CIA DO Resignations

[Guy]

I got in trouble "one time" over there about the press. I was in fear of what she might publish or write.

"Off the record my ass...get the hell away from me before I...."

You have to be a damn dummy, to ask someone who is tired, dirty, hungry, just been missed... By some retard, that decides to blow himself up!

What the hell you expect me to say? It's an isolated incident?

Catepillar and John Deere would have a booming business if I was SECDEF!

[NousDefionsDoc]

by Michael ledeen - NRO contributing editor
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


November 16, 2004, 8:50 a.m.
Porter’s Purge
What spymasters?

I really didn't think I needed much help understanding the screams of misery emerging from the CIA's plush campus over in Langley, but since I've always taken a second opinion from America's most famous spy, I hit the trusty ouija board and very quickly — for once — got the late James Jesus Angleton online (so to speak; as a passionate devotee of fly fishing, he might not care for the metaphor).

Ledeen: Have you been following the hijinks at the agency?

JJA: Hah! Such fun! I wish I were more materially involved, but it's been a great few weeks, even at this distance. The election, Arafat...

ML: Before we get into the details, I've got a quickie for you. I was reading a recent interview with Charles McCarry, the ex-spook who writes terrific books, and he said something quite extraordinary.

JJA: To wit?

ML: He said: "I never met a stupid person in the agency. Or an assassin. Or a Republican... They were, at least in the operations side where I was...wall-to-wall knee-jerk liberals. And they were befuddled that the left outside the agency regarded them as some sort of right-wing threat. Because they were the absolute opposite, in their own politics."

JJA: Of course. I mean, they all came from Yale, which didn't exactly preach Social Darwinism. And then remember that during the McCarthy purges, any leftist at State who could get to CIA, jumped, and Allen Dulles protected them all. In the Fifties and early Sixties, the State Department was much more hard-line than the agency.

ML: Well, I think they've caught up by now...

JJA: No doubt, no doubt. I see where you're going.

ML: Yes, I'm sure you do. The CIA didn't like Bush very much; they wanted him out. He was very reluctant to believe that at the beginning, but he worked it out, didn't he?

JJA: It was probably the Plame Affair that clinched it. I can't ever remember the director of central intelligence pulling a stunt like that: asking the criminal division of Justice to investigate a leak at the White House.

ML: Yeah, exactly. Richard Helms once told me that they'd investigated some leaks, and invariably found that they had come from the top guys, and so the investigation ended right there.

JJA: Right. I was involved in a couple of those investigations. Helms was right.

ML: So the call for the Plame investigation was an attempted political assassination, so to speak.

JJA: Yes, and so was that incredible business about "Anonymous." The very idea of permitting a CIA analyst to publish a book containing his own personal policy views is so unprofessional and so totally political that it took my breath away. And it wasn't very kind to the president.

ML: I thought it represented a new low. Any intelligence service with a serious claim to professionalism would have gone all-out to prevent publication, and would certainly have terminated "Anonymous" for trying.

JJA: Yes, but "serious" is not a word that fits well with the agency's performance in recent years, is it? Every single commission or committee that has looked into CIA — and the other agencies too, let's not forget — has been appalled.

ML: So I take it you're not sympathetic to the latest torrent of leaks, complaining that Porter Goss is wrecking the place by driving out a whole generation of professional spymasters.

JJA: Spymasters? The crowd that proclaimed East Germany to be the world's seventh greatest industrial power? The people who claimed to be running scads of agents in Cuba, only to find that every one was a double? The people whose counterintelligence superstar turned out to be a Soviet agent? The organization that didn't seem to have a single reliable agent on the ground in Iraq? The geniuses who thought that Saddam was in a nonexistent bunker on the eve of the invasion of Iraq? Pfui.

ML: Doesn't seem so hard to get, does it? So why are so many journalists cooperating?

JJA: Most likely because the purgees are sources of theirs, I'd say.

ML: Well, they are certainly sources now, even if they weren't in the past.

JJA: Hoho.

ML: Some of the articles are suggesting that this housecleaning is being driven by the White House. What do you think?

JJA: Who knows? Goss has been critical of the agency for many years, I don't think he needs instructions from the Oval Office. On the other hand, it's not likely he's doing it all on his own, so let's call it a meeting of the minds.

ML: Or maybe it's the result of a conversation at a lower level.

JJA: Quoting John Kennedy again are we?

At which point the usual static shut down the ouija board, and I was left marveling at the spirit's amazing memory.

[NousDefionsDoc]

Uncertain Trumpet: Imperial Hubris is an alarming book.
http://www.nationalreview.com/flashb...0411161511.asp
Sept. 27, 2004
David Frum

Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror, by Anonymous (Brassey's, 352 pp., $27.50)

This is an alarming book, but not in the way its author intended. It delivers an urgent danger signal — not about al-Qaeda, but about intelligence services staffed with analysts who think the way the author of this book thinks.

This latest attack on the Bush administration's war policies was written anonymously by Michael Scheuer, a veteran CIA analyst who headed the Agency's bin Laden unit in the late 1990s. His assessment of the War on Terror is grimly pessimistic: Everything the U.S. has done has been wrong. It was wrong to wait even three weeks before striking Afghanistan, wrong to try to rebuild Afghanistan afterward, wrong to try to cut the funding for terror, wrong to overthrow Saddam, wrong to crack down on radical Islamic groups in this country and worldwide.

As Scheuer sees it, the U.S. is now confronting a global Islamic insurgency under the leadership of the most charismatic and attractive Muslim leader to come along in at least a couple of hundred years. Scheuer dismisses hopeful talk about bin Laden representing only a fringe of a fringe within Islam. Bin Laden's views, he contends, are shared "by a large percentage of the world's Muslims across the political spectrum." America must recognize that "much of Islam is fighting us, and more is leaning that way."

Suppressing so widely backed an insurgency would demand slaughter on an almost unimaginable scale:

If U.S. leaders truly believed that the country is at war with bin Laden and the Islamists, they would dump the terminally adolescent bureaucrats and their threat matrix and tell the voters that war brings repeated and at times grievous defeats as well as victories, and proceed with relentless, brutal, and yes, blood-soaked offensive military actions until we have annihilated the Islamists who threaten us, or so mutilate their forces, supporting populations, and physical infrastructure that they recognize continued war-making on their part is futile.

Scheuer understandably flinches from such massive bloodletting — and indeed, he is not truly contemplating it. He deploys his tough talk only as part of the old bureaucratic trick of generating unacceptable alternatives in order to manipulate policymakers: Well, Mr. Secretary, we have worked up three options for you. Option A is total passivity. Option B is global thermonuclear war. And Option C is . . .

In Scheuer's case, Option C turns out to be a policy of averting terrorism by figuring out what the terrorists want, and then giving it to them. Such a policy of — shall we call it "conciliation"? — is feasible in Scheuer's opinion because Osama bin Laden and his Islamists are guided by defined and indeed "limited" goals:

First, the end of all U.S. aid to Israel, the elimination of the Jewish state, and in its stead the creation of an Islamic Palestinian state. Second, the withdrawal of all U.S. and Western military forces from the Arabian peninsula — a shift of most units from Saudi Arabia to Qatar fools no Muslims and will not cut the mustard — and all Muslim territory. Third, the end of all U.S. involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq. Fourth, the end of U.S. support for, and acquiescence in, the oppression of Muslims by the Chinese, Russian, Indian, and other governments. Fifth, restoration of full Muslim control over the Islamic world's energy resources and a return to market prices [sic], ending the impoverishment of Muslims caused by oil prices set by Arab regimes to placate the West. Sixth, the replacement of U.S.-protected Muslim regimes that do not govern according to Islam by regimes that do. For bin Laden, only Mullah Omar's Afghanistan met these criteria; other Muslim regimes are candidates for annihilation.

We've all heard this list before; what's new here is a senior U.S. counterterrorism official agreeing that the demands included on it can and should be met. Yet so Scheuer does: "We can either reaffirm current policies, thereby denying their role in creating the hatred bin Laden personifies, or we can examine and debate the reality we face, the threat we must defeat, and then — if deemed necessary — devise policies that better suit U.S. interests."

Scheuer's list of policy changes is headed by a change in policy toward Israel, a country he condemns as a "theocracy in all but name," characterized by "arrogant racism." He also makes it clear that he sees no reason for the U.S. to continue supporting any of its non-European allies against takeover by bin Ladenism: "For our own welfare and survival, we must 'watch others die with equanimity' and help after 'the flames burn themselves out' by focusing our overseas intercourse on trade, sharing knowledge, and donating food and medicine." He is ready to evacuate all "military and naval bases on the Arabian peninsula." And here's how he characterizes the struggles of four other countries victimized by Islamist terror:

Washington has taken measures to enhance its ties to India and simultaneously to coerce Pakistan to halt aid for Muslim Kashmiri insurgents, thereby giving de facto sanction to India's sorry record of abusing its Kashmiri Muslim citizens, as well as its Israel-like refusal to obey long-standing U.N. resolutions. Similarly, Washington has supported and armed the Indonesian military's efforts to smash Islamist separatists on Aceh, advised and participated in Manila's attacks on Moro Islamist groups in Mindanao, and backed the Yemeni regime's drive to keep local Islamists at bay. . . . The point here is not to question whether the governments above are entitled to handle domestic "terrorism" as they see fit — they are — but to ask if the United States is wise to ally itself with regimes whose barbarism has long earned the Muslim world's hatred.

Three of these four countries — India, Indonesia, and the Philippines — are secular democracies under attack from the very same groups that hit the U.S. on 9/11. Yet in every case, Scheuer disdains them — India he labels "unsavory" and "malodorous" — and manifestly sympathizes with their attackers. And his tale is seriously misleading. Manila, for example, only "attacked" the Moro Islamist groups because the latter have launched a campaign of murder against Filipino citizens and foreign visitors. Aceh and Kashmir are more complicated stories, but you would think that Scheuer — who claims expertise in South Asia — would know that those Kashmiri "insurgents" are Qaeda-backed terrorists who nearly succeeded in triggering an Indo-Pakistani nuclear war by opening fire on the Indian Parliament in December 2001, killing nine people. Putting the Kashmiri terrorists out of business is essential to the peace of the region.

Scheuer's habit of seeing every world issue through the lens of Muslim aggrievement leads him into amazing double standards. While he apparently favors independence for the Indonesian province of Aceh, he condemns the U.S. for helping to achieve independence from Indonesia for East Timor, "ignoring the principle of self-determination." How does it violate "self-determination" to grant independence to an ethnically and religiously distinct territory that Indonesia seized by force and where the pro-independence president won 83 percent of the vote in a free and fair election?

It is also telling that in his accounting of U.S. successes and defeats in the War on Terror, Scheuer lists as defeats the bombing of Taliban forces in Afghanistan, the addition of the anti-Chinese Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement to the State Department terror list, a joint U.S.-Indian military exercise in Kashmir, and the Israeli assassination of Sheik Ahmed Yasin. What do all three of these accomplishments have in common? Very simple: They could potentially offend an important section of Muslim opinion. It would seem that the former head of the CIA's bin Laden unit would regard the actual capture of bin Laden as the most catastrophic possible defeat of all.

What distinguishes Scheuer's approach from that of, say, Michael Moore is that Scheuer is not an ignorant activist, but a person charged with informing the nation's leaders about the terrorist threat. It is disturbing, at the least, that a man who had such a large role in defending the nation from Islamic extremism seems to have been mentally captivated by it. I have a strong feeling that Scheuer's 15 minutes of fame have ended already. His book is no longer seen in the shop windows; its ranking on Amazon drops daily. But the spirit of appeasement that produced this book has not, alas, vanished — not from inside the national-security agencies, nor from the larger policy community.

[NousDefionsDoc]

I think a little house cleaning was in order.

The media smell blood in the water. It will be interesting to see what "Tell All" books come out after the Night of the Long Knives over there.

[Roguish Lawyer]

Interior -- Bill Harsey
Press secretary -- Sacamuelas!
HUD -- D9
HHS -- Doc T
Nat'l Sec Adv -- Magician

[Huey14]

May I be the NZ Ambassador? I have always fancied a limo.

[Smokin Joe]

RL,

Can I have Homeland Security?

Originally Posted by Roguish Lawyer

Treasury -- Greenhat

Budgets for maintaining beaurocracy are right out!!

[rubberneck]

Goss aims to rein in the rogues

November 18, 2004

BY ROBERT NOVAK SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST


After President Bush nominated him to be director of Central Intelligence, Rep. Porter Goss walked across the Capitol to meet with a senator he hardly knew and who had criticized him: John McCain. There he received advice confirming his determination to take a course that soon became the talk of Washington.

McCain told Goss the CIA is ''a dysfunctional organization. It has to be cleaned out.'' That is, the CIA does not perform its missions. McCain told Goss that as director, he must get rid of the old boys and bring in a new team at Langley. Moreover, McCain told me this week, ''with CIA leaks intended to harm the re-election campaign of the president of the United States, it is not only dysfunctional but a rogue organization.''

Following a mandate from the president for what McCain advised, Goss is cleaning house. The reaction from the old boys confirms those harsh adjectives of ''dysfunctional'' and ''rogue.'' The nation's capital has become an echo chamber of anti-Goss invective, with CIA officials painting a picture for selected reporters of a lightweight House member from Florida, a mere case officer at the CIA long ago, provoking high-level resignations and dismantling a great intelligence service.

Veteran CIA-watchers such as McCain regard the agency as anything but great and commend Goss for taking courageous steps that previous directors avoided. George Friedman, head of the Stratfor private intelligence service, refers to Goss's housecleaning as ''long overdue.''

That cleansing process has been inhibited by the CIA's fear factor as an extraordinary leak machine. Its efficiency was attested to when Goss appointed Michael V. Kostiw, recently staff director of the House Intelligence Subcommittee on Terrorism, as the CIA's executive director. Before Kostiw could check in at Langley, the old boys leaked information that Kostiw was caught shoplifting in 1981 after 10 years as a CIA case officer.

Kostiw then resigned the agency's third-ranking post, though Goss retained him as a special assistant. Kostiw's treatment has enraged people who have known him during a long, successful career in Washington -- including McCain. The senator called Kostiw ''one of the finest, most decent men I have ever met.''

The story fed by Goss's enemies in the agency is that dedicated career intelligence officers have been replaced by Capitol Hill hacks. Their real fear is that Goss will put an end to the CIA running its own national security policy, which in the last campaign resulted in an overt attempt to defeat Bush for re-election (intensifying after George Tenet left as director ).

I reported on Sept. 27 that Paul R. Pillar, the CIA's national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia, told a private dinner on the West Coast of secret, unheeded warnings to Bush about going to war. I learned of this because of leaks from people who attended, but many other senior agency officials were covertly but effectively campaigning for Sen. John Kerry.

That effort seemed to include Imperial Hubris, an anonymously published attack on Iraq War policy by CIA analyst Michael Scheuer. He has since left the agency, but he was still on the payroll when the CIA allowed the book to be published. The Washington Post on Election Day quoted Scheuer as saying CIA officials muzzled him in July only after they realized that he was really criticizing them, not Bush. ''As long as the book was being used to bash the president,'' he said, ''they gave me carte blanche to talk to the media.''

Traditional bipartisanship in intelligence has been the victim, with Democrats cheering the CIA Bush-bashing. Rep. Jane Harman, ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, abandoned pretense of bipartisanship, and Sen. Jay Rockefeller, the Senate committee's vice chairman, never pretended. Both are attacking former colleague Goss.

McCain's use of the word ''rogue'' carries historical implications. A long, debilitating time of troubles began for the CIA in 1975 after Sen. Frank Church called it ''a rogue elephant'' that is out of control causing trouble around the world. The current use of the word refers to the intelligence agency playing domestic politics, which is an even more disturbing aberration.

[NousDefionsDoc]

Yep, the media definitely smells blood in the water...

[Sacamuelas]

NSA director could be in line for CIA deputy director post
By George Cahlink
http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/1104/111704g1.htm

The Central Intelligence Agency has been rocked in recent weeks by changes brought by new director Porter Goss, and the shake-up could continue with the appointment of a tough deputy director.

Reuters reported on Tuesday that Goss was considering naming National Security Agency Director Lt. Gen Michael Hayden to the agency's No. 2 slot. John McLaughlin, who served as acting CIA director this summer, recently announced his retirement from the deputy director post.

Hayden has been one of NSA's most visible, powerful and, in some quarters, controversial directors, as he has fought to reorganize the signals intelligence agency. If he were tapped for the CIA slot, he'd likely bring the same aggressive management style to the beleaguered agency.

Goss served as chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence before being nominated for the CIA job in August. In that position, he conducted oversight of the NSA and worked closely with Hayden to increase the agency's budget.

Hayden, who is NSA's longest-serving director, has been relentless in pushing change at the intelligence agency since taking over in March 1999. He's asked longtime agency workers to retire to make way for new hires, outsourced information technology work, expanded the pool of contractors, raised the agency's profile, and consolidated leadership ranks.

Few would argue that changes were not needed at an agency with a veteran workforce trained and computer systems designed for the Cold War. James Bamford, author of two best-selling books on the NSA, credits Hayden with continuing to let veteran workers go even after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
"The people they had were people they did not need," said Bamford, who noted that the agency had a surplus of Soviet analysts and linguists but too few Middle East experts.

Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Charles Boyd, now head of Business Executives for National Security, who served with Hayden, said, "He sold needed reforms to those with oversight and resources. He's presided over a transition there from an institution geared toward the Cold War into one for a new world with different technology."

Some NSA veterans however, have protested Hayden's moves.
"Coming to a place and telling a large group of well-qualified professionals they need be cleaned out is not the way to change an agency," said Michael Lavin, who worked at the agency from 1947 to 1993, first as an analyst and later as a policymaker and spokesman. NSA veterans with obsolete skills should be retrained to prevent the loss of corporate memory, Lavin argued.

Hayden earned praise for his efforts to expand the NSA's contracting base and upgrade the agency's aging computer systems. In 2001, the agency inked a $2 billion outsourcing deal with an industry team, led by Computer Sciences Corp., to upgrade and run the agency's computer operations over the next 10 years.
Congress, however, has not been happy with how the agency tracked its spending. In 2004, the NSA lost its independent spending authority, and its budget is now managed by Defense undersecretaries.

Steven Aftergood, an intelligence expert with the Federation of American Scientists, noted that Hayden is one of the few intelligence managers to escape blame for Sept. 11. "Everyone has been down on the CIA," he said, "but NSA came through almost completely unscathed."

[NousDefionsDoc]

NSA veterans with obsolete skills should be retrained to prevent the loss of corporate memory, Lavin argued.

And there is a big part of the problem, right there. "Corporate" what the hell?

[Airbornelawyer]

Originally Posted by NousDefionsDoc

And there is a big part of the problem, right there. "Corporate" what the hell?

"Corporate" as in "of the body." Collective or institutional memory. Of course, if that's just an excuse for keeping deadwood around - "because we know how things get done" - then I take you point.

[NousDefionsDoc]

From the way they talk lately, I think he means "corporate" as in "corporation" as in "I'm the CwhateverO and you can't fire me."

[1026]

LOL... It's known as 'The Company' for a reason.