Oct. 5, 2007 – 7:50 p.m.
The CIA is a relatively calm place these days, with its senior officials concentrating more on nailing foreign targets than each other.
That’s a nice change from the short, tumultuous era of Porter J. Goss, the Florida Republican who in 2004 traded the chairmanship of the fractious House Intelligence Committee for the captaincy of the CIA madhouse.
Almost from the first day of his 20-month tenure, agency veterans leaked like lawn hoses about how the congressional aides Goss imported from Capitol Hill were wrecking the spy agency.
It wasn’t just Goss’ aides, derisively dubbed the Gosslings by agency careerists, who thought the CIA needed new leadership after the twin debacles of 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq. But from day one, Goss and his people seemed to be punching above their weight. The well-publicized departure of several agency mainstays after confrontations with the Gosslings sealed their fate. President Bush carried out the mercy killing on May 5, 2006.
Since then, all of them have kept low profiles.
Goss, 68, has been spending time with his family, sorting through various options for involving himself in policy debates on intelligence and “actively participating in the early years of his well deserved retirement from government service,” according to one friend who asked not to be identified. His former chief of staff, Patrick B. Murray, is working as a corporate lawyer near Washington. Another former aide who accompanied Goss to the CIA, Merrell Moorhead, has launched a new career in Nova Scotia as a vintner, turning sour grapes, you might say, into pinot noir.
But two recent memoirs, one by former CIA Director George Tenet, the other by career spymaster Tyler Drumheller, as well as some conversations I’ve been having with other agency veterans, have shed new light on the back-channel battles that consumed the CIA.
The knives were out for years before the Gosslings arrived in Langley, by Drumheller’s account — as far back as 1997, when Goss became chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.
According to Drumheller, Goss’s aides and like-minded conservative friends inside the agency would gather regularly at a restaurant just down Route 123 from the CIA’s gates to trade gossip and indulge in their dreams about how they would remake the agency if they had the chance.
“They used to meet at Da Capo, now Michael’s, once a month or so,” Drumheller said. “They called themselves ‘the revolutionaries.’ They would talk about Tenet and their other enemies.”
In their capacity as aides on an intelligence oversight committee, they regularly traveled to CIA stations abroad, where, Drumheller and other agency sources say, they continued their efforts to recruit critics of Tenet.
“They were in congressional oversight, so therefore they were certainly welcomed and encouraged to visit places,” said another senior intelligence official, speaking on the basis of anonymity. “But they would try to dredge up stuff on people.”
“The field and headquarters always had a frictional relationship, at any time,” he continued. “Healthy tension probably should exist. But in their case they used that to kind of exploit people, to draw them out to criticize [Tenet]. They would ask about operational things they were entitled to know about, and if they got a whiff of a complaint, either just a disagreement with headquarters or something like that, the Gosslings would elevate that as if it was some sort of strategic issue.”
“It was common knowledge that they were doing that,” added a recently retired former station chief.
But other intelligence sources sympathetic to Goss’ reform efforts said they didn’t recognize Drumheller’s descriptions of the staff who were out to change the agency’s culture, and they laughed at his depiction of “the revolutionaries” who allegedly conspired at a restaurant outside the agency gates — nothing remotely like that happened, they insist.
But they did note that the team Goss brought to the CIA would have been remiss if they didn’t listen to out-of-channel complaints about the agency’s management.
Observers in both camps agree that there was much during Tenet’s tenure to criticize — the failure to catch Osama bin Laden, the misjudgments on Iraq, counterintelligence mishaps, and such unpleasant surprises as India’s nuclear bomb.
“We didn’t have a clue” about the India test, Tenet confessed to Sen.
Gaffes like that propelled Shelby, once a Tenet enthusiast, into the ranks of his foes.
“We’ve had too many failures for too long,” Shelby said on the PBS Newshour in 2004.
Their antagonism became legendary.
“Shelby hated Tenet,” said another former CIA station chief. “Shelby would come through town and ask for dirt about Tenet. He made no secret of that. He always said, ‘I’m going to get you a new director.’”
Tenet got back at Shelby in a little-noticed passage in his memoir.
He recounted how, in December 1996, shortly after President Bill Clinton nominated his national security advisor Anthony Lake to be CIA director, Shelby approached him after a committee briefing. (Tenet was then deputy director.)
“George, he drawled,” according to Tenet, “if you have any dirt on Tony Lake, I sure would like to have it.”
Tenet was taken aback, he wrote, because he and Lake were friends.
Tenet also wrote that, “National Security Agency officials told us that Shelby staffers had been asking whether there was derogatory information in their communications intercepts on Lake.”
But the NSA refused Shelby’s entreaties, two sources said, and there was no derogatory information in the FBI’s files.
Shelby also demanded, and got, the FBI’s raw files on Lake. The senator did not respond to three days of requests last week for comment.
But Lake did.
“The facts speak for themselves,” he said in a brief interview.
Shelby’s ability to obtain FBI files, which could be filled with uncorroborated allegations and rumors, he added, set a bad precedent.
“Using intelligence agencies to go after officials,” he said, “is not a good idea.”
Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.