President Bush's nominee to lead the embattled CIA pledged yesterday to shelve his partisan Republican rhetoric and to encourage the agency's overseas operatives to take more risks in spying and counterterrorism operations.
"I believe that the message is out . . . that nice spies is not the formula right now, that risk will be rewarded. But I don't believe there's a full confidence in those words yet" among CIA officers, Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.) told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in a hearing on his nomination to replace George J. Tenet.
"What will I do? I will try and put confidence behind those words. . . . I will give them the chance to make the mistakes out there," Goss said. "I will give them more leash. . . . I'll probably be up here explaining to you, hopefully in closed session, about why something went wrong."
Goss, a former CIA case officer who until recently headed the House intelligence committee, predicted it would take the CIA longer than the five years Tenet had promised to rebuild the agency's human intelligence capabilities.
"On a scale of 10, we're about a three in terms of build-back," he said. "In my estimation, five years is not enough. The great bulk of what we need is more than five years out there."
The CIA, he added later in a discussion about terrorism analysts, is "borrowing analysts from other places we should not be borrowing them from, and that's not good. And it's got to stop."
Although the panel's questioning was sometimes pointed, congressional sources in both parties predicted Goss will be confirmed, partly because of his experience and partly because Democrats do not want to be viewed by voters as obstructing counterterrorism operations by delaying the appointment of an intelligence director.
If confirmed, Goss would take leadership of the CIA in a period of unprecedented change prompted by the U.S. intelligence community's failure to deter the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and by its dramatic miscalculation that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
While the CIA, the FBI and other agencies are trying to adjust their training and operations to thwart threats from decentralized Islamic terrorist groups, Congress and the public are demanding significant changes in the way the intelligence agencies are organized.
Goss was nominated to be director of central intelligence, the person who runs the CIA and oversees 14 other U.S. intelligence agencies at the Pentagon and elsewhere. The White House has not made clear whether Bush would name him to a new position, national intelligence director, if Congress creates it. The Sept. 11 commission proposed establishing that position to give one official more direct control over all 15 intelligence agencies. The aim of the proposal -- embraced in part by Bush and under debate on Capitol Hill -- is to ensure better coordination among the agencies.
The House intelligence committee that has been led by Goss completed fewer major investigations of the CIA's performance than its counterpart panel in the Senate. Goss's committee did not investigate the abuse scandal at the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad or the faulty prewar intelligence analysis of Iraq. But Goss was an aggressive member of the joint panel that in 2002 investigated the Sept. 11 attacks, and he is credited by many on the panel as having persuaded the CIA to declassify more of the 700-plus page report than it wanted.
Yesterday, he won praise from one of the administration's fiercest intelligence critics, Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), who co-chaired the joint inquiry on the attacks.
"I believe Porter Goss is an exceptional human being and will be an exceptional head of our intelligence community," Graham said.
Much of the confirmation hearing was taken up by Democratic efforts to highlight Goss's attacks on presidential nominee John F. Kerry and the Democratic Party. The GOP, and Goss, countered with statements about his nonpartisan nature.
