Intelligence: Goss Goes Out-But the CIA's Struggles Go On

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If there was one government agency that needed to improve after 9/11, it was the CIA. Apparently, however, the spy agency has only weakened. Forced out last week as CIA director, Porter Goss leaves an outfit that has far more resources than it did five years ago, but still seems to be struggling with low morale and turf battles. Emblematic of the CIA's woes is its number-three man, Executive Director Kyle (Dusty) Foggo. His story is a depressing tale of reform gone awry.

After 9/11 and the intelligence fiasco over Iraqi WMD, the CIA bureaucracy was thought to be leaky and rebellious by many White House officials. A former junior case officer at the CIA who had become chairman of the House intelligence committee, Goss replaced an embattled George Tenet two years ago. His first move was to bring in several of his top Hill aides to clean house. They quickly became known as the Gosslings by resentful agency staffers. Foggo was an old CIA hand, but not a member of the elite Clandestine Service running foreign agents. Rather, he was a logistics expert well known to junketing congressmen who visited Frankfurt, Germany, where Foggo was based.

At the agency, Foggo soon became embroiled in a turf struggle between the agency's Counterterrorist Center and the newly created National Counterterrorism Center under the control of the new director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte. (Ironically, the DNI was set up by post-9/11 intel reformers to help end turf battles.) Negroponte complained to President George W. Bush, who was also hearing loud grumbles about Goss's poor leadership of the CIA from old intel hands and experts on the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Though Bush had once been friendly with Goss, a fellow Yale man, he was persuaded to let Goss go, offering only a few words of faint praise at an Oval Office farewell for the cameras.

But the agency's problems may only get worse, and one reason is Foggo. Federal investigators are looking at the ties of the CIA's "Ex Dir" to a congressional bribery scandal. Foggo was a high-school football teammate and college buddy of Brent Wilkes's, a defense contractor who was identified as an unindicted co-conspirator when former San Diego congressman and ex-Navy air ace Randy (Duke) Cunningham pleaded guilty. The CIA has acknowledged that its internal watchdog is investigating if Foggo helped steer any contracts to Wilkes. According to three sources who declined to be identified commenting on the details of a government probe, there are also indications that the Feds are interested in Foggo's role in the wider Cunningham bribery scandal.


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