Goss was a clandestine service officer in Western Europe when his illness struck. The agency offered him a desk job, but he decided to retire and relocate to Sanibel Island, off Florida's Gulf Coast. He had friends from the CIA there, including retired supervisors in the directorate of operations who were planning business ventures. "Come on down, we can ease you back," they told him.
Goss recalls a long, painful rehabilitation with the help of his wife, "trying to get my health back, a few steps a day," forcing himself to walk a couple hundred yards from his house to the shoreline.
"We started a new life," he says. "We just started all over again, completely."
With two ex-spy partners, he went into the newspaper business. They established a weekly called the Island Reporter in 1972, and Goss became politically active. By December 1974 he was elected the island's first mayor, winning 1,356 votes. He was paid $1 a year. (It helped that his wife came from a rich, old Pittsburgh industrial family.)
As it turned out, that part of Florida was a magnet for former spooks. Attending a meeting with other local mayors -- from Naples, Fort Myers and Cape Coral -- Goss realized they were all former CIA men. So were some of the reporters covering the meeting.
"Of the eight people in the room, seven were agency people!" he says, chortling.
In local elections, conspiracy theories flew. Was the CIA trying to establish Sanibel as a base for another Bay of Pigs invasion? After all, the CIA reportedly had trained Cuban insurgents on nearby Useppa Island in 1960.
Goss and his partners eventually sold the paper "at an obscene price," he says. He continued his political rise when then-Gov. Bob Graham, impressed by Goss's slow-growth efforts to protect the environment in Sanibel, reached across party lines in 1982 and appointed the Republican to fill a vacancy on the scandal-wracked Lee County Commission. In 1988, Goss ran for Congress and won.
Losing the Human Factor
"King Neptune," a newspaper cartoonist nicknamed him: Porter Goss, protector of sea creatures, foe of those who would exploit dolphins in water shows.
The congressman focused initially on what he calls "stewardship of natural resources." He tends to strike balances -- an avid boater who also supports zones to keep manatees safe. As he moved on to the foreign affairs, rules and intelligence committees, he gained a reputation as an honest broker, straight-talking, given to thoughtful deliberation rather than grandstanding. "He's always been policy-oriented as opposed to politics-oriented," says Allen, the former Reagan adviser. (Allen once owned a condo on Sanibel.) "He strikes me as quite atypical of a Washington politician."
As House intelligence chairman since 1997, Goss aimed shots at the Clinton White House, part of a consistent barrage of warnings about the nation's "underinvestment" in the intelligence community, a manpower deficit at the FBI, poor interagency coordination, and a lack of language training among CIA operatives, as well as military officers. "We inherited some serious mess from the Clinton administration," he said yesterday.
Old-school spooks such as Goss often wax nostalgic about the days when "HUMINT" (human intelligence) trumped technological wizardry, when operatives spoke the local lingo and blended into cultures to make connections. The surprise attacks of 9/11 are often attributed, in part, to the CIA's inability to penetrate Islamic terror cells because of a lack of language skills and a paucity of on-the-ground HUMINT.
As this week's headlines show, there were rumblings and red flags last summer that something big was afoot. But counterterrorism operatives evidently weren't close enough to their targets to find the gold: those 19 hijackers' intentions and plans.
"We get piles and piles of information, but how much of it is actually intelligence?" laments one veteran intelligence officer.
