The Toronto Star May 6, 2006
Boss of troubled CIA quits
Resigns after less than two years at the helm
Tenure marked by an exodus of talented officers
By Tin Harper
WASHINGTON—CIA chief Porter Goss abruptly and unexpectedly resigned his post yesterday, apparently pushed out by intelligence czar John Negroponte after less than two years leading an agency dogged by morale problems.
Senior administration officials told reporters following videotaped statements by Goss and George W. Bush that Negroponte, who was given the nation's top intelligence post by the U.S. president, had recently raised the prospect of the departure of the former Florida congressman.
The ascension of Negroponte had reduced the stature of Goss's post, but he was also reportedly unable to lift the agency from the ongoing scandal of faulty and exaggerated intelligence that Bush used in his push to war in Iraq.
Goss had vowed to break the mould at the Central Intelligence Agency when he took over, but instead was faced with a spate of resignations by long-time agents when he brought many of his own loyalists into the job.
Last month's firing of Mary McCarthy, accused of leaking information about clandestine CIA prisons to Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter Dana Priest, only further poisoned the atmosphere at the agency.
Goss had vowed to end leaking at the agency and McCarthy was among a number of analysts and officials forced to undergo polygraph tests.
Goss and Bush released a videotaped statement from the Oval Office. Bush was extremely sparse with the accolades for the outgoing Goss.
"Porter's tenure at the CIA was one of transition,'' Bush said, "where he's helped his agency become integrated into the intelligence community. And that was a tough job. And he's led ably.''
Goss said he believed the agency was "on a very even keel; it's sailing well.
"I honestly believe that we have improved dramatically your goals for our nation's intelligence capabilities."
A replacement is expected to be announced Monday and speculation immediately turned to Bush's homeland security adviser, Fran Townsend.
Goss had no shortage of critics.
"His chief mission was to reform the operations of the CIA and to lead the agency with foresight and vision, yet his tenure was marked by an exodus of talented and respected intelligence officers and a demoralized staff," said Jay Rockefeller, a Democratic senator from West Virginia.
Jane Harman, the senior Democrat on the House of Representatives intelligence committee, said last week she had never been so concerned about the security of the country.
"We still don't have a handle on Al Qaeda," she said. "Our intelligence reorganization is in a slow start-up, and the CIA is in free fall."
John Pike, a security analyst at globalsecurity.org, said the CIA culture could not deal with the influx of political Goss aides.
"Morale is never good at any large organization. That is a given," Pike said.
"But it had never recovered from the WMD thing and the White House blaming them for that, and then along comes the White House chosen one to clean out the stable."
Goss and the agency also lost a lot of its clout with the installation of Negroponte as the director of national intelligence.
He oversees 16 intelligence agencies, and he, not Goss, delivers the daily intelligence briefings to the U.S. president.
Goss was chosen in 2004 to replace George Tenet, who had infamously told the administration that the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq would be a "a slam dunk."
But while Goss pledged to improve the CIA's human intelligence, Osama bin Laden is still at large, the investigation of the leaking of the name of agent Valerie Plame was an earthquake at the agency and it had been rocked by allegations of its role in both the clandestine prisons and the so-called extraordinary renditions of terrorism suspects, using airports in other countries.
When Bush appointed Goss, 67, himself a former CIA agent, he lauded him as a "reformer."
But it has become a peripheral agency, said Steven Aftergood, a senior analyst with the Federation of American Scientists and a close observer of the agency.
"The CIA is an agency in decline and it has declined further under Goss's tenure," he said.
© Copyright 2006, Toronto Star Newspapers Limited
