|
Goss went cia after yale 1960 { August 11 2004 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/content/auto/epaper/editions/today/news_149119f596a7505400ee.htmlhttp://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/content/auto/epaper/editions/today/news_149119f596a7505400ee.html
Goss began ties to intelligence right after college
Larry Lipman
Wednesday, August 11, 2004
WASHINGTON -- Congressman Porter Goss, the former undercover operative whom President Bush has nominated to head the CIA, actually stumbled into his first contact with the agency.
While Goss was at Yale University in the late 1950s, he went to a jobs fair at the university's graduate employment center to visit a metals company with a booth there. His father worked for the metals company as a sales manager.
"I went left instead of right and I walked into the wrong room and the guys in the wrong room were CIA," Goss told County Times of the Islands magazine in 2002.
The CIA recruiters were intrigued with the ROTC cadet who was a classical languages major. They interested Goss in the agency, but first he had to complete his two years of Army duty. After graduating from Yale with honors in 1960, Goss spent the next two years ostensibly in Army intelligence, but most of it was really working at the CIA.
For the next decade, Goss was a case officer. He spent some time in the Miami area during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 and then traveled around Latin America, the Caribbean, Europe and Africa as an undercover case officer recruiting local agents.
Most of that time Goss, his wife, Mariel, and their four children lived either near the CIA headquarters in McLean, Va., or in London. During a visit to Washington, Goss became seriously ill and collapsed in his hotel room. He was diagnosed with a staph infection that had attacked his heart and other vital organs. The cause of the infection was never determined.
Became Sanibel's first mayor in '74
The illness and the months of recovery brought the spy in from the cold. He was offered a desk job at the CIA but decided to retire instead. He left the agency in 1971 and, rather than returning to Connecticut where he had attended boarding schools as a youth, he settled in southwest Florida's seashell-strewn Sanibel Island, a haven for retired CIA operatives.
Goss immediately became involved in the community's business and government scene. He ran a boat rental operation and a beach cottage resort. With other former CIA officers, Goss helped found an award-winning weekly newspaper, the Island Reporter, and was its publisher. In the early 1970s, Goss helped incorporate the city of Sanibel and became its first mayor in 1974. He served for eight years on the Sanibel City Council, including four one-year stints as mayor.
In 1983, then-Gov. Bob Graham reached across party lines to appoint Goss to the Lee County Commission after three commissioners were indicted in a sex-for-votes scandal involving a contractor suspected of having mob ties. Some Democrats were unhappy with Graham for giving the seat to a Republican. Goss easily won reelection to the commission and in 1988, when Connie Mack III gave up his safe House seat to run for the Senate, Goss was elected to Congress. He has been reelected every two years since then, running unopposed in 1990, 1994, 1998 and 2002.
Goss had planned to make the 2000 election his last before retirement, but that was before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Goss and Graham, then chairmen of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, were meeting in the Capitol that morning with Gen. Mahmud Ahmed, the since-deposed head of Pakistan's intelligence agency, when word came of the attacks in New York. Goss, that day's designated speaker pro tempore, went through his duties of convening the House before the Capitol was evacuated.
In the wake of those attacks, Goss and Graham took the unprecedented step of holding the first joint inquiry by full House and Senate committees in congressional history.
Goss called himself and Graham the "Frick and Frack" of congressional intelligence and won high marks for helping shepherd the contentious inquiry in the face of White House resistance.
Panel criticized agency's leadership
Graham, in an interview shortly after the terrorist attacks, said it was hard for him to be objective about Goss "because I have such a high opinion of him as a human being, as a member of Congress and as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee."
Under pressure from congressional leaders and the White House, Goss ran for reelection in 2002. House leaders waived their rules to allow him to remain as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee for eight years, rather than the six-year term limit.
Goss, 65, has been seeking to increase money for intelligence since well before the terrorist attacks, and was a consistent defender of George Tenet as CIA director. In 2000, Goss was mentioned as a possible replacement for Tenet, but Tenet became one of the few holdovers from the Clinton administration.
But as the House considered a new intelligence authorization bill last month authorizing a 16 percent increase over Bush's February budget request to what Goss called its highest levels in history (the exact amount is classified), Goss' committee delivered a blistering criticism of the agency's leadership.
In a portion of its report released to the public, the committee criticized the agency for a "misallocation and redirection of resources, poor prioritization of objectives, micromanagement of field operations, and a continued political aversion to operational risk."
Tenet responded with a letter that called some of the assertions in the report "frankly absurd."
Within hours of Tenet's announcement last month that he planned to retire, Goss' name surfaced as a possible successor.
|
|
