WASHINGTON (AP):
CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE Agency (CIA) Director Porter Goss resigned unexpectedly yesterday, leaving behind a spy agency still battling to recover from the scars of intelligence failures before America's worst terrorist attack and faulty information that formed the United States' rationale for invading Iraq.
It was the latest move in a second-term shake-up of President George W. Bush's team.
TENURE OF TRANSITION
Making the announcement from the Oval Office, Bush called Goss' tenure one of transition.
When Bush nominated Goss in August 2004, in the midst of the president's re-election campaign, he said he would rely on the advice of the CIA officer-turned-politician on the sensitive issue of intelligence reform.
"He knows the CIA inside and out," Bush said in a Rose Garden announcement at the time. "He's the right man to lead this important agency at this critical moment in our nation's history."
Goss, a former congressman from Florida, head of the House Intelligence Committee and CIA agent, had been at the helm of the agency only since September 2004.
He came under fire almost immediately, in part because he brought with him several top aides from Congress who were considered highly political for the CIA.
He had particularly poor relations with segments of the agency's powerful clandestine service. In a bleak assessment, California Representative Jane Harman, the Intelligence Committee's top Democrat, recently said, "The CIA is in a freefall," noting that employees with a combined 300 years of experience have left or been pushed out.
Under Goss and the sweeping intelligence overhaul Congress approved in December 2004, the CIA lost considerable clout among U.S. spy agencies. With the installation of the country's first national intelligence director, John Negroponte, Goss no longer sat atop the 16 intelligence agencies. Negroponte took that role and many of the CIA director's responsibilities. That includes Bush's morning intelligence briefings.
