One day in 1962, a spanking new graduate of the CIA’s cloak-and-dagger training course was summoned to the office of the spy agency’s formidable director, Allen Dulles.

“I was nervous,” Porter J. Goss recalled, “going one-on-one with a living legend.”

Young Goss was even more nervous when he noticed smoke coming from the arm of Dulles’ tweed jacket. An ember from the director’s ever-present pipe had evidently popped out.

“I gestured at his arm, and the director, cool as ever, patted his sleeve and smothered the burning wool.”

Goss included the anecdote in the text of a graduation speech he gave at tiny Tiffin University in Ohio on Saturday, May 6.

One day earlier, it was easy to imagine Goss himself running from the CIA’s headquarters in flames — and longtime agency employees just stepping aside.

Goss, 67, resigned unexpectedly on Friday after 20 tumultuous months on the job. It was “a total, total surprise,” said a senior FBI official who confers regularly with intelligence community leaders.

No successor was named in the hastily arranged White House Oval Office ceremony, where Goss didn’t even merit a “good job, Porty,” from an unusually restrained President Bush (replacement speculation over the weekend centered on Michael Hayden, principal deputy director of the Office of National Intelligence).

“Porter’s tenure at the CIA was one of transition,” was about was about all Bush could manage. “He’s helped this agency become integrated into the intelligence community.”

For his part, Goss responded that he “would like to report back to you that I believe the agency is on a very even keel, sailing well.”

He might like to report that, but he’d also likely earn a volley of tomatoes for the effort. Goss’ tenure was a total disaster, officials across the board say.

“He took an agency that was broken, demoralized and had to be fixed . . . and dug a deeper hole for it,” the senior FBI official said in a representative comment.

Controversy over the CIA’s secret prisons, faulty intelligence on Iraq and myriad other issues were the least of Goss’ problems, observers said, which began even before he arrived at Langley in 2004 with a retinue of highly partisan, anti-CIA aides from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, or HPSCI.

Only months before, the Florida Republican had broken tradition by chairing the intelligence panel in an unusually partisan fashion, especially during the 2004 presidential campaign, when he attacked Democratic candidate Sen. John Kerry.

Goss installed a number of his young congressional aides, nicknamed Gosslings, in the spy agency’s seventh-floor executive suites, where they cut off the easy access that top CIA veterans were used to with his predecessor, George Tenet. A number of them headed for the doors, with Goss’ people crying crocodile tears.

“He’s a good man,” said Dave Szady, an FBI counterintelligence chief who retired in January after years of working closely with the CIA. “But he had a lot of issues within the agency. There were a lot of forces in the agency working against him, too.”

Goss ran the CIA as if he was still in Congress, said a former intelligence official who observed him closely.

“What he did is let his staffers run things day to day and then brief him on what he had to know. He’s told what do say, how to say it and when to say it and what the issues are. He let those guys run amok and they ran into conflict with the professionals at the CIA, and I don’t think they ever overcame that conflict.”

Few grieve his departure.

A draft report on Goss’ tenure by the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), a group of Washington insiders now headed by former Goldman Sachs banking group chairman Stephen Friedman, was said to be “devastating.”

“It recommended that either he or his staff — or both — had to go,” said a senior former homeland security intelligence official familiar with the report, and who asked for anonymity because he still works for the government.

But Richard Kerr, the former head of CIA intelligence who headed the agency’s review of its faulty estimates of Iraq’s weapons, said Goss shouldn’t take all the rap.

Blame should go to the entire reorganization of U.S. intelligence by the administration and Congress, capped by the creation of the Directorate of National Intelligence (DNI), Kerr said.

“Lets face it, the reorganization is a disaster and both Porter Goss and (DNI chief) John Negroponte probably are doing the best they can,” Kerr said.

But Goss, who spent a couple years in military intelligence right out of college in 1960, followed by less than a decade in the CIA more than 40 years ago, was not well qualified to run today’s much bigger, much more technically sophisticated CIA.

Kerr called such appointments by the White House “cavalier.”

“Where are the intelligence professionals?” Kerr asked. “How would you like to see a civilian without military experience being appointed as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs?”

Many close observers contrasted the president’s handling of Goss’ departure — why on Friday afternoon, with no notice and no successor standing by? — with his loyal treatment of other Cabinet members embroiled in even deeper controversies.

Outside of Goss and the hapless FEMA chief Michael Brown, nobody seems to face consequences for policy or management mistakes in this administration.

While Goss was being virtually frog-walked out of the White House on Friday, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has endured a series of hammer blows over Iraq by a score of former generals, admirals and intelligence officials — to little effect. If Bush ever does decide to get rid of him, he’ll likely have a successor in the wings as he pins a presidential medal on Rummy.

The critics have been howling for Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff’s scalp, too, ever since Katrina, with no results. Other Cabinet members have been called to public account for perceived offenses ranging from rewriting government reports on global warming to “misstating” the true costs of the Medicaid prescription drug plan.

So why the hasty exit for Goss? Speculation was rife that a criminal investigation stemming from the guilty plea of former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham, R-Calif., if not heading for Goss, was soon to take at least one, and maybe more, of his top aides.

Already implicated in the probe is Kyle Dustin “Dusty” Foggo, the CIA’s executive director, who according to media reports was involved in overseeing at least some intelligence contracts that were bought by contractors with money and prostitutes provided by a limousine service.

“I . . . hear that the Foggo story is getting very tacky,” said a former very senior CIA official with continuing good contacts at the agency. The probe could reach back into Goss’ heyday at the helm of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), this source said, only on the basis of anonymity.

“Since Cunningham was on Goss’ [committee], it could be that there will be more revelations” regarding Goss’ staff, this person said. “If corruption has crept into and compromised the HPSCI, there will be an explosion.”

An authoritative senior FBI official, speaking only without attribution, noted that the CIA had officially conceded that Foggo attended poker games with the contractors — but not Goss.

Goss has not been interviewed by the FBI, the official said.

“We’re not at his door yet . . . not at his doorstep.”

But the CIA man, with 30 years at the spy agency, insisted Goss “must have been pushed.”

“As of yesterday [May 4], I don’t think he was planning to take this move. Also, a Friday jump,” when administrations traditionally release bad news, “is always suspect.”

“It must be a madhouse on the 7th floor today,” he added, referring to the top level at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va.

It’s unlikely Goss will shed any more light on such dark currents on Monday, where he is one of the House alumni scheduled to receive the Congressional Distinguished Service award from Speaker J. Dennis Hastert in the Capitol’s Statuary Hall.

The prepared text of Goss’ speech to Tiffin graduates on Saturday had an unexpected poignancy, considering his shocking resignation the day before.

At one point, according to the text, he makes a pun from the the Soviet Union’s failed central economic planning.

“The committee that created their five-year plans was called Gosplan,” the text says. “But as far as my career is concerned, I never had my own Goss plan. I can honestly look back and say I didn’t miss one, either.

“The best thing to do,” the Goss text advises the new graduates, “is not to worry too much about having a plan. Just be sure to know yourself, and to be ready when an opportunity arises.

“The trajectory of most careers,” he continues, “is determined by a handful of meetings, chance encounters, or other wild cards.”

Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.