PORTER GOSS was confirmed as director of central intelligence on September 22, 2004. That day, acting CIA director John McLaughlin said, “I know I speak for my colleagues at CIA and throughout the intelligence community in congratulating Porter Goss on his confirmation by the Senate as director of central intelligence.”
It was a gracious statement from a man who had wanted the job. But in terms of accuracy it should go down as the latest in a long line of bogus CIA assessments. McLaughlin was not speaking on behalf of many of his colleagues at the CIA when he congratulated Goss on his confirmation.
As chairman of the House Select Committee on Intelligence for seven years, Goss had been highly critical of the agency, particularly its clandestine services. He arrived at Langley with reform of the stubborn CIA bureaucracy on his mind.
So within two weeks of McLaughlin’s statement, current and former CIA officials started firing warning shots at their new boss. These ranged from disgraceful attempts to tarnish the personal reputation of Goss’s associates, to silly stories of how Goss’s team was being rude to oh-so-sensitive bureaucrats in Langley, to ridiculous claims that Goss was trying to politicize an agency that had become more politicized than either of our political parties.
These stories were fed to sympathetic and credulous reporters by operatives long schooled in the art of disinformation, and the media began to construct a narrative: Porter Goss and his heavy-handed band of Republicans had unfortunately come to carry out a partisan purge of an outstanding, effective, public-spirited agency.
Meanwhile, it turned out that Michael Scheuer, former head of the agency’s bin Laden unit, had received permission from CIA leadership publicly (though anonymously) to criticize the Bush administration’s conduct of the war on terror through much of the last year–so long as that critique did not include harsh assessments of the performance of the intelligence community. That admission makes it much easier to understand the numerous CIA leaks against President Bush in September and October.
The good news is that the president is now fighting back. He wants change at the agency and is standing behind Goss. He knows that he cannot carry out a post-9/11 foreign policy with a pre-9/11 intelligence apparatus–and whatever constrained him from making changes over the past three years, those constraints seem gone. He knows the CIA needs dramatic reform, that the American people will welcome such reform, and even that they expect him to do it and to do it quickly. And he knows that those inside the CIA opposed to Goss’s reforms will fight hard and will fight dirty.
So Bush and Goss are undeterred. When two senior CIA officials from the operations directorate challenged his authority earlier this month, Goss quickly made it clear that he would accept their resignations. They resigned. These are almost certainly the first of many personnel changes. Others will and should come quickly. And organizational changes will follow as well. There is much to do. Bush made clear he appreciates the urgency of the task with his November 18 order instructing Goss to vastly increase the size of the clandestine and analysis services at the agency “as soon as feasible.”
But the improvements at the CIA must be both quantitative and qualitative. The CIA, and in particular its clandestine service, exists to penetrate enemies and collect their secrets. In recent years, it has signally failed in this task. The CIA never penetrated Saddam Hussein’s inner circle or the senior levels of al Qaeda. Thus, analysts were clueless about much that was going on within al Qaeda and within Saddam Hussein’s regime.
Porter Goss, with the strong backing of the president, should insist on major reform at the CIA. The more quickly he proceeds, and the more steadfastly the president backs him, the safer we’ll all be.
—William Kristol
