By: E&P Staff With the sudden departure of Porter Goss as director of the CIA on Friday, it became clear that the press would have a field day, as the magnitude of another disastrous high-level appointment became clear. Just as President Bush was likening the war on terror to "World War III," the man he had appointment as a frontlines officer was revealed as the wrong man for the job from the outset who had seriously undermined that "war."
Not surprisingly, the reporter who provided the most informed, and lacerating, critique was The Washington Post's Dana Priest. She has had an unfortunate link with Goss in recent weeks, ever since at Goss's order a CIA officer named Mary McCarthy was fired amid allegations that she had leaked information to Priest for her Pulitzer-winning "secret prisons" stories. McCarthy has denied this.
Today, Priest in a front-page Post story, painted this picture of Goss:
"Porter J. Goss was brought into the CIA to quell what the White House viewed as a partisan insurgency against the administration and to re-energize a spy service that failed to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks or accurately assess Iraq's weapons capability.
"But as he walked out the glass doors of Langley headquarters yesterday, Goss left behind an agency that current and former intelligence officials say is weaker operationally, with a workforce demoralized by an exodus of senior officers and by uncertainty over its role in fighting terrorism and other intelligence priorities, said current and former intelligence officials.
"In public, Goss once acknowledged being 'amazed at the workload.' Within headquarters, 'he never bonded with the workforce,' said John O. Brennan, a former senior CIA official and interim director of the National Counterterrorism Center until last July. 'Now there's a decline in morale, its capability has not been optimized and there's a hemorrhaging of very good officers,' Brennan said.... Brennan added: 'Porter's a dedicated public servant. He was ill-suited for the job.'
"As a result of all these factors, said these sources and outside experts who work with the CIA, the number of case officers has skyrocketed, but there has been no dramatic improvement in how spies collect intelligence about terrorist targets.
"As important, Goss -- who did not like to travel overseas or to wine and dine foreign intelligence chiefs who visited Washington -- allowed the atrophy of relations with the foreign intelligence services that helped the CIA kill or catch nearly all the terrorists taken off the streets since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, in the view of these officials and several foreign intelligence officials."
The remainder of the article can be found at www.washingtonpost.com
Elsewhere, two reporters for the New York Daily News write on Saturday that, actually, the Goss departure is closely linked the the emerging "Hookergate" scandal.
Richard Sisk and James Gordon Meek declared that Goss abruptly resigned "amid allegations that he and a top aide may have attended Watergate poker parties where bribes and prostitutes were provided to a corrupt congressman.
"Kyle (Dusty) Foggo, the No. 3 official at the CIA, could soon be indicted in a widening FBI investigation of the parties thrown by defense contractor Brent Wilkes, named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the bribery conviction of former Rep. Randall (Duke) Cunningham, law enforcement sources said....
"Intelligence and law enforcement sources said solid evidence had yet to emerge that Goss also went to the parties, but Goss and Foggo share a fondness for poker and expensive cigars, and the FBI investigation was continuing."
It's "all about the Duke Cunningham scandal," a senior law enforcement official told the Daily News in reference to Goss' resignation.
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