Love it or not, the CIA has had a role in US Foreign policy since the end of WWII. Sometimes good/bad, sometimes right/wrong but usually always with a point of view that it offered up to key decision-makers when asked. For all the knuckleheaded cowboys who have been through the Agency, there are and have been thousands of men and women who have tried to work on and present essentially "good" intelligence, "good" being subjective and qualified as intel that presented balanced viewpoints to the folks requesting it. Have they gotten things wrong? Absolutely, and we all know about some of those failures. Have they gotten things right? Yes, and we'll likely never know about most of those things, because their successes probably mean that an event will never become front-page news, ever.
When Porter J. Goss took over a failure-stained CIA last year, he promised to reshape the agency beginning with the area he knew best: its famed spy division.
Goss, himself a former covert operative who had chaired the House intelligence committee, focused on the officers in the field. He pledged status and resources for case officers, sending hundreds more to far-off assignments, undercover and on the front line of the battle against al Qaeda.
Just because Goss was appointed to head the House Intelligence Committee and is a former CIA officer, there's no guarantee that he knows shit about leadership, or how to handle those faithful public servants he spent years criticizing as "federal bureaucrats" as a congressman. Now it comes out that Goss' leadership in a word, sucks.
A year later, Goss is at loggerheads with the clandestine service he sought to embrace. At least a dozen senior officials -- several of whom were promoted under Goss -- have resigned, retired early or requested reassignment. The directorate's second-in-command walked out of Langley last month and then told senators in a closed-door hearing that he had lost confidence in Goss's leadership.
The turmoil has left some employees shaken and has prompted former colleagues in Congress to question how Goss intends to improve the agency's capabilities and restore morale. The White House is aware of the problems, administration officials said, and believes they are being handled by the director of national intelligence, who now oversees the agency.
Oh, yeah the infamous director of national intelligence, another Preznit Zero Intelligence uber-crony, John Negroponte. Well, I guess that the problem will just solve itself. Negroponte just needs to order a few of the dissenters to go for one-way helicopter rides after being roughed up and life will be good again. It's his preferred method of dealing with "problems".
I remember when Jimmy Carter appointed Admiral Stansfield Turner to the CIA post, and how much howling and gnashing of teeth there was over that appointment because of his interest in the development of intel sources unrelated to "HUMINT". How when the reign of Bill Casey began there was a general moaning and groaning over the reduced capabilities of the CIA and the intelligence community in general. And look what "Wild Bill" Casey's most enduring legacy has been: Al-Qaeda. Great job, guys. Trying for a mulligan?
