A Year Later, Goss's CIA Is Still in Turmoil

This is from the Washington Post:

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.

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.

But the Senate intelligence committee, which generally took testimony once a year from Goss's predecessors, has invited him for an unusual closed-door hearing today. Senators, according to their staff, intend to ask the former congressman from Florida to explain why the CIA is bleeding talent at a time of war, and to answer charges that the agency is adrift.

Do we really need to have a Congressional investigation into WHY people are leaving the CIA? The CIA has been pretty much shredded by the White House. First, the White House demanded that the CIA produce intelligence reports which would promote their arguments for invading Iraq. Second, any intelligence reports that countered the White House PR arguments--such as intelligence reports saying Iraq didn't have weapons of mass destruction--were either ignored by the White House or suppressed. Third, any dissent or criticism from the CIA towards the White House was also suppressed, or such critic's reputations were destroyed by the White House. Fourth, two words--VALERIE PLAME! Career CIA analysts and operatives are not going to work for a president who will--either through himself or through his key aids--expose undercover agents out of spite and invectiveness in response to criticism. Finally, through the bureaucratic shake-up after Sept. 11 with the CIA being subservient to the new national director of intelligence, the CIA has become a former shell of itself.

The intelligence services has become way too big, and too complex. There are too many intelligence offices--the CIA, FBI (which was originally designed as a domestic intelligence agency, but now is the premier crime-fighting agency that also maintains some intelligence services), NSA, Pentagon intelligence agencies of Army intelligence, Navy intelligence, Air Force intelligence. Each agency has their own budget, their own staff, and their own agenda for gathering intelligence. And each agency certainly doesn't want the other agencies to step on their turf. Of course, Congress doesn't help with its legislation of putting all the intelligence agencies under one roof with a single intelligence czar. And the White House isn't helping with the faulty intelligence reports on Iraq's WMDs or Valerie Plame. Forming them into a single bureaucracy is one way to solve the problem, but it also creates another layer of management that can also filter the intelligence data, or play the CYA game when intelligence fails the government again--such as another terrorist attack. Greater sharing of intelligence between the different agencies is certainly needed, where the agencies can be trusted in knowing that their turfs are not going to be stepped upon. It is an almost impossible job--especially considering the role the CIA played during the Cold War years when it was an all powerful agency, that is now being relegated to second-hand status and which has been used in partisan politics through the Bush administration.