politics

Running Out of Goss

American magazines this week hover backstage and try to provide some analysis of what exactly is going on behind the tattered curtains at the CIA.

May 9, 2006

On Friday President Bush announced that Porter Goss would be stepping down as the director of the CIA and, yesterday, revealed that Goss would be replaced by General Michael V. Hayden. While newspapers scrambled to profile Hayden and the burgeoning battle over the general’s nomination, American magazines this week hovered around backstage and tried to provide some analysis of what exactly is going on behind the tattered curtains at the agency.

“It was one of those resignations that raise more questions than answers: The CIA’s patrician boss, Porter Goss, was stepping down after less than two years on the job, the White House announced late Friday afternoon,” writes U.S. News & World Report. “That kind of end-of-the-week timing is usually reserved for bad news, when political handlers hope reporters are lost in the shuffle of the oncoming weekend.”

So what was with the Friday stagecraft?

“There was plenty of reason to bury the news, for Goss’s short tenure at the CIA was anything but smooth,” adds U.S. News. “He took control in the wake of disastrous intelligence failures involving the 9/11 attacks and the Iraq war, amid a far-reaching reorganization that diminished the CIA’s role in the U.S. intelligence community. … Besides that, the CIA’s inspector general and the FBI are looking at the presence of one of Goss’s top aides, CIA Executive Director Kyle ‘Dusty’ Foggo, at gambling parties sponsored by a defense contractor implicated in the bribery case of former Rep. Randy ‘Duke’ Cunningham.”

Sure enough, Goss’ abrupt exit might soon be upstaged by the “Duke” Cunningham and “Dusty” Foggo show, which, according to Newsweek, appears to be gaining momentum.

“[T]he agency’s problems may only get worse, and one reason is Foggo,” reports Newsweek. “Federal investigators are looking at the ties of the CIA’s ‘Ex Dir’ [Executive Director] to a congressional bribery scandal. Foggo was a high-school football teammate and college buddy of Brent Wilkes’s, a defense contractor who was identified as an unindicted co-conspirator when former San Diego congressman and ex-Navy air ace Randy (Duke) Cunningham pleaded guilty.”

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“Former Texas congressman Charlie Wilson told Newsweek that he attended two or three poker games with federal contractor Wilkes and his cronies at the Watergate, but saw no hookers and quit going to the games because he was bothered by the cigar smoke,” notes the magazine. “An eyewitness (who asked not to be identified commenting on sensitive matters) told Newsweek that in 1999, Foggo, Cunningham and a former Goss aide and ex-CIA official known as Nine Fingers (identified to Newsweek as Brant Bassett) attended an all-male Wilkes poker party at the Westin Grand Hotel in Washington.”

But according to Time, Goss’ departure has less to do with Duke and Dusty and Nine Fingers, and everything to do with a guy named John — specifically, Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte.

Goss was “hired as CIA chief at the very moment the job began to lose its clout,” reports Time. “Less than a year after Goss stepped into the Langley, Va., post, Bush named Negroponte director of national intelligence (DNI) and gave him the authority to oversee and direct 16 intelligence shops — among them the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the FBI.”

“Armed with new powers created by Congress, Negroponte was supposed to make the hidebound agencies work together and share information, something they had largely failed to do before 9/11,” Time adds. “Goss’s departure was, above all, a signal that Negroponte was finally exercising his powers and trying to slip the stray agencies into harness.”

The prospect of Negroponte and his harness is exactly what scares the editors at The Weekly Standard, one of the few magazines this week lamenting Goss’ departure.

“Goss is a political conservative and an institutional reformer,” writes The Weekly Standard. “He is pro-Bush Doctrine and pro-shaking-up-the-CIA.”

“John Negroponte, so far as we can tell, shares none of these sympathies,” adds the Standard. “Negroponte is therefore more in tune with large swaths of the intelligence community and the State Department. If Negroponte forced Goss out and is allowed to pick Goss’s successor — if Goss isn’t replaced with a reformer committed to fighting and winning the war on terror, broadly and rightly understood — then Goss’s departure will prove to have been a weakening moment in an administration increasingly susceptible to moments of weakness.”

In the meantime, the editors at National Review were also busy pinpointing the source of the CIA’s turmoil.

“The reasons for Porter Goss’s abrupt departure as CIA director are shrouded in mystery,” writes the magazine. “But its effect is not. It gives the impression that there has been a coup by the CIA insiders who have waged a covert policy war against the Bush administration for five years. The White House must act quickly to correct the impression that the renegades have won.”

“The CIA has always had a leftist bent, well represented in its upper echelons even under directors of staunchly anti-Communist and pro-national-security orientation,” adds National Review. “During the Bush presidency, however, the agency has not been content with subtly pushing its own agenda while underperforming its nominal mission. It has run amok.”

“Most damaging of all, however, has been the CIA’s incorrigible leaking,” concludes the magazine. “Again and again, it has demonstrated that it is more dedicated to harming the Bush administration’s war effort than to protecting its own secret activities.”

In other words, forget about all those hookers, bribes and smoke-filled rooms — and fire up those polygraph machines!

Felix Gillette writes about the media for The New York Observer.