerns as well. There are legitimate questions about how pervasive this program is and whether it's more comprehensive than General Hayden has acknowledged."

Senators would probably also examine what Hayden's appointment would do to the balance of military vs. civilian influence in the intelligence community. Rumsfeld has asserted more control over intelligence operations, much to the resentment of the CIA. "It seems to me the Pentagon grows even stronger now," a former intelligence official said. "Every time there's a change, it moves in that direction."

But Hayden is far from close to Rumsfeld. When Congress was working on legislation to restructure intelligence agencies in 2004, Hayden testified that the NSA should be under the new director of national intelligence rather than the defense secretary. Rumsfeld was unhappy and let him know it.

Still, some critics said the Goss resignation pointed to broader problems with the restructured intelligence apparatus. "This kind of chaos in U.S. intelligence over the past two years is utterly irresponsible," said Robert L. Hutchings, who was chairman of the National Intelligence Council from 2003 to 2005. "A 'reform' that was supposed to improve coordination and coherence among our intelligence agencies has had the opposite effect."

Staff writers Walter Pincus and Michael A. Fletcher contributed to this report.


© 2006 The Washington Post Company

http://fairuse.100webcustomers.com/nws/nytimes48.htm

May 7, 2006
New Chief Will Find C.I.A. Is Hobbled on Iran
By SCOTT SHANE
WASHINGTON, May 6 — As the Central Intelligence Agency undergoes its latest round of turmoil, legislators and former intelligence officials say that serious gaps in the United States' knowledge of Iran are among the most critical problems facing a new director of the spy agency.

A year after a presidential commission gave a scathing assessment of intelligence on Iran, they say, American spy agencies remain severely handicapped in their efforts to assess its weapons programs and its leaders' intentions. Whoever takes the helm of the C.I.A. after the resignation on Friday of Porter J. Goss will confront a critical target with few, if any, American spies on the ground, sketchy communications intercepts and ambiguous satellite images, the experts say.

When he took the job 19 months ago, part of Mr. Goss's mandate was to make certain that the wildly mistaken prewar assessments about Iraq's weapons would not repeated. But as Mr. Goss leaves the agency, the intelligence watchers say that huge uncertainty remains in estimates of Iran's weapons, complicating the task of persuading the United Nations Security Council to impose sanctions or take other measures.

"How many years are they away from having a nuclear weapon?" asked Senator Pat Roberts, Republican of Kansas, chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, in an interview this week. "We don't know, and the people providing the answers don't know."

Administration officials say Mr. Goss's successor, expected to be named Monday by President Bush, will probably be Gen. Michael V. Hayden of the Air Force, the principal deputy director of national intelligence. A senior intelligence official said on Saturday that General Hayden recently gave the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board a highly critical account of Mr. Goss's performance at the C.I.A. that may have been one catalyst for the director's ouster.

If General Hayden is the president's choice and is confirmed — a process likely to involve a public review of his prior role in domestic electronic surveillance as director of the National Security Agency — he will inherit an agency in considerable disarray. He would bring political clout that might be welcomed by the agency's battered managers, but some officers might resent him as an outsider, a military man and a representative of the director of national intelligence, John D Negroponte, former agency officials said.

General Hayden would face the aftermath of a long list of seemingly unrelated problems that marked Mr. Goss's brief tenure.

Mr. Goss's team of brash former Congressional staff members stirred resentment and an exodus of experienced officers, and months after Mr. Goss's arrival he found himself cast as second fiddle to Mr. Negroponte. The Valerie Wilson leak investigation strained relations with the White House.

The agency's role in the secret detention and interrogation of terrorism suspects led to accusations of misconduct. Leaks prompted Mr. Goss to conduct a campaign of polygraph examinations that led to the dismissal of a senior official.

The doubts about intelligence on Iran persist despite some successes, including revealing data from a laptop computer provided by an Iranian exile that American officials say casts new light on Iran's nuclear program. American officials shared the data last year with the International Atomic Energy Agency, whose inspectors remain the major source of the United States' knowledge of the Iranian program.

Also, in January, Mr. Negroponte sought to focus multiple agencies' efforts by appointing a veteran C.I.A. analyst, S. Leslie Ireland, as the first "mission manager" for Iran. With input from General Hayden, Ms. Ireland has created an Iran strategy board, with 20 analysts from various agencies who meet monthly and talk daily about how to get better information.

But if the administration and the atomic energy agency have emphasized what they have learned about Iran's quest for nuclear weapons, skeptical members of Congress stress the larger universe of the unknown. They are not convinced much has changed since last year's presidential commission on weapons intelligence, led by Laurence H. Silberman, a federal judge, and Charles S. Robb, the former Virginia senator and governor, found a lack of solid evidence on Iranian programs.

Representative Jane Harman, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said a classified briefing in early March on Iran's missiles and their ability to carry warheads "raised as many questions as it answered." She and other representatives sent a classified letter posing additional questions on March 9 to Mr. Negroponte, but they have received no reply, she said.

"I continue to believe that our sources are stale and our case is thin" on the weapons programs and internal politics of Iran, Ms. Harman of California, said.

Some experts say they have confidence in official American estimates that Iran is unlikely to have a nuclear weapon until the next decade. "I think the 5 to 10 year estimate is very solid," said Gary S. Samore, vice president of the MacArthur Foundation and a former government expert on nuclear proliferation.

But an array of former intelligence officials said the holes in American knowledge are numerous.

"Whenever the C.I.A. says 5 to 10 years, that means they don't know," said Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former Iran specialist in the clandestine service of the C.I.A. He said French and Israeli experts believe an Iranian bomb may be as little as one to three years off.

Flynt L. Leverett, a former C.I.A. analyst now at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, said American military planners clearly lack the detailed data needed to be able to cripple the Iranian nuclear program with air strikes should such a step be ordered.

"It's likely there are facilities we don't know about," Mr. Leverett said. "And if we knocked out the facilities we do know about, we wouldn't really know how much we'd set back their nuclear program."

Jon Wolfsthal, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said American uncertainty extends to the relationship of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the firebrand president since August, and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, and their respective goals.

"We not only don't know who makes the decisions," said Mr. Wolfsthal, who traveled to Iran last month. "We don't even know who's in the room when decisions are made."

A senior American intelligence official, authorized to speak only on condition of anonymity, did not quarrel with that bleak assessment but said the government's Iran specialists were working to improve the situation.

"It is a hard target, but we are not complacent," the official said. "On a daily basis we're trying to recruit new sources."

Such intelligence shortcomings date at least to the period before the Islamist revolution that overthrew the shah in 1979. With no American embassy in Tehran, C.I.A. officers cannot operate under diplomatic cover inside Iran. And because American sanctions ban most business and academic ties, infiltrating spies under what is known as nonofficial cover is difficult.

"I can't think of many people who'd go in under nonofficial cover and pitch senior officers of the I.R.G.C.," the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, said a former veteran C.I.A. operations officer with experience in Iran. Without diplomatic immunity, an unmasked spy could be imprisoned or worse, said the former officer, who was granted anonymity to discuss intelligence methods.

Operating in the 1980's from a C.I.A. base in Frankfurt, called Tefran, for Tehran-Frankfurt, C.I.A. officers managed to build a network of agents inside Iran. But Iranian counterintelligence broke up the ring in 1989, former intelligence officers say. In the early 1990's the Frankfurt base was disbanded, and since then, operations have been directed from C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Va., focusing on areas where there are large numbers of Iranian immigrants, including Los Angeles, the officers said.

But by all accounts, the results have been modest. Mr. Leverett said, "it seems likely that the United States does not have a significant human intelligence capability inside Iran."

The National Security Agency's efforts to intercept Iranian government communications were hampered in the last two years because Iran learned that the United States had broken its codes and changed them. Satellite photography has provided detailed images of suspected nuclear facilities, but such photographs leave many unanswered questions. Unmanned aerial vehicles are flown into Iran to sniff for gases that would provide clues to nuclear processing, former intelligence officials said.

But such technology cannot remedy Americans' ignorance of Persian language and Iranian culture, said Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak, director of the Center for Persian Studies at the University of Maryland, where some intelligence officers will begin immersion language classes this summer. Just 300 to 400 university students nationwide are studying Persian, he estimated, and most of those will drop out before becoming fluent.

"The problem of the failure to understand Persian culture has been with us since before the revolution in 1979," Mr. Karimi-Hakkak said. "But its consequences have never been more serious than today."

Mark Mazzetti contributed reporting for this article.

http://fairuse.100webcustomers.com/sf/latimes5_06_06.htm
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/na...-home-headlines
From the Los Angeles Times
NEWS ANALYSIS
Negroponte Still Faces Uphill Battle to Change System
By Doyle McManus and Peter Spiegel
Times Staff Writer
8:34 PM PDT, May 5, 2006

WASHINGTON — After a little more than a year in his newly created job, John D. Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, has won an initial battle to establish authority over the vast U.S. intelligence community -- Porter J. Goss, who resisted Negroponte's moves to limit the autonomy of the CIA, is gone.

But Negroponte faces a larger and much more difficult challenge: a struggle with Donald H. Rumsfeld's Department of Defense, which runs more than 80 percent of the nation's intelligence budget and is busy expanding its role even further.

Negroponte's job is to coordinate the work of 16 different intelligence agencies, including the CIA and the giant National Security Agency, which eavesdrops on international communications, as well as the Energy Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration. The post was created in 2005 in response to charges -- made most tellingly by the commission that investigated the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 -- that the federal government's intelligence effort was uncoordinated and needed central direction.

When he took office in April 2005, Negroponte, a veteran diplomat, moved quickly to exert his authority over the CIA. He took over the job of giving President Bush his daily intelligence briefing, a task that once allowed CIA directors to bond with the presidents they served. He took a central role in briefing Congress on intelligence issues. He transferred some CIA officers to new joint intelligence centers. And when it appeared that Goss was not fully on board, officials said, Negroponte and his deputy, Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, quietly complained to the White House -- apparently contributing to Goss' decision to resign Friday.

But Negroponte, who once worked as an aide to former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, has been much more cautious in confronting the Pentagon, officials and members of Congress have said. (Kissinger once complained that Rumsfeld was the toughest bureaucratic warrior he ever met.)

When Negroponte has sought to push through changes at the Defense Department, "They told him to take a flying leap," said one U.S. intelligence official who said he was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter. "If you get the shove from DOD, where else can you go?"

The Pentagon has said it is cooperating with Negroponte. But even before the intelligence director's job was created, Rumsfeld made it clear he thought its power should be limited, and he lobbied successfully in Congress to curtail much of Negroponte's clout over personnel and budgets.

Rumsfeld explained at the time that he did not want to weaken the Pentagon's ability to deliver tactical military intelligence to soldiers in the field by involving a new authority outside the military.

"We would not want to place new barriers or filters between the military combatant commanders and (defense intelligence) agencies when they perform as combat support agencies," Rumsfeld said in congressional testimony at the time.

But in recent months, the Pentagon has asserted its authority to expand its own intelligence operations far beyond tactical support for soldiers. The move that has drawn criticism from some members of Congress, who say they worry about an effort to create parallel intelligence-gathering capabilities -- including reportedly setting up covert special operations teams to spy in foreign countries.

The Pentagon is in the middle of a wide-reaching restructuring of its own intelligence gathering and analysis abilities, run by Stephen A. Cambone, a close Rumsfeld aide who is the department's intelligence chief, and his deputy, Lt. Gen. William Boykin. Some critics have warned that the effort is turning into a bid for even more control over national intelligence assets.

"They started from an advantageous position because, even 10 years, ago they had about 85 percent of the intelligence budget," said Steven Aftergood, a civilian analyst who tracks intelligence issues for the Federation of American Scientists. "But with the onset of war in Iraqi, intel (intelligence) support for military operations has only increased, and the Pentagon has been increasingly assertive about its role as an intelligence gatherer and analyst."

Last month, Rumsfeld approved a new Defense Joint Intelligence Operations Center, which officials have described as an effort to centralize all military intelligence to better serve commanders in the field.

In a briefing to reporters, Boykin said military officials were in talks with the CIA to allow the new center to win access to the agency's raw intelligence, a move he characterized as an effort to get analysts in combat zones all the information they might need about potential threats.

"We want access to databases from other agencies, where appropriate," Boykin said.

Already, the Pentagon's intelligence budget dwarfs that of the CIA. Although the budgets remain classified, the CIA is believed to get about $5 billion annually, less than the Pentagon's NSA, which gets $6 billion to $8 billion a year. The Defense Department's National Reconnaissance Office, the operator of military satellites, also gets $6 billion to $8 billion a year.

Other Pentagon agencies -- like the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the department's mapping office with a budget of about $3 billion, and the Defense Intelligence Agency, which gets $1 billion to $3 billion annually -- also have sizable budgets, as do the individual military services, which all have their own intelligence-gathering operations.

Negroponte declined to speak about these issues in the wake of Goss' resignation Friday. But in a speech last month, he said -- in an implicit criticism of at least some of the 16 intelligence agencies he supervises -- that his basic goal is to "optimize the (intelligence) community's total performance as opposed to optimizing its members' individual operations."

"We are in the process of remaking a loose confederation into a unified enterprise," he added.

His key weapon, he said, would be control over the intelligence budget, which he called "a powerful integrating force." By controlling which agencies and which programs are funded, he said, he can nudge the separate agencies toward greater collaboration.

Still, Negroponte acknowledged at a Senate hearing in March, there has been open conflict with the Pentagon over at least one issue: personnel. The law setting up his job gave Negroponte the authority to transfer professionals from individual intelligence agencies into joint centers or other agencies to make the integration process work. But the Pentagon has made that process difficult, officials said, in part by issuing a directive that any such transfer required the "concurrence" of its intelligence chief, Cambone.

"We look at those people as intelligence people, and the secretary (Rumsfeld) certainly looks on those as DOD folks," Negroponte said.

"I think we'll work our way through it," he said.

Times staff writer Greg Miller contributed to this report.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/07/washingt...artner=homepage


Exit of C.I.A. Chief Viewed as Move to Recast Agency

By MARK MAZZETTI
Published: May 7, 2006
WASHINGTON, May 6 — The choice of Gen. Michael V. Hayden of the Air Force as the new director of the Central Intelligence Agency is only a first step in a planned overhaul to permanently change the mission and functions of the legendary spy agency, intelligence officials said Saturday.

A Long Legacy of Frustration at C.I.A. Helm (May 7, 2006)
C.I.A. Chief Will Face Critical Gaps in Iran Data (May 7, 2006) Porter J. Goss, who was forced to resign Friday, was seen as an obstacle to an effort by John D. Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, to focus the agency on its core mission of fighting terrorism and stealing secrets abroad. General Hayden, who will be nominated to the post on Monday, is currently Mr. Negroponte's deputy, and he is regarded as an enthusiastic champion of the agency's adoption of that narrower role.

A senior intelligence official said that General Hayden, in a recent presentation to the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, had sharply criticized Mr. Goss for resisting the transformation. Mr. Goss was seen as trying to protect the C.I.A.'s longtime role as the government's premier center for intelligence analysis, but under General Hayden, much of that function would probably move elsewhere.

"There will be a serious change to the structure of the agency," one intelligence official said. That person and others from intelligence agencies and the Bush administration were granted anonymity for this article because they are not allowed to speak publicly about intelligence matters.

Even as it turns its focus to intelligence collection, through the spying operations overseas that are run by the C.I.A.'s new national clandestine service, the C.I.A. faces a challenge from the Defense Department, which is expanding its own spying operations abroad.

General Hayden has spent his career in the military, but his relationship with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has never been close. A Bush administration official said on Saturday that General Hayden was selected, in part, because he had demonstrated an ability to set aside a parochial military mind-set and look at the broader picture.

Mr. Negroponte himself has had a difficult year trying to bring the Pentagon's vast intelligence operations under his control. Historically, the Pentagon has controlled more than 80 percent of the nation's intelligence budget.

The administration official said that President Bush had also chosen General Hayden, a former director of the National Security Agency, in part because of his success in running a large, complex organization. The official said Mr. Bush also believed that General Hayden would improve morale at the C.I.A., which has plummeted under Mr. Goss, who was regarded within the White House and the agency as an ineffectual leader.

As he leaves the agency, Mr. Goss is widely expected to be joined by other members of his inner circle, many of whom he took with him to the C.I.A. from Capitol Hill. Kyle Foggo, a longtime agency officer whom Mr. Goss elevated to the agency's No. 3 job, plans to resign in the coming days, a senior intelligence official said Saturday.

Mr. Foggo is a longtime friend of Brent R. Wilkes, one of the military contractors mentioned in the indictment of Randy Cunningham, a former Republican congressman from California. Mr. Foggo's ties to Mr. Wilkes have been investigated by the C.I.A.'s inspector general.

Besides the personnel changes, General Hayden will inherit an agency in some disarray if he is confirmed, a process likely to involve a public review of his role in domestic electronic surveillance as the N.S.A. director.

General Hayden would bring political influence that might be welcomed by the battered managers of the C.I.A., but some officers might resent him as an outsider, a military man and a representative of Mr. Negroponte, according to former agency officials. General Hayden would face the aftermath of a long list of problems that marked Mr. Goss's brief tenure.

Mr. Goss's team of brash former Congressional staffers stirred bitter resentment, and the C.I.A. director found himself cast as second fiddle to Mr. Negroponte. The Valerie Wilson leak investigation strained relations with the White House.

The agency's role in the secret detention and interrogation of suspected terrorists led to charges of misconduct. Leaks prompted Mr. Goss to start an internal campaign of polygraph examinations that resulted in the dismissal of a senior agency official.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Goss, Jennifer Dyck, defended his performance. "Director Goss is going to leave an agency that has bigger graduation classes of new officers than any other time in history," Ms. Dyck said. "There are more résumés coming to C.I.A., better recruiting and better training of operatives."

When Mr. Goss took charge of the C.I.A. in the fall of 2004, he himself talked about focusing the agency's work on its core mission of spying. Mr. Goss is a clandestine officer, and intelligence officials said he had used his tenure to strengthen the agency's operations abroad, partly by opening new stations and bases.

More recently, however, Mr. Goss has defended the agency's analytical work against what some at the C.I.A. saw as encroachment by Mr. Negroponte's staff, including the National Intelligence Council, and by the new National Counterterrorism Center, which is the government's lead agency in assessing the terrorist threat.

In recent months, intelligence officials said on Saturday, Mr. Goss fought an effort by Mr. Negroponte to transfer analysts from the agency's Counter Terrorism Center to the new organization. Mr. Goss said in a speech last September to C.I.A. employees that "analysis is the engine that drives the C.I.A."

The clashes over the agency's priorities were among the reasons that Mr. Goss finally lost the support of Mr. Negroponte and the White House, the officials said.

A spokesman for General Hayden, Carl Kropf, declined to comment about reports of his criticism of Mr. Goss, in the recent presentation to the president's intelligence advisory board.

Under General Hayden, the C.I.A. is expected to maintain a large staff of intelligence analysts, the officials said. But their role is likely to be diminished, with the primary task of supporting the agency's spying operations rather than producing broad intelligence assessments for policymakers.

Scott Shane and Elisabeth Bumiller contributed reporting for this article.

The CIA at Rock Bottom

By David Ignatius

Porter Goss was dumped by a president who doesn't like to fire anyone. That's a sign of how badly off track things have gotten at the CIA.

To view the entire article, go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...er=emailarticle

Advisory board allegedly convinced Bush to fire Goss San Jose Mercury News
A little-known White House advisory board convinced a reluctant President Bush to launch yet another high-profile shakeup of the nation's intelligence community and can CIA Director Porter Goss, sources said Saturday. Bush had already gotten an earful from Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte on the shortcomings of Goss, but the final push came from the "very alarmed" President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, intelligence and Congressional sources said. Alarms were set off at the advisory board by a widening FBI sex and cronyism investigation that's targeted Kyle (Dusty) Foggo, the No. 3 official at the CIA, and also touched on Goss himself. The 16-member bipartisan board, now headed by former Goldman Sachs executive Stephen Friedman, has the mandate to conduct periodic assessments on "the quality, quantity and adequacy of intelligence collection." The board, which includes longtime Bush confidant and former Commerce Secretary Don Evans, joined in the growing chorus inside and outside the CIA calling for Goss' ouster, persuading Bush to act, sources said. The result was the Oval Office announcement Friday at which neither Goss nor Bush gave a specific reason for Goss' return to Florida. Goss told CNN Saturday his resignation was "just one of those mysteries." White House spokeswoman Dana Perrino said a "collective agreement" led to the decision to find a new CIA director, but "reports that the President had lost confidence in Porter Goss are categorically untrue." Bush was expected to name a new spy chief, possibly as early as tomorrow, with Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, Negroponte's top deputy, and White House homeland security adviser Fran Townsend heading up a short list. But the spillover from the continuing FBI investigation, coupled with a parallel probe by the CIA's inspector general, could impact on what were already expected to be difficult Senate confirmation hearings for the new director. The investigations have focused on the Watergate poker parties thrown by defense contractor Brent Wilkes, a high-school buddy of Foggo's, that were attended by disgraced former Rep. Randy (Duke) Cunningham and other lawmakers. Foggo has claimed he went to the parties "just for poker" amid allegations that Wilkes, a top GOP fund-raiser and a member of the $100,000 "Pioneers" of Bush's 2004 reelection campaign, provided prostitutes, limos and hotel suites to Cunningham. Cunningham is serving an eight-year sentence after pleading to taking $2.4 million in bribes to steer defense contracts to cronies. Wilkes hosted regular parties for 15 years at the Watergate and Westin Grand Hotels for lawmakers and lobbyists. Intelligence sources said Goss has denied attending the parties as CIA director, but that left open whether he may have attended as a Republican congressman from Florida who was head of the House Intelligence Committee.
BY RICHARD SISK
Goss Going... We Should Have Seen It Coming NPR
Intelligence: Goss Goes Out—But the CIA's Struggles Go On Newsweek
Los Angeles Times - Pittsburgh Post Gazette - Washington Post - TIME - all 1,623 related »

CIA Chief's Ouster Points to Larger Issues

WASHINGTON-Problems plague the nation's spy services - despite or
even because of intended reforms. By Greg Miller.
http://email.latimes.com/cgi-bin1/DM/y/e2W...Io30G2B0HVzu0E1

US Secret Service Embattled

DEBKAfile Special Report

May 6, 2006, 10:03 PM (GMT+02:00)





The abrupt resignation (ouster?) of Porter Goss as director of the Central Intelligence Agency lays bare the rocky state of America’s most prestigious secret service amid critical missions on three fronts, Iraq, Afghanistan and the war on al Qaeda.

The White House quickly denied US media reports that the CIA chief, entrusted 20 months ago with reforming the agency after the twin intelligence failures of 9/11 and Iraq, had been forced to quit. At a hastily called press conference Friday, President George W. praised Goss for his “help to make this country a safe place and help us win the war on terror.” But he inserted a barb: "Porter's tenure at the CIA was one of transition."

Goss insisted: "The agency is on a very even keel, sailing well"

However, that judgment is not shared by most intelligence watchers.

Indeed, DEBKAfile’s intelligence sources note the CIA is on its uppers in three vital spheres:

1.US forces are not getting to grips with either of the two segments of the Iraqi guerrilla insurgency: the mostly secular Baathists and the extremist Islamist Iraqi groups and al Qaeda. The continuous upsurge of violence in Iraq means the CIA has failed by and large to penetrate the most dangerous insurgent groups.

2. While the Taliban-al Qaeda rebellion rages in Afghanistan, Abu Musab al Zarqawi’s Iraq wing - far from being crushed - has in the last six months opened up new terror fronts in Sinai, Egypt, Palestinian territories and Algeria.

3. On Iran, the CIA comes up short on two interconnected issues: derailing Iran’s nuclear program with the help of local surrogates which, given the millions of expatriate Iranian exiles who detest the clerical regime, should pose fewer difficulties than penetrating al Qaeda. Secondly, American operatives should have been able to head off the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and intelligence agents who have permeated every corner of Iraqi politics and whose influence in Baghdad often prevails over the word from Washington - despite the presence of 135,000 US troops.

The CIA, like any service of its ilk, cannot handle its missions without superb counter-intelligence and clandestine services and the taking of operational risks.

When he took command of the agency from George Tenet in September 2004, Porter Goss started out by trying to steer the secret agency in the right direction for overcoming these grave shortcomings. His attempts to reform and shake up key personnel were quickly challenged by the upper and professional echelons, which meted out the treatment traditionally reserved for “outsiders.”

Goss spent 10 youthful years up until 1971 as a CIA spy. From 1989 up until his appointment as 19th director of the intelligence agency, he served on the House Intelligence Committee. No part of this record qualified him as an insider in CIA terms. He was dismissed as a Bush political appointee and his efforts to make changes met the sort of resistance the spy service’s core personnel have put up successfully for decades.

An obvious analogy is the case of Goss’s predecessor, President Bill Clinton’s nominee John Deutsch. Taking office in May 1995, he believed like Goss that if he brought in his own people – who came to be dubbed “Deutschland” - he would be able to fend off the internal pressures and intrigues besetting any external new broom.

However, the career echelon cold-shouldered him (some of them because he was a Jew) and after 19 months he threw in the sponge.

From the 2005 appointment of John Negroponte as Director of National Intelligence - the post of czar of all US spy agencies created after the Sept. 11 al Qaeda attacks – the new CIA director’s days were numbered. Traditionally the agency chief is first among his peers in the other American undercover services. Although the two had been friends, Negroponte’s appointment upset that internal balance and further weakened Goss in his struggle with the agency veterans. When the inevitable clash occurred, the president favored the czar.

The CIA chief’s departure will not make life easier for Negroponte but rather put him and indirectly the president on the spot. The intelligence overseer ranks in CIA terms as an outsider even more than Goss. A career diplomat, he comes from the posts of ambassador to the UN, followed by the embassy in Baghdad. He will come up against the same difficulty as the departing director when he sets about implementing the necessary overhaul to adapt the agency to post-Sept. 11 challenges.

The Director of National Intelligence may try inserting as a cushion his principal deputy, Air Force General Michael Hayden 61, in the top CIA slot, hoping that as an accredited member of the rarefied spook community he gets better treatment than Goss. Hayden was director of the National Security Agency in 2001 and in charge of the controversial wiretapping program of conversations with suspected overseas terrorists without a warrant. But it is by no means certain that Negroponte’s remedy is the cure.

Republican sees problems with likely Bush CIA pick Yahoo! News
The general considered the Bush administration's likely choice to become CIA director would be the "wrong person at the wrong place at the wrong time," the Republican head of the U.S. House of Representatives Intelligence Committee said on Sunday. Gen. Michael Hayden, former director of the National Security Agency, has been widely cited in the media as the President George W. Bush's expected pick to lead the CIA following the ouster of CIA director Porter Goss. "We should not have a military person leading a civilian agency at this time," Rep. Pete Hoekstra of Michigan, told "Fox News Sunday." He said the Department of Defense, which has its own intelligence agencies, had been the biggest opponent to intelligence reform and that there were continuing tensions between the CIA and the Defense Department. "I think putting a general in charge, regardless of how good Mike is, putting a general charge is going to send the wrong signal to the agency here in Washington but also to our agents in the field around the world," Hoekstra said. "The bottom line: I do believe he is the wrong person at the wrong place at the wrong time," he said. He said the perception would be that the CIA was under the sway of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Hoekstra said the White House had discussed several possible candidates with him, and his views on Hayden would not be a surprise to the Bush administration.

Bipartisan fight brews over potential CIA nominee

By Tabassum Zakaria

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. lawmakers, some from President George W. Bush's Republican party, are challenging his expected choice as CIA chief of a general behind a disputed domestic spying program.

To view the entire article, go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...er=emailarticle

This is worth reading even if its not from your favorite news source, says Snuffysmith tongue in cheek:


http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,194587,00.html

FOXNEWS.COM HOME > FNS W/ CHRIS WALLACE
Transcript: Rep. Pete Hoekstra on 'FNS'
Sunday, May 07, 2006

The following is a partial transcript from the May 7, 2006, edition of "FOX News Sunday With Chris Wallace":

"FOX NEWS SUNDAY" HOST CHRIS WALLACE: The apparently forced resignation of CIA chief Porter Goss on Friday shocked most of official Washington. So what's behind the move and what's next for the CIA? For answers, we turn to Pete Hoekstra, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.

And, Congressman, welcome back to "FOX News Sunday".

REP. PETER HOEKSTRA, R-MICH.: Thank you. Good to be here.

WALLACE: The big question today, of course, is who is going to be the new CIA chief, and the warehouse is putting out the word that the almost certain choice is going to be General Michael Hayden, the former head of the National Security Agency and the top deputy now to the director of national intelligence, John Negroponte.

One, do you think he'll get the job? And two, is he the right man?

(Story continues below)

ADVERTISEMENTSAdvertise Here



HOEKSTRA: Well, we'll have to wait until the president makes an announcement. Obviously, that's his call. I've got a lot of respect for Mike Hayden. I think he's done a very good job in the positions that he's had. He's got a distinguished career.

Bottom line, I do believe he's the wrong person, the wrong place, at the wrong time. We should not have a military person leading a civilian agency at this time.

WALLACE: Well, explain that, because there have been, I think, a half dozen military people leading the CIA over the years, I guess most recently, back in the Carter administration, Admiral Stansfield Turner. So this is not unprecedented.

HOEKSTRA: It's not unprecedented. It's a bad time. You know, there's been a tremendous amount of tension between the CIA, Department of Defense, the intelligence community over the last 18 months. It was highlighted in the fact that when we did intelligence reform, the biggest opponent to doing intelligence reform was the Department of Defense.

There's ongoing tensions between this premiere civilian intelligence agency and DOD as we speak. And I think putting a general in charge — regardless of how good Mike is, putting a general in charge is going to send the wrong signal through the agency here in Washington, but also to our agents in the field around the world.

WALLACE: Well, is it your feeling that as an active general that General Hayden would be under the sway of Don Rumsfeld?

HOEKSTRA: I think that clearly will be the perception in the CIA both, again, here in Washington and at the CIA. I don't think you can underestimate the difficulty in rebuilding, reshaping and transforming the Central Intelligence Agency. This is the debate we don't need at this time.

WALLACE: What about the possibility that has been raised — what if Mike Hayden were to resign his commission and step down as an active general?

HOEKSTRA: I think the perception is still going to be — it's going to be the wrong kind of perception. There are talented folks out there that can take the agency where it needs to go, and they don't have to, and they shouldn't, come from a military background.

WALLACE: Let me ask you about another aspect of this. Mike Hayden, according to intelligence sources who I talked to yesterday, was one of the driving forces in getting Porter Goss out.

He was one of the lead men for Negroponte in trying to strip the CIA of some of its powers, particularly to take the analysis part of it out and put it in the Department of National Intelligence.

If Hayden now takes over the CIA after having helped in this process of forcing Goss out, could that be perceived or could it, in fact, be a sense of the CIA being dangerously diminished?

HOEKSTRA: I think so. I mean, you brought up a number of issues there. Number one, moving the analytical function out of the CIA into the Office of the Director of National Intelligence — that's not what we envision in intelligence reform.

The DNI was supposed to be coordinating and bringing these 16 agencies together, not becoming a doer of things. He was the chief executive officer, not an operating officer. I'm concerned about that direction.

And if General Hayden was an architect of that, he's going to be going into an agency where the people in the agency say he's not an advocate for us. He's the one that's, you know, potentially gutting what we believe are some of our core functions.

WALLACE: Now, I mean, explain to us, because a lot of this stuff, I'm sure, to a lot of people — frankly, to me — seems like a lot of sort of bureaucratic moving of chairs.

What's the danger if the Pentagon takes over a prominence in the intelligence community over the CIA? What's the danger if analysis is stripped out of the CIA?

HOEKSTRA: The danger of having the military take over intelligence is that the military has a very different perspective on the world. They're worried about today and wars, you know, and threats to the United States in the short term and how we might respond militarily.

So they need information that helps them better prepare for fighting and winning future wars or winning the war that we are in today.

The CIA's job is to provide us as policymakers better information so that we can make informed policy decisions of which — you know, war, and winning a war and the consequences of war are very, very different.

WALLACE: You are not just another congressman. You are — I don't have to tell you — the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. Have you told the White House that this man who is on the front pages of the paper as basically being called the next CIA director — have you told them you oppose this choice?

HOEKSTRA: I've been asked for input on some names. I've given them my feedback. I don't think anything that I've said to you this morning is news to the White House.

WALLACE: And obviously, it doesn't seem to have stopped them.

HOEKSTRA: I don't know. I mean, obviously, the president has not made a choice or has not announced a choice at this point.

WALLACE: Now, as the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, if they go ahead and name General Hayden as the CIA director, is that going to make it difficult to operate in this environment?

HOEKSTRA: No. Mike and I have a very good personal relationship. We've worked together for three years, four years. You know, we both have to be focused on building a great intelligence community, transforming the community, and we'll have to work together. Like I said, I think he's the wrong person today.

WALLACE: Give me an idea of one or two names of who you think would be the right person.

HOEKSTRA: You know, I knew that was going to come up. I don't have names. I mean, the...

WALLACE: Well, you said you offered names to them.

HOEKSTRA: No, I said they have given me names, other names...

WALLACE: Oh, all right.

HOEKSTRA: ... other than Hayden we provided them feedback on, but I've not — you know, I was caught by surprise on Friday, like many people. I was with Porter on Wednesday. I talked to him on Thursday. The guy can keep secrets. I had no idea this was coming, and then I talked to him again on Friday.

WALLACE: Well, all right. Now, let's talk about that part of the equation here. It's become clear that Porter Goss was forced out as CIA director. The White House — officials there are saying he made too many enemies, created too many waves within the CIA.

Sources in the intelligence community tell me, as we just mentioned, that he fought decisions by Negroponte to strip the CIA of some of its powers. What do you believe is the real story of why Goss is out?

HOEKSTRA: I think some of that all may be true. I don't think it's all necessarily bad. I think cleaning house at the CIA needed to happen. I mean, it's not like we were saying wow, didn't we have great intelligence before 9/11, didn't we have great intelligence before we went into Iraq.

It became painfully evident that the CIA needed to be transformed. Porter Goss was leading that effort. And when you change an organization, you're going to make enemies, and you're going to let some people go.

In terms of being an advocate for the CIA, that's exactly what I want in that person at the CIA, somebody who can go toe to toe with the director of national intelligence — same at NSA. You want strong leaders in these doing operations to make sure that you get the kind of results that we need.

You can't have "yes" people in these organizations. You need advocates fighting for them.

WALLACE: So do you think it was a mistake to force him out?

HOEKSTRA: Well, I mean, that — you know, I think Porter in many ways was ready to go. You know, three years, four years ago he wanted to leave Congress. The speaker of the house asked him to stay for one more term. Then they asked him to become director of the CIA.

He made some important changes. I think he was ready to go, and so now it's important. Cut down this transition time. Get new leadership in there quickly and move forward.

WALLACE: Let me ask you, because we can't let this occasion pass without talking about the fact that there was a lot of criticism in this town of Porter Goss. He was, as we said, brought in in the CIA in 2004 because of all the intelligence failures after 9/11, the WMD in Iraq.

He was brought in because there had been a series of leaks within the agency that seemed to be against President Bush in the middle of the 2004 election campaign, but many professionals at the agency thought that he was too political.

Take a look at what Jane Harman, your counterpart on the House Intelligence Committee, said after Goss resigned. "In the last year and a half, more than 300 years of experience has either been pushed out or walked out the door in frustration. This has left the agency in free fall."

Mr. Chairman, you have to admit there has been something of a brain drain at the CIA under Porter Goss.

HOEKSTRA: Absolutely. He was brought in to make changes. If this was an agency that when he came in was functioning at a high level of efficiency and we'd say man, it's a great organization, I'd be concerned about those things.

I've managed, you know, in businesses and those types of things. This agency was in free fall when Porter Goss moved into this job, and he was attempting to bring in the right people to transform it. This thing needs to be rebuilt. It needs to be reshaped.

You know, it has to be an organization that can compete toe to toe with Al Qaeda and radical Islam, 24/7, and they have to be able to whip them each and every day, and this organization is not in a position to do that today.

WALLACE: Well, let me ask you about that, because I know when we talked a few weeks ago, you were very concerned that Negroponte and the director of national intelligence — that instead of making the intelligence community leaner and more active in fighting Al Qaeda, in fact that they were creating another level of bureaucracy.

Is what's happened this week, with Goss out and if we get Michael Hayden in — isn't this your worst fears being realized?

HOEKSTRA: I'm not sure it's my worst fear. But I mean, obviously, we're going to have to go back and push on it. You know, does this make it more entrepreneurial or more bureaucratic? Does this flatten the organization or does it make it more hierarchical? Does it make decision making quicker or slower?

We're going to push on all of those things. And if we're moving more authority and more control and more doing — you know, more activity management — to the DNI, yes, I'm concerned.

WALLACE: We're going to have to leave it there, Chairman Hoekstra. Thank you so much for coming in. And whether you got the White House's attention before, I suspect you did this morning. Thanks so much for joining us and discussing this breaking story.

HOEKSTRA: Great. Thank you.

http://www.abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=1933145&page=1

Expert Slams Departing CIA Director's Leadership
Author of 'CIA at War' Says Departing Director Did Not Respect Agency Employees

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/...1191802,00.html

Why Goss is Gone
How John Negroponte won control of the CIA, and what he plans next to consolidate rival agencies and his power
Michael Duffy

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...0501738_pf.html




The Fix-It Man Leaves, but The Agency's Cracks Remain

By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, May 6, 2006; A01



Porter J. Goss was brought into the CIA to quell what the White House viewed as a partisan insurgency against the administration and to re-energize a spy service that failed to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks or accurately assess Iraq's weapons capability.

But as he walked out the glass doors of Langley headquarters yesterday, Goss left behind an agency that current and former intelligence officials say is weaker operationally, with a workforce demoralized by an exodus of senior officers and by uncertainty over its role in fighting terrorism and other intelligence priorities, said current and former intelligence officials.

In public, Goss once acknowledged being "amazed at the workload." Within headquarters, "he never bonded with the workforce," said John O. Brennan, a former senior CIA official and interim director of the National Counterterrorism Center until last July.

"Now there's a decline in morale, its capability has not been optimized and there's a hemorrhaging of very good officers," Brennan said. "Turf battles continue" with other parts of the recently reorganized U.S. intelligence community "because there's a lack of clarity and he had no vision or strategy about the CIA's future." Brennan added: "Porter's a dedicated public servant. He was ill-suited for the job."

As a result of all these factors, said these sources and outside experts who work with the CIA, the number of case officers has skyrocketed, but there has been no dramatic improvement in how spies collect intelligence about terrorist targets.

As important, Goss -- who did not like to travel overseas or to wine and dine foreign intelligence chiefs who visited Washington -- allowed the atrophy of relations with the foreign intelligence services that helped the CIA kill or catch nearly all the terrorists taken off the streets since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, in the view of these officials and several foreign intelligence officials.

Foreign intelligence heads, who used to spend hours with Goss's predecessor, George J. Tenet, discussing strategy and tactics, are now more likely to meet with the director of national intelligence, John D. Negroponte, whose position was created in the overhaul of U.S. intelligence agencies.

One senior European counterterrorism official, asked recently for his assessment of Goss's leadership, responded by saying, "Who?"

Goss, then the Republican chairman of the House intelligence panel, was handpicked by the White House to purge what some in the administration viewed as a cabal of wily spies working to oppose administration policy in Iraq. "He came in to clean up without knowing what he was going to clean up," one former intelligence official said.

Goss's counterinsurgency campaign was so crudely executed by his top lieutenants, some of them former congressional staffers, that they drove out senior and mid-level civil servants who were unwilling to accept the accusation that their actions were politically motivated, some intelligence officers and outside experts said.

"The agency was never at war with the White House," contended Gary Berntsen, a former operations officer and self-described Republican and Bush supporter who retired in June 2005. "Eighty-five percent of them are Republicans. The CIA was a convenient scapegoat."

Less than two months after Goss took over, the much-respected deputy director of operations, Stephen R. Kappes, and his deputy, Michael Sulick, resigned in protest over a demand by Goss's chief of staff, Patrick Murray, that Kappes fire Sulick for criticizing Murray.

Kappes "was the guy who a generation of us wanted to see as the DDO [operations chief]. Kappes's leaving was a painful thing," Berntsen said. "It made it difficult for [Goss] within the clandestine service. Unfortunately, this is something that dogged him during his tenure."

The confrontation between Murray and the agency's senior leadership continued throughout Goss's tenure, exacerbated by the fact that Goss effectively allowed Murray and other close aides to run the agency, in the view of some current and former intelligence officials. Many agency officials felt the aides showed disdain for officers who had spent their careers in public service.

Four former deputy directors of operations once tried to offer Goss advice about changing the clandestine service without setting off a rebellion, but Goss declined to speak to any of them, said former CIA officials who are aware of the communications. The perception that Goss was conducting a partisan witch hunt grew, too, as staffers asked about the party affiliation of officers who sent in cables or analyses on Iraq that contradicted the Defense Department's more optimistic scenarios.

"Unfortunately, Goss is going to be seen as the guy who oversaw the agency victimized by politics," said Tyler Drumheller, a former chief of the European division. "His tenure saw the greatest loss of operational experience" in the operations division since congressional hearings on CIA domestic spying plunged the agency into crisis, he said.

Though the agency has grown considerably in size and budget in the past four years -- the operations branch has reportedly grown in size by nearly 30 percent -- dozens of officers with more than a decade of field experience each, those who would have been tapped as new staff chiefs or division heads, chose to leave.

Pre-retirement classes, which serve as a transition out of the agency for active-duty officers, are bulging with agency employees.

While the stature and role of the CIA were greatly diminished under Goss during the congressionally ordered reorganization of the intelligence agencies, his counterpart at the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, continued his aggressive efforts to develop a clandestine intelligence operation within his department. The Pentagon's human intelligence unit and its other clandestine military units are expanding in number and authority. Rumsfeld recently won the ability to sidestep U.S. ambassadors in certain circumstances when the Pentagon wants to send in clandestine teams to collect intelligence or undertake operations.

"Rumsfeld keeps pressing for autonomy for defense human intelligence and for SOF [Special Forces] operations," said retired Army Col. W. Patrick Lang, former head of Middle East affairs at the Defense Intelligence Agency. "CIA has lost the ability to control the [human intelligence] process in the community."

Now, "the real battle lies between" Negroponte and Rumsfeld, said retired Army Lt. Gen. Donald Kerrick, a former deputy national security adviser and once a senior official at the Defense Intelligence Agency. "Rumsfeld rules the roost now."

Staff writer Thomas E. Ricks and researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-2168449,00.html




The Sunday Times May 07, 2006


CIA chief quits after 'Hookergate'
Sarah Baxter, Washington



ALL the ingredients for a spy thriller involving prostitutes, poker, a congressman called Randy and parties at the legendary Watergate complex may lie behind the sudden resignation of Porter Goss as director of the CIA last Friday.
The saga has already been named “Hookergate” and the CIA is buzzing with rumours that there is more to Goss’s departure than meets the eye.



The timing is certainly curious, coming hard on the heels of the CIA’s confirmation last week that Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, the number three in the nation’s spy centre who was hand-picked by Goss, had attended poker games at the Watergate and Westin Grand hotels in Washington with Brent Wilkes, a defence contractor and close boyhood friend.

Wilkes is under investigation for allegedly providing Randy “Duke” Cunningham, a disgraced Republican congressman, with prostitutes, limousines and free hotel suites.

The net is also closing in on Foggo, who is being investigated by the FBI over the award to Wilkes of a $3m contract to supply bottled water and other goods to CIA operatives in Iraq and Afghanistan. Although Foggo has admitted playing poker with Wilkes, he insists that no prostitutes were present.

A former senior CIA official said this weekend that he had been told by a trusted source inside the agency that Goss, 67, had attended one of the poker games. The CIA has denied it. “Goss has repeatedly denied being there, so if it were to come out that he was, he is finished,” the former official said.

Intelligence and law enforcement sources said solid evidence had yet to emerge that Goss also went to the parties, but Goss and Foggo share a fondness for poker and expensive cigars.

Larry Johnson, a former CIA operative and a Bush administration critic, said Goss “had a relationship with Dusty and with Brent Wilkes that’s now coming under greater scrutiny”.

Johnson vouched for the integrity of Foggo and Goss but said: “Dusty was a big poker player, and it’s my understanding that Porter Goss was also there (at Wilkes’s parties) for poker. It’s going to be guilt by association.”

President George W Bush said on Friday that Goss’s tenure at the CIA was one of “transition”, although that temporary description was not used when Goss was appointed to the job only 19 months ago.

Behind Bush’s public explanation for Goss’s departure lies a second authorised version, according to which Goss lost a turf battle for power and prestige with John Negroponte, the politically adept new director of national intelligence, a post created to oversee all intelligence gathering after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

Inside the CIA Goss quickly became unpopular after he drove out some of the agency’s most experienced hands — more than a dozen senior officials left.

Some saw the revolving door as necessary after the CIA failed to uncover Al-Qaeda’s plots and supplied faulty intelligence on the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Even so, Goss will not be mourned by colleagues. “There’s more champagne being drunk tonight than on New Year’s Eve,” said one former high-ranking CIA official after Goss’s resignation was announced.

Associates say the former Republican congressman never got a handle on the job. “It was like watching a friend in pain,” one said. “I think he got in over his head.”

Goss is expected to be replaced tomorrow by General Michael Hayden, head of the National Security Agency (NSA), who is close to Dick Cheney, the vice-president. Bush had hoped to announce his appointment at the same time as Goss’s departure. But the CIA chief reportedly said: “If we’re going to do this, let’s go ahead and do it.” It implies that Goss was sacked more brutally than Bush’s polite words about his “able” leadership of the CIA had suggested.

The significance of “Hookergate” in Goss’s demise has yet to emerge, but CIA officers and congressmen are nervous about how far the allegations of sleaze will reach.

The disgraced congressman Cunningham, a 64-year-old Vietnam flying ace, was sentenced to eight years in prison in March for accepting bribes from defence contractors while a member of the defence appropriations sub-committee.

It was obvious that he was living way above his means on a Washington yacht called the Duke-Stir where, in his pyjamas, he would entertain women with champagne. A penitent Cunningham is said to be co-operating with the FBI.