IT IS NO SECRET that the Bush administration and the old guard at the CIA have not, in many instances, seen eye to eye over the last several years. Leaks and anonymously-sourced complaints from agency officials have dominated above-the-fold news stories. The rancorous bureaucrats at the agency have been so hostile to the administration, in fact, that Senator John McCain warned, on ABC’s This Week, in November 2004, that “This is a dysfunctional agency and in some ways a rogue agency.”

Porter Goss, who became the director of Central Intelligence in April 2005, has confronted this highly-politicized bureaucracy. The result has been a staggering amount house cleaning. Various press accounts have discussed the ongoing purge of senior-level officials from Langley. But the bureaucrats who once ran the nation’s supposedly super-secret spook organization aren’t going down without a fight. Bureaucracies die hard.