Gosslings, Bacon, and a Kobe Beef Cow

The CIA that Gen. Michael Hayden will soon take over is badly in need of an overhaul. The agency has become a place where providing answers desired by the Bush Administration takes priority over honest analysis, to the point that employees are assiduously avoiding politically sensitive assignments. For example, the CIA has a system of bidding for chief of station posts. I was told by a well-placed source that during a recent round of bidding several dozen people applied to be station chief in cozy Dublin, while not a single candidate stepped forward for the job in Islamabad—one of the most storied posts in the CIA's history and currently one of the most important.

Porter Goss is not the only person responsible for the agency's lamentable state, though he certainly contributed to it. The media, with a few exceptions, continues to miss the story behind his disastrous tenure at the spy agency.

For Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard, Goss's demise was the result of resistance from an “intransigent bureaucracy” that opposed the director's “reform-minded” leadership and the spunky “agents of change” he brought with him after taking charge in September 2004. Hayes's story could have been commissioned by Goss himself, as it entirely exonerated the outgoing director of any responsibility for the turmoil that took place during his tenure.

Goss, according to Hayes, came to the agency with two goals, “stemming the flow of leaks from the Agency and reforming the directorate of operations”—only to be shot down by a recalcitrant old guard. But Goss's “agents of change” were less interested in plugging leaks than they were in settling scores. (And never mind that many of the leaks Goss sought to plug came from employees troubled about secret prisons, renditions, and related matters.) They reportedly came in with a lengthy list of names of people to be purged and went about removing them. One of those who was effectively forced out by the Gosslings was Stephen Kappes, who will likely return now as Hayden's number-two.

Even more laughable was Hayes's description of Goss as a bold reformer. The agency is in desperate need of restructuring, as it still is fundamentally based on an outdated Cold War model. Yet Goss took few steps in that direction, even though he inherited a comprehensive restructuring plan that had been drawn up before he arrived. “All Goss did [at the CIA] was add a few new seats and a few new layers,” said one recent retiree from the agency. “That was his idea of change.”

Goss boasted that he hired more spies, but that didn't accomplish much since his “agents of change” didn't improve the CIA's ability to collect human intelligence, its most important function. When Goss took charge of the CIA, the agency's Baghdad station had 400 people, and that number was trending downward, sources told me. It currently has 600 employees, but the quality of intelligence has fallen because they're mostly cooped up in the Green Zone, and because, as I reported last week, because of political pressure to produce unrealistically cheerful assessments of developments in the country. “Increasing numbers [of employees] make for a nice Powerpoint slide, but more bodies are not going to solve the problem,” said one person familiar with the situation in Baghdad. “We've got enough people. The problem is that they're not meeting with anyone.”

Meanwhile, in the May 13 New York Times, Maureen Dowd pointed to part of the real story—rampant cronyism after Goss took charge in September 2004—but then proceeded to obliterate the wrong target. Dowd devoted much of her column to attacking Michael Kostiw, a senior advisor to Goss, referring to him as “Bacon Guy” because he was reportedly caught shoplifting a package of bacon a quarter-century back. Based on what I've heard, Kostiw in the past had a series of personal difficulties, including family health problems; the shoplifting incident was out of character and stemmed in part from those problems. (I have a close friend who is a complete straight arrow but who was depressed after a death in the family and shoplifted a belt from a department store. By the logic of Dowd's column, it would be fair to characterize this person as “Belt Gal” and reduce her entire life to that event.)

Ironically, Kostiw was one of the few people brought over by Goss who seems to have been generally well-regarded inside of and outside of the agency. He had worked for Goss on Capitol Hill and had previously spent nine years as a case officer and 20 years in the international energy business, experience which gave him contacts in every part of the world. Kostiw is a conservative Republican, but he reportedly had a friendly relationship with Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez from his days in the oil industry with Texaco. (A friend of Kostiw's told me Chavez nicknamed Kostiw “El Coronel de la Texaco.”) When administration hawks began to push for a hard line against the Venezuelan government, Kostiw proposed that he travel to Caracas to meet with Chavez, but the offer was rejected. Since 2004, Kostiw made at least a dozen trips to Iraq and another half-dozen to Afghanistan. He is said to be among the minority of senior officials at the agency who offered realistic assessments as opposed to cheerleading.

Kostiw had been Goss's first pick to be CIA Executive Director, but he withdrew after the shoplifting story was leaked to the Washington Post. In his place came the now notorious Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, whose home and CIA office were recently raided by the FBI. Foggo, as readers by now probably know, is being investigated for possibly steering contracts to his old pal Brent Wilkes, the defense contractor who allegedly bribed the now imprisoned former congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham.

But the real culprits were several other Goss aides from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence who came with him, as staffers or contract employees, to CIA. Those people—especially Brant “Nine Fingers” Bassett, Jay Jakub, and to a lesser extent Patrick Murray—pushed for Foggo to get the Executive Director job, despite knowing that the skeletons in his closet were far more troubling than anything in Kostiw's past.

Foggo had long served as a logistics expert for the CIA, his last posting having been Frankfurt. His duties then included taking care of visiting congressional delegations, a job at which he excelled. “Some of the Gosslings knew Dusty from trips they made to Germany when they were on the Intelligence Committee,” one source told me. “Dusty would be waiting on the tarmac and he'd have cars and hotels lined up. He took good care of them, which is why they liked him so much.”

Bassett, as I previously reported, is a former CIA officer who built even longer-standing ties to Foggo as the two men worked together over the years at the agency. Bassett, like Foggo, also had ties to Wilkes, once receiving a $5,000 consulting fee from the defense contractor for a trip he made to Germany.

I've also been told by sources that there are a number of troublesome episodes in Basset's past at CIA, some which could be described as Foggo-esque. In 1989, Philip Agee, the former CIA officer turned agency critic, reportedly turned up in Mexico City posing as a member of the agency's Inspector General's staff and tried to convince a new staffer that he needed inside information as part of a secret investigation he was conducting. The staffer reported the unusual contact to Bassett, who was then based in Mexico City. Bassett, the staffer and another CIA officer then went to a meeting with Agee, whom Bassett recognized and confronted. But Bassett was apparently reprimanded for not properly notifying the station chief about the incident and for carrying a gun to the meeting with Agee.

During the same period, Bassett is said to have sent a prank letter to a friend at the CIA who was then stationed in Vienna. I've heard various accounts of precisely what he wrote, but multiple former intelligence sources said that the letter contained exaggerated talk about sexual relationships. Two of the sources said that the letter was intercepted in Vienna by the KGB, which, believing it had Bassett in a compromised position, subsequently made a blackmail recruitment pitch to him. Bassett properly reported the contact to his superiors, they said, but was again reprimanded for sending the letter in the first place. “Bassett was a cowboy who violated procedures, but he had a lot of influence with Porter,” said one person. “Dusty would never have gotten the [executive director] job if he hadn't been good friends with Bassett.”

Other Gosslings treated the CIA as if it were a gigantic congressional committee that could be milked for all the usual perks. Jay Jakub undertook a major (and unnecessary) review of the CIA's liaison relationship with British intelligence, in part, sources said, because it allowed him to make multiple trips to London, a favored destination.

The bad influence of Bassett, Jakub, and other aides was amplified because Goss—due to his pampered past as a powerful congressional committee chairman, as well as the notoriously short hours he spent at the office—was far more dependent than most CIA directors on his staffers. “He was softened up over the years by these guys like a Kobe beef cow,” said one person who worked at the CIA under Goss. “He couldn't make a move without their help.”

So it wasn't “Bacon Guy” or an entrenched old guard who did in Goss. Among the primary reasons for his failure were his inability to manage the CIA and the fact that he was surrounded by top aides who imported from Congress the culture of corruption and cronyism that pervades Capitol Hill.

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