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Two more top spies quit troubles CIA { November 26 2004 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1360153,00.htmlhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1360153,00.html
Two more top spies quit troubled CIA
Shake-up by new director blamed for resignations
Julian Borger in Washington
Friday November 26, 2004
The Guardian
Two more of America's top spies were reported yesterday to be leaving the CIA, as an attempt to fix the troubled agency appeared increasingly to be dividing its ranks and driving out its most experienced officials.
The latest departures were undercover operatives, and so were not named in yesterday's press reports, which described them as "barons" in the top level of the CIA's clandestine service - officially called the directorate of operations - in charge of its European and Far East divisions.
The New York Times quoted a former intelligence official as saying the two were "very senior guys" who were leaving because they were "uncomfortable" with the management team brought in by the new CIA director, Porter Goss.
There have been other high level resignations since Mr Goss was appointed by President Bush in September. The head of the directorate of operations Stephen Kappes and his deputy Michael Sulick both resigned last week, after the departure of the CIA deputy director, John McLaughlin.
As a Republican congressman Mr Goss was a ferocious critic of the agency, particularly for its failure to spot the 19 al-Qaida hijackers who made their way into the US in 2001 before the September 11 attacks, and for its inability to track down Osama bin Laden.
The House of Representatives intelligence committee that Mr Goss chaired issued a report this year saying the CIA risked becoming a "stilted bureaucracy incapable of even the slightest bit of success".
However, most of the senior officials who have left to date were not implicated in the CIA's recent failures. Mr Kappes and Mr Sulick had only recently taken up their jobs and were widely regarded inside and outside the agency as the best leadership team the clandestine service had had in years.
It appears that it was not Mr Goss's intention to force Mr Kappes out, and that he tried to persuade him to stay, but the clumsy behaviour of the new management team appears to have alienated the clandestine service chief.
That team is made up of four of Mr Goss's former congressional staffers. Three of them were once CIA employees whose careers were cut short; many of the CIA's current staff claim they failed to make the grade as spies. In the words of one official who resigned in the past month, "they're now back to take their revenge".
The fourth and most senior member of the team is a former Washington lawyer, Patrick Murray, Mr Goss's chief of staff.
As a top Republican aide on the House intelligence committee, he had a tough reputation. According to a former CIA official quoted in Newsweek magazine, he tried to lean on the agency to declassify information that he could use to "embarrass the Democrats".
Much of Mr Goss's career has been accidental. He is the scion of a wealthy Connecticut family and joined the CIA after Yale in 1960, when he fell into a cross-purposes conversation with a recruiter at a jobs fair.
He thought the man was a representative from his father's metal company, telling him he had just stopped by to say hello to his dad's friends. The recruiter assumed he was the son of a senior agency official.
In his job interview for the clandestine service, the jacket of the CIA director, Allen Dulles, caught fire. Assuming it must be a test, Mr Goss said nothing but stared at the smoke rising. No doubt impressed by his cool, Dulles hired him.
His critics allege it is partisan loyalty rather than reformist vision that is now driving Mr Goss's shake-up.
A self-declared old friend who trained with Mr Goss, Thomas Twetten, a former deputy director of operations, warned in the Los Angeles Times: "Goss and his minions can do a great deal of damage in short order.
"If the professional employees in the agency don't believe the agency's leadership is on their side, they won't take risks for it and, in the end, they won't stay."
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