Ruel Marc Gerecht: The mess at the CIA is hardly the fault of Porter Goss
[Mr. Gerecht, a Middle Eastern specialist with the Central Intelligence Agency from 1985 to 1994, is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.]
"In the last year-and-a-half, more than 300 years of experience has either been pushed out or walked out the door in frustration. This has left the agency in free-fall. I have visited these brave and committed women and men in nearly every corner of the globe, and urge the new director do so. They deserve maximum support and a clear vision of where their agency is headed."
Quite unintentionally, Democratic Representative Jane Harman's press release on the resignation of CIA Director Porter Goss is a decent guide to the debilitating problems afflicting the agency's clandestine service. Although the operations directorate has certainly been in free-fall, this condition has very little to do with Mr. Goss's tenure. The CIA is a dispirited organization. It should be: The end of the Cold War removed a sustaining sense of purpose and the broad indulgence of the agency's unenviable record of clandestine-intelligence collection, counterespionage and analytical forecasting.
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The nature and exigencies of the Cold War (and the attendant literary fascination with cloak-and-dagger stories that usually bore little resemblance to the truth) successfully camouflaged much of the internal rot. Case officers love to deceive themselves and others about their work. Would you want to admit that the most important espionage achievement of the Cold War was to wait inside U.S. embassies and consulates for Soviet officials to walk in, volunteering their information and services? Or would you want to admit today that CIA officers who wait for Pakistani, Jordanian and Egyptian security officers to give them information are the "front-line" operatives in the war on terror?
Another myth is on the verge of being born. To wit: Porter Goss, the conservative ideologue, greatly politicized the CIA, and encouraged or forced several critically important senior officers to leave the agency, thus dispiriting the entire organization.
Implicit in Ms. Harman's commentary -- made more explicit elsewhere by her, by other Democrats in Congress, and by sympathetic members of the press -- is the assumption that the Bush administration is waging a vendetta against Langley's upper echelons for their hostility to the administration and their embarrassing leaks to the press, especially before the 2004 elections. The current version of this theme, best articulated by Howard Dean of the Democratic National Committee, posits a completely apolitical, professional CIA -- correctly analyzing Iraq (weapons of mass destruction excepted, of course) -- being pounded by a partisan, bellicose, mendacious Republican administration, punishing those who speak truth to power....
Read entire article at WSJ
"In the last year-and-a-half, more than 300 years of experience has either been pushed out or walked out the door in frustration. This has left the agency in free-fall. I have visited these brave and committed women and men in nearly every corner of the globe, and urge the new director do so. They deserve maximum support and a clear vision of where their agency is headed."
Quite unintentionally, Democratic Representative Jane Harman's press release on the resignation of CIA Director Porter Goss is a decent guide to the debilitating problems afflicting the agency's clandestine service. Although the operations directorate has certainly been in free-fall, this condition has very little to do with Mr. Goss's tenure. The CIA is a dispirited organization. It should be: The end of the Cold War removed a sustaining sense of purpose and the broad indulgence of the agency's unenviable record of clandestine-intelligence collection, counterespionage and analytical forecasting.
* * *
The nature and exigencies of the Cold War (and the attendant literary fascination with cloak-and-dagger stories that usually bore little resemblance to the truth) successfully camouflaged much of the internal rot. Case officers love to deceive themselves and others about their work. Would you want to admit that the most important espionage achievement of the Cold War was to wait inside U.S. embassies and consulates for Soviet officials to walk in, volunteering their information and services? Or would you want to admit today that CIA officers who wait for Pakistani, Jordanian and Egyptian security officers to give them information are the "front-line" operatives in the war on terror?
Another myth is on the verge of being born. To wit: Porter Goss, the conservative ideologue, greatly politicized the CIA, and encouraged or forced several critically important senior officers to leave the agency, thus dispiriting the entire organization.
Implicit in Ms. Harman's commentary -- made more explicit elsewhere by her, by other Democrats in Congress, and by sympathetic members of the press -- is the assumption that the Bush administration is waging a vendetta against Langley's upper echelons for their hostility to the administration and their embarrassing leaks to the press, especially before the 2004 elections. The current version of this theme, best articulated by Howard Dean of the Democratic National Committee, posits a completely apolitical, professional CIA -- correctly analyzing Iraq (weapons of mass destruction excepted, of course) -- being pounded by a partisan, bellicose, mendacious Republican administration, punishing those who speak truth to power....