Porter Goss headed to Langley to run the CIA with a carrot and a stick. Gone was George Tenet, who had ruled Langley for seven years, longer than any director except the fabled Allen Dulles.

Tenet had formed a close working relationship with President Bush, supplying him with some of the most important wartime intelligence assessments in the nation’s history.

But intelligence scandals and investigations dominated his Bush years, and by 2004 a weary Tenet wanted out.

Goss, a Florida congressman who chaired the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence from 1997 to 2004, had been a stern critic of the CIA. He was a businessman when elected to Congress, but before that he had been an Army intelligence officer and then a CIA operative who worked on clandestine operations in Latin America.

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After Goss was confirmed by the Senate, the Langley bureaucracy braced for more turmoil. Months before he arrived at the CIA, he had approved a blistering attack, in the House committee’s unclassified budget report, on the performance of the Agency’s clandestine service.

“For too long the CIA has been ignoring its core mission activities,” the report stated. “There is a dysfunctional denial of any need for corrective action.”

It was a shot at Tenet’s leadership and a direct hit on Stephen Kappes, who as director of operations ran the CIA’s network of case officers and spies abroad. Goss’ staff put even more biting criticism in the report’s secret addendum.

The public report said the clandestine service had fallen into disarray during the Clinton administration and stood five years away, at best, from getting back on track. The CIA, the report charged, was misusing its experienced field officers, not listening to their recommendations, and bristling at any outside criticism.

By the fall of 2004, the CIA’s nemesis was in charge at Langley — and his inner circle consisted of the same congressional aides who had written the scathing critique of the CIA’s spying capabilities.

These interlopers would now carry out Goss’ orders to shake up the place. They soon found that the Agency was fighting back with leaks to the press. The stories all had the same plot line: Goss’ people were incompetent, partisan, and out to gut the CIA.

As one of his first acts as director, Goss gave a speech to staff in the “bubble,” the CIA’s super-secure auditorium. He focused on three points. First, he wanted thorough and timely collection and analysis of intelligence. Second, he wanted the Agency to go beyond counter-terrorism and take a “global approach” that looked at every conceivable threat. And finally, he wanted the leaks to stop.

To that end, Goss ordered the Agency’s inspector general, John Helgerson, to cast a wide net for leakers; investigations would involve interrogations and polygraph tests. This last item was the stick Goss had brought to the CIA.

When Goss arrived, Helgerson was finishing up an accountability review of the Sept. 11 attacks. The report was never made public, but apparently it placed blame on many individuals in the Agency, including aides to Tenet, and recommended disciplinary action.

When the inspector general completed his report, Goss contemplated setting up disciplinary boards, but he was incapable of firing anyone. Instead, Goss pardoned everyone singled out by the IG. This was the carrot.


After the announcement, he arrived on the seventh floor, heading to his office. Along the corridor, relieved workers gave him a standing ovation.

But by then, Goss’ men had already begun to dismantle the CIA’s high command.

Pat Murray, Goss’ chief of staff, wanted to move the associate deputy director of clandestine service, Michael Sulick, to the CIA’s station in New York at the U.N. ambassador’s office.

The idea was that if Goss was to reform the clandestine service, he had to break up the powerful duo of Sulick and his superior, Stephen Kappes.

Murray had sent Sulick an e-mail that the veteran case officer believed was insulting. When the men met to discuss his future, Sulick flipped a copy of the e-mail at Murray. “No Hill puke is going to tell me what to do,” Sulick said. He retired rather than take the new assignment in his native New York.

Kappes, another highly respected leader in the Agency — he had helped broker the 2002 deal with Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi to get him to surrender his WMD program — quit in protest, even though Goss begged him to stay.

Their resignations were followed by the retirement of deputy director John McLaughlin, who had been passed over in favor of Goss as Tenet’s replacement.

Suddenly, the buzz in Langley was that Goss was cleaning house, although that wasn’t the case. Division chiefs, figuring they were next, put in retirement papers. What started as a bid to reassign one senior manager took on the look of a massacre.

CIA insiders quickly leaked the retirements to the news media, which portrayed Goss’ team as partisan Republicans who were ridding the CIA of some of its finest staff members for purely political reasons.

On Nov. 18, 2004, Goss issued what he thought was an anodyne message to employees. It read, in part: “CIA is, of course, a part of the executive branch primarily as a capabilities component. We do not make policy, though we do inform those who make it. We avoid political involvement, especially political partisanship.”

The rank and file took those sentences as a veiled charge that Langley was a Democratic Party hotbed. But it was an ensuing paragraph that prompted another counter-attack, which was aired via the media. Goss said, “We support the administration and its policies in our work. As agency employees we do not identify with, support or champion opposition to the administration or its policies.”

The word “support” was interpreted by some as a demand to get in line and back Bush. Goss protested that “support” meant simply to supply information on to policymakers so they could make policy.

Nonetheless, insiders leaked the memo and spun it to reporters as a call to partisanship. The Agency had inflicted another wound on Goss. Sen. John McCain, who served on the Robb-Silberman commission, came to Goss’ defense. “I think this kind of shakeup is absolutely necessary,” he told George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “This Week.” “This agency needs to be reformed. And some of the actions of leaking information that could be damaging to the president prior to the election, using a compliant media, [were wrong] if I may say so. Porter Goss is on the right track.”

At a closed Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, Goss confessed he still did not control the CIA bureaucracy after more than a year on the job. Staff members exchanged glances in disbelief. It seemed a confession that he was not up to the task.

In May 2006, Josh Bolten, the White House chief of staff, telephoned Goss and asked for his resignation. Always the good Republican soldier, Goss hurried to the Oval Office for his farewell to the president.

ABOUT "SABOTAGE": The articles in this series are drawn from “Sabotage,” a book appearing this week from Regnery Publishing. Author Rowan Scarborough, The Examiner’s national security correspondent, tells the story of a CIA bureaucracy that badly damaged the Bush administration with leaks, false allegations and sheer incompetency. He interviewed scores of intelligence and defense sources to paint a picture of an agency that fell into disarray under former President Bill Clinton and that is still rebuilding in the sixth year of the War on Terror. Scarborough is author of a previous book, “Rumsfeld’s War,” also published by Regnery.

Read other "Sabotage" excerpts | Order the book now