[Originally published in the Washington Post.]
Porter Goss, the new CIA Director (DCI) and a devoted political ally of President Bush, has brought with him to Langley a Praetorian guard of hatchet men from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Against the backdrop of his hands-off management style, they are running wild. They are said to be thoughtless, brusque, rude and intimidating. What clearly is true is that they have come to shake the place up.
Whatever is going on, it is at the behest of the White House and probably does not involve faulty intelligence on WMD, but rather on the conduct of the Iraq war and its aftermath. In that context, the Administration’s wrath seems directed primarily toward the Clandestine Service (CS), that component of the Agency that recruits and handles spies, not the component that publishes intelligence estimates. Since Goss’ arrival in Langley, much of the senior management of the CS has been fired or has quit, reportedly to be replaced with more compliant officials.
David Brooks of the New York Times wrote in a scurrilous, vituperative column in mid-November that we were viewing a death struggle between the White House and the CIA. He opined that the CIA had been trying to contribute to the President’s defeat in the election by systematically leaking classified material designed to bolster the idea that the Iraq policy was ill conceived and going badly. Incidentally, it would now appear that idea was absolutely correct.
It appears that CIA, both the CS and the Intelligence Directorate, had 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 would appear that the Administration has found a welcome excuse for the collective punishment of the CIA.
Given the way the Bush White House has handled intelligence during the last three years, it makes sense that they are angry at the Clandestine Service. CS officers are often required to give their opinions about policies in advance of their implementation. It is unlikely that any CS officer, having spent a career in the Middle East, would see our current policy there as unflawed. The White House probably sees the CS as a nest of enemies. Consider the alternate possibility that they really are 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, every CIA Station Chief writes a message to the DCI giving his or her analysis of how things are going in the country to which they are assigned. These analyses are totally straghtforward and normally show extraordinary understanding of local, on-the-ground-realities. They contain the kind of candor, which, if they were to get unvarnished to a Bush White House or to the press (as the most recent one from Baghdad recently did), it would likely infuriate this Administration.
After all, this is the President who will not acknowledge any shortcomings in either his policy or its outcomes in Iraq. Given his dogged adherence to the righteousness of that policy, it makes sense that the President would be angry with the CS. It seems quite possible that the CS is being punished for having been right, or at least unsupportive of Administration policy.
Would any President in touch with God want a CIA that told him that what he wanted to do was wrong? 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 CS, whose officers run Human Intelligence operations, those operations are the last best hope we have to keep up with the terrorist problem.
But then, the White House is angry with the CS, presumably because of their position on Iraq, and the Bush Administration has always had trouble clearly separating Iraq from our real problems with Al Qaeda and its allies. Purging the CIA at this unfortunate, badly timed moment when we need to be dealing with real issues of terrorism is like cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Haviland Smith 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.
