A Year Later, Goss's CIA Is Still in Turmoil

UH-OH, I would love to be a fly on the wall at that closed hearing...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/18/AR2005101801549_pf.html
A Year Later, Goss's CIA Is Still in Turmoil
Congress to Ask Why Spy Unit Continues to Lose Personnel

By Dafna Linzer
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 19, 2005; A01



When Porter J. Goss took over a failure-stained CIA last year, he promised to reshape the agency beginning with the area he knew best: its famed spy division.

Goss, himself a former covert operative who had chaired the House intelligence committee, focused on the officers in the field. He pledged status and resources for case officers, sending hundreds more to far-off assignments, undercover and on the front line of the battle against al Qaeda.

A year later, Goss is at loggerheads with the clandestine service he sought to embrace. At least a dozen senior officials -- several of whom were promoted under Goss -- have resigned, retired early or requested reassignment. The directorate's second-in-command walked out of Langley last month and then told senators in a closed-door hearing that he had lost confidence in Goss's leadership.

The turmoil has left some employees shaken and has prompted former colleagues in Congress to question how Goss intends to improve the agency's capabilities and restore morale....the Senate intelligence committee, which generally took testimony once a year from Goss's predecessors, has invited him for an unusual closed-door hearing today. Senators, according to their staff, intend to ask the former congressman from Florida to explain why the CIA is bleeding talent at a time of war, and to answer charges that the agency is adrift....

sentence...

(took over a failure-stained CIA last year.)

Can't fix something that isn't broken...only purge it.

incompetent hacks, cronies and toadies. It is a very worrying development.

it's all part of their plan to destroy the US.

That's what happens when you put people in power who hate government.

Turbulent Times

Taking over the agency at a turbulent time in its history would not have been an easy task for anyone. It was particularly difficult for Goss, an eight-term congressman who was close to the White House and who became fiercely critical of the CIA.

Shortly before he was nominated for the job, Goss co-authored a scathing indictment of the agency and its popular director, George J. Tenet. In a letter to the agency in May 2004, Goss and several congressional colleagues focused particular wrath on the clandestine service and human intelligence.

"After years of trying to convince, suggest, urge, entice, cajole, and pressure CIA to make wide-reaching changes to the way it conducts its HUMINT mission," the CIA "continues down a road leading over a proverbial cliff. The damage to the HUMINT mission through its misallocation and redirection of resources, poor prioritization of objectives, micromanagement of field operations, and a continued political aversion to operational risk is, in the Committee's judgment, significant and could likely be long-lasting."

Goss declined to be interviewed. But some of his close allies say the letter, which they believe he regrets in tone, if not substance, has haunted his first year and accounts for much of the strain between Goss and the clandestine service. "The letter is a pretty clear indication that he didn't expect to get the job," one official said.

junior indeed knows his men! Brownie, Negroponte and Kerik comes to the mind in a flash. The King of trash is still Donald Rumsfeld.