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WASHINGTON, DC, United States (UPI) -- J Porter Goss took over the CIA, confident he had all the answers. He did. The problem was they weren`t the answers to the questions he had to deal with.
Porter`s shock resignation Friday took Washington by surprise. He had served for little more than a year head of the nation`s main intelligence gathering organization.
President George W. Bush announced Goss`s resignation with the outgoing CIA chief sitting beside him in the Oval Office. 'He has led ably,' the president said. 'He has a five-year plan to increase the analysts and operatives.'
Bush also praised Goss for helping to 'make this country a safer place.' And Goss, a former veteran Republican congressman from Florida and long-time Bush loyalist, was also upbeat and on-message. 'I would like to report to you that the agency (CIA) is back on a very even keel and sailing well,' he said.
But no amount of spin could disguise the fact that Goss was the latest casualty of new White House Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten`s ambitious plan shake up and revitalize an administration hammered by $70 a barrel plus oil prices, rising casualties and violence in Iraq and tumbling opinion poll ratings.
Goss`s resignation was announced the same day that White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan gave his last press briefing. He is being replaced by veteran Fox News commentator Tony Snow. And even Karl Rove, the president`s chief political strategist has given up the hands-on detailed control of administration policy he had enjoyed since the beginning of the president`s second term of office.
Goss had the vision of transforming the CIA into a lean, mean intel machine that would focus on the war on terror, put thousands more human agents into the field and provide the U.S. armed forces, especially the Army and Marine forces fighting the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, with real time intelligence that could be of far greater operational use to them.
Goss had a background serving in the CIA back in the 1960s, and he had long been regarded on Capitol Hill as one of the most knowledgeable and respected figures in Congress in dealing with intelligence issues. He also enjoyed the president`s full confidence. And expectations were high when he got the job. Unlike so many of his predecessors, he was given a literal blank check in terms of funding and resources by a sympathetic, ask-no-questions GOP majority in Congress. He pushed through an ambitious five year plan that -- on paper -- will transform the agency.
However, Goss leaves office with no striking intelligence achievements to his credit, the most remarked upon structural and cultural problems within the CIA still crippling its effectiveness, and a senior staff far more demoralized and stripped of influence than when he arrived.
Despite his long experience in Congress, Goss had never had any serious management experience in government or out of it. He proved a very weak administrator at the CIA and rapidly alienated many senior staffers. He was confident from his own service in the agency that he knew street-smart details of operational realities, but his own espionage experience was three and a half decades ago at the height of the Cold War.
His arrival and early heavy hand set off so much personal and political feuding at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia that agency insiders told reporters was turning the venerable, globe-spanning institution into a soap opera.
Goss tried to ride above the turmoil. Newsweek magazine reported that in a private question and answer session with agency employees on Sept. 22, 2005, Goss was asked why veteran agency officers were resigning in numbers unprecedented for since the Carter administration. He replied, 'I don`t do personnel.'
The answer was reminiscent of the high-handed, confident, publicly abrasive way Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has repeatedly shrugged off criticism of his conduct of the Iraq war. But Goss did not prove as fortunate as Rumsfeld.
'That answer killed him. It destroyed his credibility,' a source with close agency ties told UPI Friday. 'What else is there for a CIA chief to do? The job is all about choosing the right personnel and evaluating them accurately.'
Goss also had an adversarial relationship with the media, despite the greatly increased sense of national responsibility that pervaded the nation, including the media following the mega-terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Goss purged senior managers from the agency but he did not appear to have a firm grasp on veteran senior staff and their intelligence assets. Critics charged him with relying too much on his old inner circle of congressional staffers. In his Sept. 22, question and answer session, Newsweek reported, Goss was asked why he had brought to Langley with him a former congressional staffer who, as a junior CIA officer, once got into trouble for shoplifting. He replied that everyone made mistakes. Senior staff compared that answer with Goss`s relentless criticisms of their own more impressive careers and were not impressed, agency insiders told UPI.
Goss clashed with senior officials in the agency`s Directorate of Operations. His supporters told the press and sympathetic lawmakers in Congress that the officials had been opposing Goss`s reform efforts. But in the private world of the U.S. intelligence community, this reaction was widely seen as irresponsible, and as a lack of loyalty by Goss towards the troops he led.
Goss could not even retain the confidence of senior staff he had promoted himself. He made Robert Richer deputy director of operations. Richer resigned less than a year later and later informed the Senate Select Committee on intelligence that he had told Goss to his face in a private meeting on Sept. 22, 2005 that the CIA director was out of touch with his own agency.
More veteran Middle East officers resigned before their retirement or career stints required during Goss`s brief tenure than under any previous CIA director since Adm. Stansfield Turner, who held the job for President Jimmy Carter.
Copyright 2006 by United Press International
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