Rowan Scarborough of the Washington Examiner spoke today about his new book, Sabotage: America’s Enemies Within the CIA, at the Heritage Foundation. The book focuses on what Scarborough characterizes as a campaign by some at the CIA to undermine the conduct of the war on terror, spread misinformation about senior officials, and embarrass the president. Scarborough has previously provided excerpts of the book to his paper; you can find the first of five here. Scarborough explains how some at the agency undermined the work of intelligence analysts at the Pentagon, and elsewhere, who drew different conclusions:
Scarborough goes after what he sees as the rogue culture at the CIA and the role of agency staffers in promoting a probe of the Valerie Plame leak, in going after Donald Rumsfeld, in failing to produce useful intelligence on Iraq, in exposing secret prisons, etc. Today he talked at some length of attempts to frustrate the work of DCI Porter Goss, who pushed to reform the Agency. Once an agent himself, Goss was a critic of the CIA and its former director, George Tenet, during his tenure as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. When he arrived at Langley, he brought with him senior staffers who were already unwelcome. Career employees saw Goss as a threat and took offense at statements they viewed as an effort to get them to toe the administration line, and some fought back with leaks to the press that painted Goss and his team as incompetent. How are things now? Scarborough did not go into detail. He said that Admiral Hayden, the current director, has changed the tone. Having seen the clandestine service weakened by leaks, he has attempted to build it back up. He set a new tone early by inviting employees to contact him directly via email with their thoughts and concerns. While Hayden is certainly more popular than Goss among many at Langley, according to Scarborough it is too soon to asses his influence on the agency. It was just two weeks ago for example, that Goss’s successor as chair of the House Intelligence Committee asked the Director of National Intelligence to look into CIA leaks regarding secret U.S. detention facilities overseas.
