We haven’t heard Porter Goss’s side of the story but I’m sure we will. I doubt he and his staff are going to let all the stuff being dumped on them — from Dana Priest in the Washington Post, an anonymous administration source, and the Democrats — go unanswered. Of course, as this Washington Times editorial notes, “the real back story of the Goss ouster” is a separate issue from the “from debates over Gen. Hayden’s merits.” Today’s Wall Street Journal editorial makes a similar point. And, after reading Reuel Marc Gerecht’s WSJ piece, there’s no doubt the general has his work cut out for him. Gerecht writes:
Another myth is on the verge of being born. To wit: Porter Goss, the conservative ideologue, greatly politicized the CIA, and encouraged or forced several critically important senior officers to leave the agency, thus dispiriting the entire organization. Implicit in Ms. Harman’s commentary — made more explicit elsewhere by her, by other Democrats in Congress, and by sympathetic members of the press — is the assumption that the Bush administration is waging a vendetta against Langley’s upper echelons for their hostility to the administration and their embarrassing leaks to the press, especially before the 2004 elections. The current version of this theme, best articulated by Howard Dean of the Democratic National Committee, posits a completely apolitical, professional CIA — correctly analyzing Iraq (weapons of mass destruction excepted, of course) — being pounded by a partisan, bellicose, mendacious Republican administration, punishing those who speak truth to power. One has the sneaking suspicion that Mr. Dean, like others in politics and the press, really has no idea at all what CIA case officers, working-level analysts and their few Iraqi reporting assets (overwhelmingly expatriate cliques of former Baathist Sunni military officers) were writing about Iraq from 2001 until the invasion. I’ll take a bet that not a single analyst or Iraq task-force case officer foresaw, in a written report, the all-important role of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and the senior Shiite clergy; the power of the Salafi fundamentalist movement among the Sunnis; or the speed and nature of the Sunni insurgency before the insurgency actually developed. But a remote understanding of the CIA has not prevented Mr. Dean, and others, from speaking with certainty about how astute Langley was in Iraq. Few seem to suggest that some in the senior management of the CIA might possibly want to rewrite history to make themselves look better, or that agency officers, like senior State Department officials, can occasionally misbehave and forget that they are apolitical executive-branch officers. So what do we actually know about the state of the CIA — especially the clandestine service, which has always defined the agency? And what can we say about Porter Goss’s brief tenure? The one thing we know for sure is that Mr. Goss certainly didn’t degrade the capabilities of Langley, given how poor the espionage capacity already was. And the agency’s covert-action (CA) capabilities — against targets that really mattered (for example, Iran) — were for most purposes nonexistent when Mr. Goss arrived and remain so today (the brain and muscle for these things take years to develop). A working-level CIA officer familiar with the operations directorate’s Iran assets described Langley’s CA abilities inside Iran from 2000 through 2004 as “unchanged: they’re zero.” … Regrettably, reform at the CIA is now dead. The only real chance opened immediately after 9/11 and closed when President Bush decided to retain the services of George Tenet, who always remained close and sympathetic to the operations directorate. Ms. Harman, many other prominent Democrats, and the anti-Bush press have put another nail into the clandestine service’s coffin by rallying around an organization that desperately needs to be radically deconstructed. However tepidly or lazily Mr. Goss approached his work, he and his abrasive minions ought to be complimented for at least firing somebody. Given the history of the CIA, this is not an insignificant achievement. In the 1980s, it was the Republican Party which was hopelessly lost concerning the supposed value and achievements of the CIA. Today, it’s the Democrats who’ve lost it. This is a pity. The first-rate young men and women at the CIA, who have been quitting Langley quietly in large numbers for decades, deserve better.
