Porter Goss: Public Servant?
by Joseph Finder Post date: 09.23.04
Porter Goss, confirmed yesterday as the new Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), will be the most rabid partisan to occupy the seventh-floor office at Langley since Ronald Reagan installed his campaign manager, William Casey, in the post. But partisanship doesn't in and of itself make for a bad CIA director. George H. W. Bush, for instance, had been chairman of the Republican National Committee before coming to Langley, and in his short tenure there became one of the most highly regarded DCIs. Allen Dulles was a staunch Republican as well, and he had far more successes than failures.
The problem with Porter Goss, however, goes beyond simple partisanship. After all, it's possible to be partisan without being a political toady. And since September 11 Goss seems to have morphed into an obedient servant of the Bush White House, often abusing his powerful oversight position in Congress for the administration's gain. That track record--far more than his party allegiance--is the real reason his confirmation yesterday as CIA director is cause for serious concern.
This past March, Porter Goss came out, guns blazing, as a Bush-Cheney campaign hit man, when he published an astonishingly intemperate op-ed piece titled, "Need Intelligence? Don't ask John Kerry," in which he charged the Democrats with pushing for intelligence cuts that were "devastating to the ability of the CIA to keep America safe." He blamed Kerry for "leading efforts in Congress to dismantle the intelligence capabilities of the nation." In June he called Kerry's policies "dangerously naïve," and during a House debate later the same month, in full Zell Miller mode, Goss even attempted to ridicule Kerry by holding up a poster showing a blow up of a 1997 Kerry quote calling for cuts to the intelligence budget.
When Senator Jay Rockefeller asked him at his confirmation hearing about these accusations--that the Democrats had actually tried to dismantle American intelligence--and pointed out that Goss himself had co-sponsored legislation that would have slashed intelligence spending far more, Goss evaded: "My public record is my public record." Asked whether he'd written the inflammatory op-ed piece at the behest of the Bush White House or reelection campaign, he said he didn't remember.
By then, Goss had been doing the White House's bidding for several years. In October 2002, when the Bush administration was working frantically to block the formation of the independent 9/11 Commission, Cheney called Goss with marching orders to fight it. Goss immediately declared, "The White House is not interested in this commission, hence I am not for bringing the subject up." In a closed session he revealed that he was following instructions from "above my pay grade." (Amazingly, at his confirmation hearing he had the temerity--maybe chutzpah is the more accurate word--to boast of his "paternity" in setting up the independent commission.)
But in 2002, he insisted there was no need for independent hearings, given that he was running his own, the joint House-Senate investigation that he co-chaired with his old friend Bob Graham. Their inquiry, though, was unimpressive. Goss and Graham allowed the White House and the CIA to "scrub" the report, and as a result huge portions were classified, including the famous July 2001 memo from an FBI agent in Phoenix warning that Middle Eastern men were taking flying lessons. Their report even neglected to mention the now-legendary August 6, 2001, Presidential Daily Brief (PDB)--"Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S."--though the title had already been published widely. If the Goss-Graham report wasn't quite a whitewash, it was awfully lame. It revealed not a thing about what President Bush had been told before September 11. It spared the White House the indignity of disclosure.
When Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was outed as an undercover CIA officer--as retaliation for Wilson's publicly refuting White House claims that Iraq had tried to buy "yellowcake" from Niger--Goss, that Agency veteran, refused to investigate this serious breach of operational security. He called the case a bunch of "wild and unsubstantiated allegation," adding, "Somebody sends me a blue dress and some DNA, I'll have an investigation."
Yet when Dick Cheney called him to rail against a leak from one of the Congressional intelligence committees disclosing a National Security Agency intercept on September 10, 2001, of ominous messages in Arabic ("Tomorrow is zero hour" and "The match is about to begin")--messages that weren't translated until the day after the attacks--Goss snapped to attention. He took the extraordinary step of asking John Ashcroft to send in the FBI to interrogate committee members and their staff. (The leaker turned out to be Republican Senator Richard Shelby, at which point Ashcroft's Justice Department--and Goss--lost all interest in criminal prosecution.)
And when Richard Clarke, the counterterrorism adviser to both Clinton and Bush, came out in March of this year with his accusations that the Bush White House had ignored repeated warnings on terrorism prior to September 11, Goss was one of the first to pile on. Referring to Clarke's testimony before the independent 9/11 Commission, Goss accused Clarke of perjury--of telling an entirely different story when he testified two years earlier before the joint House-Senate inquiry into the attacks. "There's a huge difference between what Clarke said then and now," Goss said, "and there may be a lie involved." Goss, who was in the room when Clarke had testified in closed hearings in July 2002 and knew full well what Clarke had said, threatened to bring perjury charges against Clarke. He also threatened to declassify Clarke's earlier testimony. But apparently Clarke hadn't contradicted himself after all, for Goss quietly dropped the subject. Asked about those perjury charges at his confirmation hearing, Goss replied, "Perhaps I was a little overzealous in what I said." As to why he never released the testimony, as he'd threatened to do, he allowed that he had "other, higher priorities."
A number of CIA insiders I've talked to in recent days have expressed bafflement about what seems, on the surface at least, to be a sudden and perplexing change in Goss's attitude toward the intelligence community. In his eight years as chairman of the House intelligence committee, he'd attained a reputation as a stout, though not unreasonable, defender of the CIA--his "alma mater," as he calls it. Even after September 11, Goss remained a booster of the Agency. He pointedly refused to characterize the CIA's intelligence on Iraq as a "failure," instead praising the Agency's "fine work."
Then, abruptly, this past June, Goss began blasting George Tenet and the CIA. In extraordinary language attached to the bill authorizing the 2005 intelligence budget, he called the Agency's clandestine service "dysfunctional" and "a stilted bureaucracy incapable of even the slightest bit of success." Goss, who so recently had nothing but praise for the "fine work" the CIA had done, suddenly declared that the Agency "continues down a road leading over a proverbial cliff."
But at the very time that Goss was trashing the Directorate of Operations, a counterintelligence operation was under way, run out of the CIA's counterterrorism center, that was, in the words of one longtime Agency official, "the most beautiful, elegant, complicated thing I've ever heard of, involving I don't know how many continents, intelligence services, surveillance teams, spies." This same official, who's never hung back from criticizing the Agency, told me, "If you knew the stuff the place was doing these days you'd weep with pride." The "wrap-up" of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the so-called operational mastermind of the 9/11 plot, is said to be the result of some breathtaking counterintelligence work. If Goss didn't know about these operations, he wasn't doing his job.
So why the sudden shift? Tenet had resigned a few weeks earlier, and the theory generally bruited about Washington was that Goss was campaigning for the job. True, his scathing attacks served only to alienate many of the Agency's employees. But Goss realized that, in order to join the Bush team, he'd have to adopt the Bush strategy, which was to make George Tenet, and the agency at large, the fall guy for September 11 and the WMD fiasco.
That's called a cover-up. The CIA's intelligence prior to September 11, and in the run-up to the Iraq war, was woefully deficient, no question about it. But my conversations with CIA insiders confirm that much of the intelligence they did supply to the White House was custom-tailored on the seventh floor to fit what the White House wanted to hear, in order to justify the war it wanted to launch.
Naturally, when eight CIA analysts were asked by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence whether they had ever skewed their reporting in response to White House pressure, they said no. But as the redoubtable Thomas Powers writes in a recent issue of The New York Review of Books, "Asking CIA analysts if they have been cooking the books while their bosses sit in the room reminds me of those well-meaning Western lefties who paid visits in the 1930s to prisoners in the Soviet gulag and returned with assurances that the prisoners all agreed the food was great and they were getting plenty of outdoor exercise."
One high-ranking CIA official told me that all sorts of questions were raised by analysts about the reliability of the Iraqi defector codenamed, fittingly, CURVEBALL. But their warnings were rebuffed at the director and deputy director level. A number of PDB articles that cast doubt on Iraq's possession of WMD were "deep-sixed," in the words of one Agency official, because they didn't fit the party line.
Internal investigations have already begun at Langley, blaming various weaknesses in the analytical product. But the problems quite likely go deeper--and higher. Unfortunately, under Porter Goss, you can be sure that these investigations will be fruitless. His record of loyalty to Bush and Cheney, at the expense of any independence of judgment, guarantees it. At a time when the country badly needs a CIA director of moral rectitude, we are instead getting another CIA director who'll give the White House what it wants.
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