08 May 2006

Tilt-a-Whirl

I got a note from an old pal, asking me if the newly nominated Director of the Central Intelligence Agency was actually Sterling Hayden, the veteran character actor who appeared in Doctor Strangelove. I didn't think so, but I checked to make sure.

That simple request wound up in an impassioned response that ran five or six pages and completely addressed the entire situation.

There was only one more fact to check, and I was rewarded when the trusty Mac froze up just as I was checking the dates and numbers of DO officers fired by ADM Stansfield Tuner in 1979- the “Halloween Massacre” at CIA that signaled the end of the Cowboy days of the Directorate for Operations.

I lost the whole thing and had to start from scratch.

He was the last active officer to head the Agency, though by no means the only one. The tradition was to have a military deputy to the DCI, a practice that was only abandoned a few years ago. So a lot of what you are hearing about the community is blather.

It was over 700 officers that were ousted in the purge, incidentally, and it marked Jimmy's Carters direction to purge the Agency of the messy Human component of spying, and which resulted in our reliance on orbital surveillance, which does not work so well in the Long War or the War on Terror or Whatever It Is.

I worked at Langley 2001-2003, not for the CIA, though I am not sure they viewed it the same way. I have worked with or around the Agency, on and off, for most of my 30 years in the business. My first encounter with the DO was in the military coup of Chon Tu-Hwan in the ROK in 1980.

The DO guys are a strange lot, some outstanding and some venal. One I knew well turned out to be a pit viper, though I cannot tell you how I know or where it happened. Two others I knew very well were heroes. The system did not make them that way. The operators like my pal Ted (cover name) or Dan (true name) played the game the best they could. Bob was outed to an Afghan national inadvertently in my last operational task for the Agency by an attorney who did not know the consequences of what he was doing.

Ted changed code names, I think, or otherwise left town. He had been a handler for the Mujahadeen in the Russian war in Afghanistan, and had been disciplined on more than one occasion for insisting on telling the truth about what happened after we walked away from them when the Russians slunk back north in defeat.

Dan would be a poster child for the failing CIA business model of the early 1990s, since he was in diplomatic cover in a South Asian nation with a long association with the US, He quit in disgust over his experience, and re-joined Naval Intelligence, but was killed in the Pentagon attack. A great man.

The Scoter Libby-Valerie Plame affair is not over, and the grand jury is still taking testimony on the release of her name as a DO operative. I don't know anyone who wants to play in that arena by naming anyone who was in a covered status.

A few notes for context on the current situation:

Porter Goss was sent to CIA to de-fang what had become a problem to the True Believers at the Pentagon and the White House. The Agency was never forgiven for not jumping on the bandwagon of the weapons of mass destruction bandwagon. It was not that we did not believe that Saddam still possessed at least some of the weapons we knew he had. But the analytic assessment was that the Agency could not prove it, and that was unforgivable.

The arrival of Director Goss and his Goslings (the leadership of his staff at the House intelligence Committee) was accompanied by the emotional departure of George Tenent, but in short order the departure of several high-ranking career DO and DI officials. In a strange twist of fate, I was with George Tenent when the first tower came down, one of those accidents at the eye of the hurricane where the DCI was waiting for a telephone and connectivity in the bunker where he had been transferred. I was on the phone, trying to make a list of contacts, and looked up to see George looking at the television with an ashen face.

George was immensely popular, and there was overt hostility to the new regime, and even the elevation of long-time Agency player Kyle “Dusty” Foggo to the number three position didn't help.

Then the 9/11 Commission stripped the “DCI” part of Goss's job away and gave it to Ambassador Negroponte. The Directorate for Intelligence always prided itself on having the president as their primary customer, and that went to the new DNI, along with all the other trappings of leadership for the Community.

In short order, a new hierarchy was established, drawn mainly from the ranks of the tiny State Department office of Survey and Investigations (S&R), and there is a little baggage that goes along with that. Little State has prided itself on iconoclastic analysis that is sometimes correct, even if they are the step-children to the CIA and the Chiefs of Station who operate with impunity in most of the embassies.

It is odd that Goss, the only case officer ever to serve as DCI, was marked as an enemy by his old Agency. He began to chafe at the re-organization, the move to transfer CIA analytic resources elsewhere, the establishment of a new HUMINT service to replace the DO, the replacement of a career CIA operative as chief of the National Counter-terror Center. It was a drumbeat of change, and Goss pushed back on changes he thought were unwise.

It was at that point that the Administration began to think that their voice of change was a liability. When it was revealed that Dusty Foggo was a lifetime friend of a contractor who bribed Congressman “Duke” Cunningham, and worse, apparently played poker with both at the Watergate Hotel, and that much worse, (horrors!) there might have been an escort service and women involved, and that further Goss himself might actually have played cards as well, the end was at hand.

I doubt that Porter Goss ever did anything inappropriate, except perhaps run for Congress in the first place. He is a man of integrity, and always treated me with courtesy.

The White House apparently wanted to play the thing out for a few weeks, and let the cloud of its own personnel re-organization settle out, but Goss was having none of it. He elected to quit, and that means the Goslings are gone, too, as will Dusty Foggo in a few days.

Mike Hayden, the anointed relief, apparently had been tapped a few weeks ago. He is a very smart and devout officer who I have known for fifteen years or more. He is also very ambitious, and only the third Intelligence officer ever to make four stars. His campaign to get his fourth star struck me as more ruthless and public than any I have seen conducted by an active officer, but perhaps I am naïve.

Don't let the current blather about military officers at CIA fool you. It is a smokescreen: the first four directors of CIA were military officers, starting with founder Major General “Wild Bill” Donovan, and so was Admiral Turner. Traditionally, either the DCI or D-DCI have been active military. In fact, it was considered a requirement until just a few years ago. So the concerns you hear are largely bogus on that count.

Plus, as an incentive to the workforce, the Administration is willing to move c current Deputy Vice Admiral “Bert” Calland aside to make room for the return of Steve Kappes, a senior DO official who left last year in protest of Mr. Goss's management style. Everything should be just fine at Langley.

Apparently, someone has convinced the President that a bruising confirmation over Mike Hayden's approval of the NSA Domestic wire-tapping program- which is not exactly what it is, incidentally- will actually be a plus.

That is beyond me, but that is what they think. Go figure.

Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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