The White House is trying
its best to put a happy face on the abrupt firing of CIA Director
Porter Goss. Announced on a Friday afternoon – the classic
timing for doomsday announcements – the news came as a surprise
to many intelligence professionals, including, I am told, Goss
himself.
Formerly mainstream media outlets including the Washington Post and
the New York Times have made much of the alleged involvement of Goss’s
chief of staff, Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, in a corruption
scheme involving convicted former Congressman Randy (Duke)
Cunningham.
According to these breathless accounts, Foggo attended poker games –
imagine! – with a friend at the Watergate (yes, that Watergate)
hotel. No one is yet saying what stakes they wagered, nor the type of
female companions Foggo’s friends may or may not have provided.
Nor has anyone alleged – so far! - that Mr. Goss attended these
gatherings. Wink wink, nod nod,
Washington, DC is a Byzantine place, but no part of our nation’s
power structure is more Byzantine than the intelligence
establishment. Planted stories such as the ones now circulating about
Porter Goss are a form of payback, aimed squarely at tarnishing the
former CIA chief’s reputation and enhancing the status of his
enemies.
Among those enemies are a coterie of current and former CIA officers
who have backed Mary McCarthy, the CIA deputy inspector general and
Democratic-party contributor who was fired by Goss after she failed a
polygraph. She
has been accused of leaking classified intelligence about secret CIA
prisons to the media, which she has denied through her
lawyer.
The White House has encouraged the worst of the mud-slingers by
calling back from retirement a former Director of Operations, Stephen
Kappas, who quit in open rebellion against Mr. Goss in 2004.
The official explanation for bringing Kappas out of retirement is
that the White House wanted to “balance” the general’s
uniform with a known and trusted intelligence civilian. After all,
they reasoned, Kappas was a former Director of Operations who won
high praise from his subordinates. Kappas will be nominated to become
deputy director.
But Kappas is a former Marine. And while that service is to his
credit, it makes mincemeat of the official argument about “balance”
from a civilian.
Also making mincemeat of that argument was none other than Secretary
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, widely seen by the media (with some
egging on from the White House) as one of the targets of this latest
rearrangement of the deck chairs on our nation’s ailing ship of
spies.
Asked on Tuesday to refute the argument that Hayden would be beholden
to the Pentagon because he still wore his general’s uniform,
Rumsfeld suggested that reporters examine Hayden’s career. If
they did so, he said, they would notice that Hayden had never held an
operational command, but was an “intelligence professional”
whose entire career had been spent driving computers, satellites, and
whole brigades of desks.
With Gen. Hayden in charge at the CIA, the agency comes fully under
the control of DNI John Negroponte. White House officials have
indicated clearly that this was the goal behind Hayden’s
appointment.
But it’s the Kappas appointment that is far more troubling to
intelligence insiders, because it sends a clear message that the Bush
administration has abandoned its efforts to weed out incompetents and
fierce political partisans from the Agency.
“The CIA has been at war with the Bush administration since the
beginning,” says Richard Perle, the former chair of the Defense
Policy board. “What is astounding is the CIA campaign to
discredit this administration.”
Perle cites numerous examples where the CIA has ¬Ýdropped
the ball - failing to warn about the threats from Islamic
fundamentalism, missing Iran’s nuclear weapons program,
reinterpreting intelligence on Saddam’s weapons programs after
the 2003 war. “The CIA had a lot of explaining to do” for
its past failures, he argued. “It was easier to attack the
president than own up to their own deficiencies.”
Just two months after Goss took over in 2004, he ordered Kappas to
fire his deputy, Michael Sulick, for gross insubordination.
Sulick and others referred to Goss’s aides dismissively as “the
Goslings” and refused to take orders from them, claiming they
were “political hacks” because they had worked for Goss
in Congress. Taking their side in this partisan battle, the
Washington Post accused Goss and his staff of conducting a “witch
hunt” for firing Sulick.
But every Director of Central Intelligence has brought his closest
aides with him from earlier jobs. This was true with Bill Casey in
the 1980s, and with George Tenet in the 1990s. And it will
undoubtedly be true of General Hayden as well.
During his brief tenure in 1995-1996, John Deutsch brought on board
Nora Slatkin as CIA Executive Director. She infamously required CIA
officers to contribute to a gigantic “diversity quilt” on
display at the headquarters building, if they wanted to keep their
jobs.
What Sulick and the partisan burrowers within the CIA didn’t
like about Porter Goss was his agenda. He had been appointed by the
President – or so he thought – to “clean house”
at the Agency, firing officers who were incompetent or so beholden to
a partisan agenda that they could not loyally serve the president. To
enforce those orders, Goss brought professional staff from the House
Permanent Select Intelligence Committee – people like Dusty
Foggo – who knew the community inside and out, including where
the bodies were buried.
Congressman Curt Weldon (R, Pa) also believes Kappas is a disaster,
and called him “the ringleader of an internal CIA rebellion”
against Porter Goss. “He was one of many in the CIA resistant
to needed reforms.”
By announcing the Kappes appointment, the White House is sending a
clear message that the time of reforming the CIA is over. And that is
the most troubling part of this appointment.
The real challenge facing the CIA today is how to reconstitute its
shattered human intelligence capabilities.
In his book Countdown to Terror, Rep. Weldon says Kappes
point-blank refused repeated pleas - backed by then CIA Director
George Tenet - ¬Ýto travel to Paris to meet with a
potential Iranian source who claimed to have intelligence on Iran’s
nuclear programs and on Iran’s ties to Osama Bin Laden.
Weldon encouraged Kappes to investigate the credentials of his
source, but got nowhere. “Finally, Kappes threatened me too. He
warned me to stop working with [the source]& Fortunately,
Kappes has now resigned from the CIA.”
Those are chilling words, especially given efforts by John Negroponte
to assert central control over all human intelligence operations.
If you thought the CIA was missing it before, just wait for the
failures charging at us down the pike.
Congress should oppose the appointment of Steve Kappes as deputy
director of CIA, and insist that the Defense Department be encouraged
to develop its own human intelligence capabilities independent of CIA
control. If ever we were in need of a “second opinion” in
matters of national intelligence, now is the time.
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