CIA troubles: At what cost to country?

By all accounts, the first few weeks of Porter Goss’ service as director of central intelligence have been marked by discord which can only be counter to the national interest. The abrupt resignations of experienced senior officers of the Central Intelligence Agency amid reports of heated discussions between these men and inexperienced personal staff that Director Goss has imposed upon the agency bespeak, at best, a deplorably unprofessional management style.

More likely is that Goss entered on duty determined to punish the agency for perceived breaches of loyalty to the Bush administration, no questions asked. It is indicative that, reportedly, Goss had virtually no direct personal contact with top professionals on

the scene during his first weeks at the agency and that he declined offers of former senior CIA officers to share insights on the agency’s institutional history and culture.

It is undeniable that individual CIA employees and former employees have demonstrated in the past several years disapproval of the current administration’s policies and intelligence management, particularly in connection with Iraq, in desperate acts calculated to undermine such policies. Those insubordinate acts have included public statements, participation in Robert Greenwald’s film “Uncovered: The War in Iraq,” and Michael Schuerer’s publication, “Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror.”

Contrary to popular belief, perhaps, the CIA is a highly hierarchical organization whose employees always have been extraordinarily disciplined, dedicated to the proposition that intelligence must be characterized by truth telling and to the notion that policy decisions must be left to others. So incongruous are breaches of discipline of the sort we have witnessed in the past several years that, before condemning, one must try to understand.

If DCI Goss’ objective is to restore the effectiveness of the organization Sen. John McCain recently characterized starkly as “dysfunctional,” surely he should have devoted his first days at Langley to asking questions rather than to the browbeating and, yes, bullying of dedicated, experienced civil servants from whom he could have learned a great deal before taking whatever actions seemed indicated.

What is it that has driven CIA professionals, and counterparts elsewhere in the foreign affairs establishment, to distraction? The list surely includes the administration’s tentative pursuit of the true perpetrators of the terrorist Sept. 11, 2001; its readiness to allow Iraqi ?migr? Ahmed Chalabi, now totally discredited, to dominate critical policy decisions on Iraq; its apparent willingness to pressure the intelligence community to endorse highly suspect intelligence on “weapons of mass destruction” dished up by Chalabi; and its dismissal of pre-war assessments by the CIA, and the State Department, that military intervention in Iraq would take the United States into a tortuous and costly quagmire.

In short, at a time when the country desperately needed to act as sensibly and as deliberately as possible, the policy-makers chose to dismiss entirely the counsel of professionals.

Some of the best intelligence always is that which is “inconvenient” for the policy-maker. Rather than to recognize that the professionals were right on substance with respect to the pursuit of al-Qaida and military intervention in Iraq, the administration has chosen to punish them severely, apparently without a hearing. It follows a pattern of the administration’s apparent abhorrence of dissent.

The new DCI seems to be more about suppression of dissent than about restoring the effectiveness of our single most important intelligence agency and the self-esteem of its dedicated employees. Our country will pay the price.

Robert Sargent of Sargentville is a former U.S. diplomat whose overseas assignments included Tunisia, Turkey, Vietnam,

Bulgaria, Belgium and The Netherlands.