May 10, 2006

A Puppet vs. the Rogue Spooks

It’s not yet clear whether Porter Goss came, saw and conquered during his now-concluded 19-month tenure as director of the Central Intelligence Agency. But there seems little doubt he did some conquering – if not of external enemies, certainly of internal ones.

Before Goss’s resignation announcement on Friday, it was no secret that certain elements within the CIA regarded Goss with disdain as a “Bush puppet.” Nor was it a surprise, because it was these very elements that Goss was charged with neutralizing if he could, and ousting if he had to.

See, it’s a funny thing, this relationship between the CIA and Bush, and the whole puppet question. Last time I checked, Bush was the boss vis-à-vis the CIA, and Goss worked for the boss. Now, not everyone likes the boss. People often grumble about the boss behind his back, usually thinking he doesn’t know about it. That’s life. You know it. The boss knows it. You deal.

But at the end of the day, most people come to a certain degree of acceptance that the boss ultimately calls the shots and sets the agenda. Unless, of course, you are part of a certain subset employed in or around Langley, Virginia, and you consider it the personal mission of yourself and your fellow travelers to undermine the boss at every turn.

Then, for you, your direct supervisor’s willingness to actually serve the boss’s agenda makes him a puppet, and the enemy.

The problem for the rogue careerists within the CIA is that this puppet fought back. Goss’s big fish was Mary McCarthy, fired just weeks ago for leaking a story to the Washington Post about “secret prisons” in Eastern Europe. It didn’t take long for information to emerge that McCarthy was not just a duty-minded whistleblower. She was a Democratic activist and one-time high-level intelligence advisor to then-President Clinton. She gave $2,000 to the Kerry campaign, which is certainly no crime, but also belies any claim that might be made on her behalf of non-partisanship. The first person to come to her defense when she was busted was fellow Clintonista Rand Beers.

And in a delicious twist, there is now a growing school of thought that there actually are no secret prisons – that the whole story was made up internally as part of a sting operation to catch suspected leaker McCarthy in the act. If this turns out to be true, how delightful that it not only cost McCarthy her job but landed the Post the award established by and named after legendary yellow journalist Joseph Pulitzer.

If the rogue elements and leakers within the CIA thought they had won a victory with Goss’s departure, one suspects their celebration was muted when they realized that Bush was going to name Michael Hayden as the next director, in spite of howls from Democrats like Harry Reid and cowardly Republicans like House Intelligence Committee Chairman Peter Hoekstra that a military man at the helm of the CIA somehow sends the wrong message. Hayden, the architect of the NSA wiretap program, and thus the bane of terrorist-rights advocates everywhere, is sure to continue the rooting out of rogues that was begun under Goss.

Much of the Bush Administration’s tenure has been marked by conflicts between the policies coming out of the Oval Office and the agendas of the careerists in various departments.

We saw it rear its head weeks ago when Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld came under attack by retired generals who used Iraq as their talking point, but in many cases were simply resentful of Rumsfeld’s efforts to change institutional thinking within the Pentagon – all at Bush’s direction.

Meanwhile, over at Foggy Bottom, the State Department’s bureaucracy of “realist” careerists – long hostile to Bush policies – found its honeymoon over when Colin Powell was replaced by Condoleezza Rice, a much stronger believer in the Bush Doctrine and no sympathizer toward those who pursue their own agenda to the detriment of the policies put forth by the people who were actually elected.

In some ways, the whole Valerie Plame kerfuffle may have helped seal the fate of the CIA’s dissenters. Plame, in pulling strings to get her unqualified husband Joe Wilson sent to Niger on a fact-finding trip, may have succeeded in preventing the administration from finding what it wanted to find. But it also helped awaken the administration to the lengths to which some people within the CIA would go to scuttle the president’s policies. Wilson’s performance upon his return – giving an oral report acknowledging the possibility that Saddam was pursuing weapons-grade uranium in Niger, then penning an op-ed for the New York Times saying the opposite – left no doubt what the administration was up against from the careerists in its own agency.

Porter Goss may be gone, but George W. Bush is not. When Hayden inevitably continues the purge, he may meet with more resistance, more leaks, more scandal-mongering op-eds and more investigations. You get the impression Bush doesn’t care, and selected Hayden because he doesn’t care either.

The rogues within the CIA are fighting back like a wounded animal, as you might expect. The hunter’s response is to go in for the kill.

This is Column # DC32. Request permission to publish here.