Goss Vows to Be Truly Apolitical Chief of the CIA
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

WASHINGTON – President Bush’s nominee to become director of central intelligence, Porter Goss, yesterday faced hostile questioning from Senate Democrats seeking to cast doubt on the Republican congressman’s ability to run the agency in an unbiased way.
They also queried his commitment to implementing post-9/11 intelligence reforms.
Mr. Goss sought to exorcise reservations about his readiness to be nonpolitical and objective, and when asked at the outset of the hearing by the Senate Intelligence Committee chairman, Senator Roberts of Kansas, if he would be able to avoid partisanship, Mr. Goss was emphatic: “You have my word on that,” he said.
Conceding that in his 16 years in the House he may “at times” have been too vigorous in congressional debate, he insisted he appreciated the difference between the role of director of central intelligence, or DCI, and that of a politician.
His pledge to be independent of party politics failed to stifle repeated sharp criticism by Democrats, who used the hearing also as an opportunity to rail against Mr. Bush’s Iraq policy, especially the handling of pre-war intelligence estimates on Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction.
“Congressman Goss, having reviewed your record closely, I have a number of concerns about whether your past partisan actions and statements will allow you to be the type of nonpartisan, independent, and objective national intelligence adviser our country needs,” said Senator Rockefeller of West Virginia, the top Democrat on the panel.
When Mr. Goss turned to future challenges in the war on terrorism for the American intelligence community there was some pause in the Democratic onslaught.
The longest came when Mr. Goss, a former CIA case officer, cautioned that it would take longer than five years to recruit and train the undercover operatives needed to combat international terrorists. George Tenet, who resigned as DCI in the summer, told the September 11 commission it would take five years to establish the clandestine capabilities required in the war on terrorism.
“I don’t believe five is enough,” Mr. Goss said. “It’s a long build-out, a long haul. It’s been started.”
The Democrat senators cited examples of partisanship by Mr. Goss and upbraided him for his recent attacks on Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, including his brandishing of a poster on the floor of the House last June that detailed Senator Kerry’s 1997 call for reductions in spending on intelligence.
Democrats said Mr. Goss had also backed in the 1990s a GOP measure that would have imposed deep cuts on the intelligence community.
Mr. Goss, who resigned this summer as chairman of the House intelligence committee after heading it for the last eight years, is expected to win Senate confirmation to the CIA post when the nomination comes up for a floor vote, possibly as early as next week.
Not wanting to be tagged in the run-up to the election as obstructionist by the Bush administration, most Democrats are expected to join the Republican majority in the Senate to approve the nomination.
In his testimony, Mr. Goss outlined several reform priorities for the American intelligence community, including increasing Langley’s human intelligence and analytic capabilities, improving intelligence sharing with state and local law enforcement agencies and enhancing foreign language capabilities at Langley.
“I agree wholeheartedly with the 9/11 commissioners that the intelligence community management must foster and nurture imagination throughout the intelligence community, not to stifle it,” Mr. Goss said.
He backed away from a provision included in an intelligence reform bill he sponsored in June, which would have relaxed a long-standing prohibition on the CIA operating inside America. “I do not believe that the foreign intelligence apparatus should be used domestically,” he said.
When choosing Mr. Goss to succeed Mr. Tenet this summer, Mr. Bush said the Republican congressman “knows the CIA inside and out. He’s the right man to lead this important agency at this critical moment in our nation’s history.”
The nomination of Mr. Goss, a former clandestine officer who worked for the CIA in the 1960s in Europe and Latin America, has been welcomed generally at Langley, with intelligence insiders saying that the Republican’s deep knowledge of the agency well equips him to reform it.
Mr. Goss’s tenure as the nation’s top spymaster, though, could be short lived. A Kerry victory in November would most likely see him replaced and his post will also be affected if legislation is passed that creates a national intelligence director above the CIA director.
The September 11 commission called for appointing a new national intelligence director with budget and personnel authority over all of the nation’s spy agencies.
The commission said the September 11 hijackers exploited deep institutional failings within the American intelligence community. Mr. Bush has endorsed some of the commission’s recommendations, including the argument for an intelligence tsar, but there is some opposition within the administration to appointing a new director who has authority over the Pentagon’s intelligence apparatus.
Yesterday, that opposition received support from the former secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, who told The New York Sun he did not agree that an intelligence czar should be established.
“I don’t agree with this recommendation. I have agreed with the need to improve our intelligence but the creation of this super tsar uniting domestic and foreign intelligence all under one leader I think creates too much power in a single structure,” Mr. Kissinger said. “I also think that military intelligence should remain close to the tactical needs of the commanders.”