The departure of senior personnel from the CIA continued on Monday with the resignation of two leading spymasters, deepening fears of low morale in the agency, and a backlash against the ambitious reform agenda of its new director.
Monday’s departures delivered fresh evidence of a series of bruising battles between the agency’s new director, Porter Goss, and his aides and career intelligence officials. Stephen Kappes, a Middle East expert who headed the clandestine service, and his deputy, Michael Sulick, stepped down at a meeting of senior staff, a former CIA official said.
The departure of Kappes, who was credited with helping to persuade the Libyan leader, Moammar Gadaffi, to stand down his WMD programmes, was seen as a serious blow to the agency.
The CIA suffered another loss last week with the resignation of John McLaughlin, the agency’s deputy chief, who was also reported to have objected to the abrasive management style of Goss and one of his most senior aides, Patrick Murray.
Among other departures was the CIA agent who headed the hunt for Osama bin Laden during the 1990s. Michael Scheur had angered the White House with the anonymous publication of a book, Imperial Hubris, this year accusing the CIA of underestimating the threat posed by al-Qaeda, and bungling repeated opportunities to capture its leader. Scheur has told reporters he resigned last week after being advised to stop speaking out about the agency’s failings.
Much of the discontent within the agency has been blamed on Goss’s management style. ”He has basically taken a scythe, and swept through the agency, and that is causing the expected reaction,” said a former senior CIA official. ”He is provoking a lot of resentment from the intelligence community professionals.”
Inside the CIA, it is widely acknowledged that a shake-up is inevitable after the catastrophic failures of intelligence in the run-up to the September 11 terror attacks and the invasion of Iraq.
However, agency professionals also suspect Goss feels stronger loyalty to the White House than to career staff, and accuse the former congressman of being more intent on punishing critics of the Bush administration than on genuine reform. Insiders say morale at the agency has reached its lowest point in 20 years. They also fear the threat of widespread departures at such a critical time could derail the CIA’s much-needed reform programme.
”It makes people who should be working around the clock to stop the next terror threat disillusioned, and less eager to do the work they should be doing,” the former senior CIA operative said.
”At the very moment when you are trying to get configured to deal with these threats and rectify the errors of the past and the failures of the past you are shaking up the agency in a way that is disruptive, and that’s a problem.”
When Goss took on the CIA post last September, he said he would focus on removing the bureaucratic shackles that had stifled individual initiative. However, he was accused this week of alienating personnel by disregarding the advice of CIA veterans, and delegating responsibility to unpopular aides.
On Sunday, the Washington Post reported that Goss had spurned the advice of four senior officials who had cautioned that his approach risked alienating key personnel. Critics of the Bush administration accuse Goss of using the need for reform as a camouflage to purge the CIA of officials who have opposed White House policy on Iraq and the war on terror.
In recent months, the White House and Pentagon have been hit by leaks from the intelligence community directly contradicting the administration’s upbeat outlook for Iraq.
”The agency seems in free-fall in Washington, and that is a very, very bad omen in the middle of a war,” Jane Harman, the senior Democrat on the house committee on intelligence, told CBS television.
But others dismissed the dissatisfaction at the CIA as evidence of institutional resistance to much-needed change.
Failures before and after 9/11
Porter Goss was appointed to take over an agency that had been pilloried for its counter-terrorism efforts, particularly in its assessment of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and its handling of intelligence before September 11.
A 567-page report by a commission set up to investigate the agency’s response to the al-Qaeda threat did not say that the attacks on New York and Washington could have been prevented.
But it blamed the agency and the administration for being unable to recognise or react to the growing threat.
”What we can say with confidence,” the report concluded, ”is that none of the measures adopted by the US government from 1998 to 2001 disturbed or even delayed the progress of the al-Qaeda plot.
”Across the government, there were failures of imagination, policy, capabilities and management. The most important failure was one of imagination.
”We do not believe leaders understood the gravity of the threat.”
The commission said George Tenet, who resigned as CIA director before the report was published, had admitted that ”the system was blinking red” in the months before September 11. The agency was accused of squandering opportunities to disrupt the plot, including the failure to put two of the hijackers, whom it had been following as al-Qaeda suspects, on an immigration watch list.
The CIA’s assessment of the threat posed by Iraq has also been derided.In 2002, The National Intelligence Estimate, overseen by Tenet, included many claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction later proved to be false.
In Bob Woodward’s book Plan of Attack, he portrays Tenet as personally convinced by the intelligence, at one point describing the case for the existence of Iraq’s WMD as a ”slam-dunk”. Tenet did not deny the claim. – Guardian Unlimited Â