Porter Goss, the new CIA director and a devoted political ally of President Bush, has brought with him to Langley a Praetorian Guard from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Against the backdrop of his hands-off management style, they are making it clear, without much tact or subtlety, what their goal is: They have come to shake the place up.
Whatever is going on, it is at the behest of the White House, and it probably does not focus on faulty intelligence about weapons of mass destruction but rather on the conduct of the Iraq war and its aftermath. In that context, the administration's wrath seems directed toward the clandestine service, that component of the CIA that recruits and handles spies (not the component that publishes intelligence estimates). Since Goss's arrival in Langley, much of the senior management of the clandestine service has been fired or has quit, reportedly to be replaced with more compliant officials.
David Brooks of the New York Times wrote in a vituperative column in mid-November that we were viewing a death struggle between the White House and the CIA. He claimed that the CIA had been trying to contribute to the president's defeat in the election by leaking classified material designed to bolster the idea that the Iraq policy was ill-conceived and going badly. Apparently, that idea was absolutely correct.
It appears that the CIA, both the clandestine service and the intelligence directorate, had indeed been leaking a wide variety of secrets. They could and should have been prosecuted for the unauthorized disclosure of classified information. They were not. Instead, it appears that the administration has found in their actions a welcome excuse for collective punishment of the CIA.
Given the way the Bush White House has handled intelligence during the past three years, it makes sense that it is angry at the clandestine service. The officers in that service are often required to give their opinions about policies in advance of their implementation. It is unlikely that any clandestine service officer, having spent a career in the Middle East, would see our current policy there as flawless. Thus many in the White House probably see the clandestine service as a nest of enemies. They might just want to consider an alternative possibility: that the service is made up of professionals who would like to save their country from the further embarrassment and potential difficulties of a truly flawed and dangerous Iraq policy.
Once a year, all CIA station chiefs write a message to the director of central intelligence giving their analysis of how things are going in the country to which they are assigned. These analyses are straightforward and normally show extraordinary understanding of local realities. They contain the kind of candor that, if it were to get unvarnished to a Bush White House or to the media (as the most recent one from Baghdad recently did), would likely infuriate the administration. After all, this is the president who will not acknowledge any shortcomings in either his policy or its outcome in Iraq.
Given his dogged adherence to the righteousness of that policy, it makes sense that the president would be angry with the clandestine service. It seems quite possible that the service is being punished for having been right, or at least unsupportive of administration policy. The agency's statutory responsibility is to speak the truth, whether the truth supports the president's plans or not. It would appear that this concept is not shared by this administration.
Porter Goss and his troops from the Hill are wreaking havoc on the best current line of defense we have against terrorism. However angry this administration is with the clandestine service, whose officers run human intelligence operations, those operations are the last, best hope we have to keep up with the terrorist problem. Purging the CIA at this unfortunate moment, when we need to be dealing with real issues of terrorism, is cutting off our nose to spite our face.
The writer is a retired CIA station chief who served in east and west Europe, the Middle East and as chief of the agency's counterterrorism staff.
