New CIA Head Favors Return of Cold War-Winning Officers

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The New York Sun

WASHINGTON – As the new director of Central Intelligence prepares to reform the CIA, many senior staff there are said to be worried that the new reorganization will leave several senior officers, analysts, and managers reassigned to less prestigious jobs or fired.


The New York Sun has learned that director Porter Goss is already setting up meetings with retired CIA officers whose service coincided with America’s victory in the Cold War. They are reportedly being considered for senior management slots in the agency, according to a former CIA senior officer and a current administration official. These sources confirm that Mr. Goss, a former operations officer himself, is offering two-year temporary contracts to the retired officers to run key departments in the much-maligned spy service as a new generation of officers prepares for senior positions.


With President Bush’s re-election, the CIA’s current management could come under fire. Inside the White House, the agency’s directorate of intelligence was perceived as hostile to the president’s re-election campaign. For example, an August report that gave a scathing assessment of the chances for achieving political stability in Iraq was leaked to the New York Times in the fall.


The document, authored by the national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia, Paul Pillar, provided a key talking point for Senator Kerry in the presidential debates, when he accused the president of botching the occupation of Iraq.


A former senior CIA officer who has met with Mr. Goss to discuss the transition said yesterday that the mood inside the agency was grim. “There is blood on the floor already,” said the former officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity.


A former CIA operations officer in the Middle East, Whitley Bruner, said in an interview yesterday that “this is a period of great unease at the agency. They feel they were at odds with the White House thinking on the war previously. There is the trauma of having a new director and what that means, and there are reports that many people are now retiring.” Mr. Bruner, who is now a senior officer at a security and information firm called Diligence, added, “There is some discouragement that some of the things that seemed to be previously the prerogative of the agency have been farmed out to the Pentagon.”


But turf wars are not the only problem for the CIA’s old guard. An Inspector General report on the CIA’s failures before the September 11, 2001, attacks is said to single out individuals in the agency. Meanwhile, the former chief of the CIA’s unit designed to catch Osama bin Laden has sent congressional oversight committees his own list of intelligence failures not addressed by the September 11 commission.


In an interview Sunday, the official, who has written two books on America’s war against Al Qaeda anonymously, said very few senior managers inside the CIA have been held accountable for recent intelligence failures.


“When the Chinese embassy was bombed, they fired a GS-12. No heads have rolled for 9/11. No heads have rolled for Iraq. We have a decade of blatant proof that there is a culture that is at least a decade old of no accountability,” he said.


Press officers at the CIA would not comment on possible personnel changes under consideration. However, last week it was widely reported that Mr. Goss will bring on a longtime operations officer, who goes by the code name “Dusty,” to replace A.B. “Buzzy” Krongard as the CIA’s executive director, the number three post at Langley.


This summer, both the CIA director, George Tenet, and the deputy director of operations, James Pavitt, resigned before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released a harsh assessment of the CIA’s pre-Iraq war intelligence. The 9/11 commission also blasted the agency’s fight against Al Qaeda before September 11, 2001.


“They are going to take a lot of these managers and move them to the war college. They have identified some 80 people who are holding jobs they should not be holding. He’s going to clean house. I can’t complain,” a former CIA intelligence officer who worked with the Iraqi opposition in the mid 1990s, Robert Baer, said yesterday.


Mr. Baer, who has written a memoir of his work as a spy and a book predicting the fall of the Saudi royal family, added, “A lot of people in the CIA bet on the wrong horse. My feeling is Goss is going to clean house. He is looking for a legacy in terms of bringing the CIA back to what it was in his era, when we won the cold war and had penetrations of the Soviet Union.”


An intelligence historian and author, Jeffrey Richelson, said he predicted Mr. Goss’s tenure would be marked by reform. “Clearly from what he has said as committee chairman, he had a lot of problems with the CIA and components of the intelligence community,” Mr. Richelson said. “He presumably would want to make changes once he has the longevity and power to do that.”


A former political appointee in the first Bush administration predicted that Mr. Goss would likely bolster the clandestine service, the branch of the CIA that collects intelligence, but would punish senior analysts inside the directorate of intelligence, the branch of the agency that analyzes intelligence.


“The directorate of intelligence has tried to actively undermine the president and the administration,” said the source, who declined to be named. “There has been an aggressive campaign of leaks of classified data. It is good news for the young Turks in the clandestine service and some of the old bulls around in (President Reagan’s director of central intelligence) Bill Casey’s day. These guys who are used to going out there and getting it done.”


The New York Sun

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