CIA boss Goss is cooked

[97silverlsc]

CIA boss Goss is cooked

Tied to contractor's poker parties -
hints of bribes & women
http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/415304p-350961c.html
BY RICHARD SISK and JAMES GORDON MEEK
DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU

WASHINGTON - CIA Director Porter Goss abruptly resigned yesterday amid allegations that he and a top aide may have attended Watergate poker parties where bribes and prostitutes were provided to a corrupt congressman.

Kyle (Dusty) Foggo, the No. 3 official at the CIA, could soon be indicted in a widening FBI investigation of the parties thrown by defense contractor Brent Wilkes, named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the bribery conviction of former Rep. Randall (Duke) Cunningham, law enforcement sources said.

A CIA spokeswoman said Foggo went to the lavish weekly hospitality-suite parties at the Watergate and Westin Grand hotels but "just for poker."

Intelligence and law enforcement sources said solid evidence had yet to emerge that Goss also went to the parties, but Goss and Foggo share a fondness for poker and expensive cigars, and the FBI investigation was continuing.

Larry Johnson, a former CIA operative and a Bush administration critic, said Goss "had a relationship with Dusty and with Brent Wilkes that's now coming under greater scrutiny."

Johnson vouched for the integrity of Foggo and Goss but said, "Dusty was a big poker player, and it's my understanding that Porter Goss was also there \[at Wilkes' parties\] for poker. It's going to be guilt by association."

"It's all about the Duke Cunningham scandal," a senior law enforcement official told the Daily News in reference to Goss' resignation. Duke, a California Republican, was sentenced to more than eight years in prison after pleading guilty in November to taking $2.4 million in homes, yachts and other bribes in exchange for steering government contracts.

Goss' inability to handle the allegations swirling around Foggo prompted John Negroponte, the director of National Intelligence, who oversees all of the nation's spy agencies, to press for the CIA chief's ouster, the senior official said. The official said Goss is not an FBI target but "there is an impending indictment" of Foggo for steering defense contracts to his poker buddies.

One subject of the FBI investigation is a $3 million CIA contract that went to Wilkes to supply bottled water and other goods to CIA operatives in Iraq and Afghanistan, sources said.

In a hastily arranged Oval Office announcement that stunned official Washington, neither President Bush nor Goss offered a substantive reason for why the head of the spy agency was leaving after only a year on the job.

"He has led ably" in an era of CIA transition, Bush said with Goss seated at his side. "He has a five-year plan to increase the analysts and operatives."

Goss said the trust Bush placed in him "is something I could never have imagined." "I believe the agency is on a very even keel, sailing well," he said.

The official Bush administration spin that emerged later was that Goss lost out in a turf battle with Negroponte, but Goss' tenure was marked by the resignations of several veteran operatives who viewed him as an amateur out of his depth.

White House officials said Bush would announce early next week his choice to succeed Goss. Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, Negroponte's top deputy, heads the list of potential replacements, with White House counterterror chief Fran Townsend also on the short list.

Negroponte "apparently had no confidence" in Goss, and Bush's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board was also "very alarmed by problems at the CIA," said a congressional source involved in oversight of U.S. spy agencies.

"Supposedly the \[Cunningham\] scandal was the last straw," the source said. "This administration may be on the verge of a major scandal."

Problems at spy agency

Here are some other scandals in the CIA's recent history:

#
A human-rights furor erupted in 2005 with revelations that the CIA had set up secret prisons in Eastern European countries to interrogate terror suspects.

#
CIA Director George Tenet took blame for the since-debunked claim in President Bush's 2003 State of the Union address that Iraq had purchased enriched uranium from Africa — a major part of his case for why the U.S. should go to war. Heavily criticized over questionable intelligence on the Iraq war and terrorism in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Tenet resigned in 2004.

#
Former CIA Director John Deutch's security clearance was suspended in 1999 because he improperly kept classified material on a home computer vulnerable to Internet hackers.

#
A State Department official revealed in 1994 that the CIA covered up what it knew about the role of a Guatemalan colonel, a paid informer, in the slaying of rebel leader Efrain Bamaca, who was married to an American citizen.

#
CIA agent Aldrich Ames spied for the KGB for nine years, until his arrest in 1994, giving the Soviets the names of every undercover agent the CIA had in Moscow, leading to the deaths of at least nine agents.

#
The agency was implicated in the Iran-Contra scandal, the Reagan-era scheme to secretly fund Nicaraguan rebels by illegally selling arms to Tehran.

 

[Calabrio]

Intelligence and law enforcement sources said solid evidence had yet to emerge that Goss also went to the parties...

It's grossly irresponsible for the press to make the ascertions when there is really nothing to base it on. Nothing, other than:

Goss and Foggo share a fondness for poker and expensive cigars

Me too.

This is the new angle that the liberals intend to attack on this issue. This'll be their gotcha issue of the news cycle. Even that shrill woman who yells alot only to be proven wrong, Elleanor Clift, tried to sneak this bomb in while on the MacLaughlin Group this weekend. Tony Blankley tried to call her on it.

Given what we do KNOW, it's, much more likely that Goss is leaving his position because he's had enough of Washington. He's unhappy with the changes in Intelligence that have him reporting to Negraponte and not directly to Bush now. And that he's working in a hostile enviroment since he was appointed to DCI to clean up the CIA. Guys who shake up the status quo are never popular, especially with entrenched beuracrats.

This guilt by association could possibly be the cause, but it's irresponsible to attack him so prematurely.

 

[fossten]

Wasn't Clinton fond of poker (verb) and cigars too?

 

[raVeneyes]

Kyle (Dusty) Foggo...Rep. Randall (Duke) Cunningham

I just find it funny that all of the people being linked to these "good ol' boy" type scandals have nicknames like Dusty and Duke (waiting for someone's to be Skippy or Ernie)

 

[fossten]

I just find it funny that all of the people being linked to these "good ol' boy" type scandals have nicknames like Dusty and Duke (waiting for someone's to be Skippy or Ernie)

You mean like Dingy Harry Reid?

 

[raVeneyes]

You mean like Dingy Harry Reid?

"Dingy"

Are you serious...someone lets themselves be called "Dingy"?

 

[fossten]

This is an excellent article by Phil Brennan that explains what's going on at the CIA.


Reprinted from NewsMax.com

Spooking the Spooks
Philip V. Brennan

Wednesday, May 10, 2006

Underlying all the ruckus boiling to the surface about the state of the so-called "intelligence community" in the wake of the resignation of Porter Goss is the unhappy fact that the various agencies involved in spookery are an unmitigated mess.

Intelligence-gathering in itself is a messy business, largely misunderstood in a nation of people most of whom prefer to go about their private business, play by the rules and don't much care for the kind of dirty, underhanded tricks involved in the spook game.

In 1929 Henry Stimson, later FDR's secretary of war, typified that attitude when he sniffed that "gentlemen do not read each other's mail." In 1963, responding on behalf of the more realistic Americans, Allen Dulles, then CIA director, said that "gentlemen do read other people's mail, if they can get their hands on it," according to Charles E. Lathrop, author of "The Literary Spy: The Ultimate Source for Quotations on Espionage & Intelligence."

The process "of getting their hands on it" is not a gentleman's job. That task belongs to the spooks, and of late those at the CIA have not been very adept at doing it. A good number of them, to the contrary, have proved capable of getting their hands on the administration's "mail" and passing it on to media friendly to their left-leaning political persuasion, which is widely at variance to that of the administration they serve.

This has been the modus vivendi of a clique of CIA staffers who have employed the leaking of secrets as their way of displaying their disapproval of administration policies, much in the same manner as Benedict Arnold displayed his disapproval of the policies of the Continental Congress and their failure to compensate him for his expenses. He was also fearful that the alliance with then-Catholic France would somehow expose the Colonies to the deadly virus of papism. So he tried to leak information to the British, the Revolution's equivalent of the New York Times and the Washington Post

When you get right down to it, with some notable exceptions Uncle Sam has not been very good at playing the spook game, partially because of that reluctance to open other people's mail. In the interim between the two World Wars, aside from the Office of Naval Intelligence and the Army's spook corps, the only civilian intelligence operation was a rather informal arrangement run out of Wall Street law firms by World War I hero General "Wild Bill" Donovan*, who had established a close relationship with Britain's intelligence services.

Early in World War II Donovan organized the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which, while largely successful in both penetrating and combating the Nazi war machine, was itself seriously penetrated by the Soviets.


Thanks to the intercepts of Soviet communications known as the Venona Project, it was revealed that a senior aide to Donovan, Duncan Lee – shamefully, a descendant of General Robert E. Lee – had divulged secret OSS operations in Europe and China to the Soviets.

Other OSS employees such as Maurice Halperin and Donald Wheeler of the agency's Research and Analysis Divisions both spied for the Soviets and slanted their reports to favor Soviet aims. There were as many as 20 other Soviet moles working for the OSS.

Aside from these traitors, the OSS had a strong contingent of leftists, many of whom could not view the Soviets as anything more than simply competitors in the international economic struggle. Quasi-Marxists themselves, they clung to the old Communist credo of having "no enemies to the left."

The significance of all this is that the OSS sired the Central Intelligence Agency, which, while performing yeoman service in the Cold War, particularly under CIA Director Bill Casey, who ran circles around the Soviets and was a principal contributor the fall of the Evil Empire, continued to be full of the same kind of left-wingers who infested the OSS.

Despite his successes, however, Casey failed to rid the agency of its large cadre of left-leaning employees, who dominated the analysis section and still do today. Such Bush-hating CIA employees as Valerie Plame Wilson, leaker Mary McCarthy and a host of others, most of whom gave big bucks to the Gore and Kerry campaigns and the DNC, were intelligence analysts, not the handful of covert operatives risking life and limb overseas to gather information. So was that Israel-hating heckler Ray McGovern, who attacked Donald Rumsfeld last week.


Porter Goss set out to cleanse the CIA of this disloyal crew, who have proved willing to endanger the national security in their frenzy to damage George W. Bush and his administration, and he was well on his way to doing it when he fell victim to the bureaucratic wars.

Much of the current controversy revolves around the turf wars that always erupt when bureaucracies clash. Goss's CIA was superseded by the new Department of National Intelligence, headed by Ambassador John Negroponte and his second in command, Air Force General Michael Hayden. One issue between Goss and his new superior was reportedly Negroponte and Hayden's plan to move the analysts out of the CIA and into their shop – a rather neat solution to the need to get the foxes out of the hen house and into a place where they could be kept under closer supervision.

Like any head of a bureaucracy, Goss recoiled at the idea of having a large chunk of his agency swept up and carried off by Negroponte to his own growing empire. This set the two old college friends at odds, and Negroponte won.

None of this really helps to resolve the main problem, which is the fact that aside from spectacular technological advances in monitoring communications, our overall intelligence-gathering capacity stinks. Goss was trying to build a human intelligence capacity, but he had a long way to go since the Church Committee and the Clinton administration just about destroyed that vital function of the spook game.

The Wall Street Journal's Opinion Journal put it well on Tuesday:

"We love the notion that Porter Goss somehow crippled the CIA's effectiveness by 'politicizing' the agency. It looked to us as if the place had given up spying for politicking well before Mr. Goss took over in 2004. The leaks out of Langley the past four years are not infighting as usual; they represent a new and corrosive level of institutional disloyalty. This is a breakdown in discipline of a degree that can be very difficult to reverse once begun. Short of prosecutions, it is hard to see what General Hayden can do to get the dogs back in the kennel. And if that proves true, then let it be said that the CIA's leakers have probably succeeded in blowing up their own agency.

"Testifying before the 9/11 Commission, former DCI and Defense Secretary James Schlesinger made a broad point worth holding in mind as the Hayden confirmation unfolds: 'Intelligence is highly successful in dealing with routine developments. It is, however, particularly prone to failure at the turning points of history.'"

We happen to be at one of those "turning points of history," and we'd better get a grip on the problem of reading other people's mail before one of those letters has a nuclear weapon inside it.

Good luck, General Hayden, and be sure to sharpen your letter opener.

*(Apropos of nothing, although I never met Wild Bill Donovan and had nothing whatsoever to do with him in his lifetime, I was an honorary pallbearer at his funeral. That may sound impressive, but it was actually one of my more bizarre exploits in klutzery.

Although uninvited, my overly aggressive partner, the late Frank Kluckhohn, flashing his State Department security credentials, bullied us into the crowded St. Matthew's Cathedral and pushed our way into a section of the jam-packed pews which, unbeknownst to us, turned out to be reserved for a distinguished group of honorary pallbearers. When the funeral ended, we found ourselves ushered into their midst as they performed their function of escorting General Donovan's coffin to the waiting hearse. That's penetration by klutzery at its highest level.)