Trying To "Goss" Over Problems At The CIA

[NATO AIR]

He did his best, but lost out in the beltway turf wars.

http://zenpundit.blogspot.com/2006/05/trying-to-goss-over-problems-at-cia.html
TRYING TO " GOSS" OVER PROBLEMS AT THE CIA

A brief comment on the departure of Porter Goss:

Goss meant well and worked very hard but he was caught between a rock and a hard place after the Intel reform bill.

The CIA career senior management ( above station chief level) who were fired/resigned since Goss arrived as DCI are usually portrayed as " anti-Bush", technically that is true but their motivations did not originally come from partisan politics. They are the generation of the Pike-Church hearings and the Schlessinger-Turner DCI era and as a matter of professional practice are exceptionally risk-averse. They don't like HUMINT, they don't like covert ops, they don't like bold judgments in NIE documents and they employ lawyers at every step of the process to ensure that nothing actually gets accomplished.

It was inevitable that this bureaucratic cohort was going to oppose a forward role in the war for the CIA or a revitalization of covert ops. They dragged their feet in the Clinton era when that administration wanted action but clashing sharply with the Bush agenda was a given, though the levels of rearguard intrigue these employees mounted against administration policy was unprecedented in American history. Firing the malcontents was the best service Goss rendered during his tenure as DCI as covert intelligence agencies really can't be in the business of sabotaging the directives of their democratically elected superiors.

The intel reform bill that created the DNI position was also a recipe for bureaucratic conflict since it more or less took the DCI role away from the DCI while leaving the DNI line of authority exceptionally vague. Negroponte, moreover, is a very smooth, very effective, troubleshooter who has been involved in the intersection of the covert ops, diplomacy and military intervention since the 80's. Success here as DNI meant steamrolling over Goss and establishing the authority of DNI over the IC, so that is what Negroponte did. He simply outclassed Goss by several orders of magnitude as a bureaucratic insider and did not have any baggage to defend or distractions weighing him down that hobbled Goss ( the fact that Goss was reportedly spending up to 5 hours a day on the PDB was a sign that there were major problems happening, the DCI should briefly do the " final edit" not be deeply involved in drafting the PDB itself) .

The only way the DCI-NDI relationship will work is if the DCI becomes effectively the DNI's main deputy for HUMINT as the NSA head is for SIGINT which is why Hayden is going to be the new DCI, he's already in the deputy position and owes the CIA bureaucracy nothing ( unlike Goss who had, despite his feuds, deep institutional loyalties).

ADDENDUM:

Colonel Lang's view.

I'm pretty sure the DIA was already freelancing HUMINT to some degree during the 90's due to the total disinterest of the Clinton administration in the IC and their general incomprehension of how the Defense Department functioned. Rumsfeld is simply greatly expanding on a precedent.