http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A51579-2005Jan5.html
Analysis
Changing of the Guard at the CIA
Goss's Shake-Ups Leave Some Questioning Agency's Role
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 6, 2005; Page A03
With the departure next month of the CIA's deputy director for
intelligence, Jami A. Miscik, CIA Director Porter J. Goss will have
largely completed the replacement of top agency officials that his
aides had predicted to colleagues when they took control in October.
About 20 senior CIA officials have resigned or retired since Goss, the
former chairman of the House intelligence committee, left Congress to
become director of the agency, bringing with him to Langley four GOP
aides from Capitol Hill. Only one member of the leadership team put
together by former CIA director George J. Tenet remains -- Donald M.
Kerr, deputy director for science and technology.
The uproar at CIA headquarters caused by the personnel moves, which
some saw as partisan in nature, has died down for now, and the pace of
departures has slowed. That is partly because case officers and
analysts are waiting to see whether Goss remains at the CIA or moves
up to the new position of director of national intelligence (DNI),
created last month by legislation aimed at reorganizing the U.S.
intelligence system.
Meanwhile, officials say Goss has selected John Kringen, a longtime
CIA officer, to become Miscik's replacement. The move may signal that
Goss has "turned inward" for new appointments, "rather than going
outside as once appeared to be the case," a former senior agency
official said this week. Kringen is head of the CIA's crime and
narcotics center, and had served in several geographical areas as a
CIA analyst and manager.
Goss went outside the CIA for a new public affairs chief, choosing
Jennifer Millerwise, who starts Monday. She was deputy communications
director of the Bush-Cheney campaign in 2004, for several years before
that was press secretary for Vice President Cheney and earlier worked
in Goss's office on Capitol Hill.
Intelligence officials say Goss and his emerging leadership team --
including the former Capitol Hill aides -- have not made clear how
they intend to change CIA policies and programs.
But there may be clues in the work Goss and his aides did last summer
on the House Select Committee on Intelligence. The committee's report
on the fiscal 2005 intelligence authorization bill included two
particularly controversial recommendations for changing the way the
CIA does business.
The first was to have analysts in the Directorate of Intelligence put
less emphasis on writing short, often overnight, spot reports to the
president and other policymakers on intelligence. Rather, the report
said, analysts should focus on writing longer-range, broader strategic
estimates.
As the report put it, "Instead of {grv}'chasing CNN,' as the committee
has observed in the past, the DI should be devoting much more of its
resources to doing the kind of all-source, in-depth analysis that
cannot, and is not, being done elsewhere in government or through
media outlets."
A former senior intelligence official questioned that approach in an
interview last week: "The president, who is CIA's primary customer, is
more worried about 2005 than he is 2020." If analysts "don't get
things like today's threat from terrorism nailed down in the near
term," he added, "it won't matter how they look at matters in Russia
or China that are five, 10 and 20 years off."
Tenet, then CIA director, reorganized the daily morning intelligence
report given to President Bush and his top advisers around quick
summaries of one or two pages each. They were designed to leave time
during the president's regular half-hour Oval Office meeting for
discussion or questions about items that caught the president's interest.
Goss, who now does the White House morning meeting when the president
is in town, has not had time to develop the same background on
intelligence issues that Tenet brought to those sessions after five
years on the job, and he has not had the same rapport with Bush,
administration and intelligence sources said.
Richard J. Kerr, a former deputy CIA director who once ran the DI,
said in a recent interview that there is "too much" emphasis on
overnight reporting of current intelligence. But he said good analysts
could handle both the short- and long-term work. He also recalled that
during the Cold War and afterward, intelligence collection, primarily
by technical means such as satellites, would focus for a week on a
single strategic problem. That would yield valuable information that
analysts could use to shed new light on issues.
"We used to 'blitz' a target such as who was developing what missiles
years ago and learned a lot we were not previously aware of," Kerr said.
The second significant but difficult-to-enact change that the Goss
team promoted on Capitol Hill was getting analysts in the Directorate
of Intelligence much more involved in recruiting and directing agents
as well as choosing targets for intelligence collection. Those
decisions have traditionally been made by the CIA's Directorate of
Operations (DO), which conducts the agency's spying and collection
efforts, and is separate from the DI, where information is analyzed.
"Senior DI managers still do not have the ability to drive collection
priorities, despite past committee exhortations about the urgency of
fixing this problem, and the CIA's own stated goals," the committee
report said.
With the departure late last year of the DO's two top officials, who
left after clashing with the Goss team, the way may be open to get the
DI more involved in setting collection priorities.
Kerr said that "analysts should be much more involved driving the
collection," including decisions about recruitment of sources. "The DO
needs to be more intimate with analysts, but good analysts in the past
have found a way to worm their way into the [collection] system," he
added.
------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~-->
Take a look at donorschoose.org, an excellent charitable web site for
anyone who cares about public education!
http://us.click.yahoo.com/_OLuKD/8WnJAA/cUmLAA/TySplB/TM
--------------------------------------------------------------------~->
--------------------------
Want to discuss this topic? Head on over to our discussion list, [EMAIL
PROTECTED]
--------------------------
Brooks Isoldi, editor
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.intellnet.org
Post message: osint@yahoogroups.com
Subscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
*** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material whose use has
not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. OSINT, as a part of
The Intelligence Network, is making it available without profit to OSINT
YahooGroups members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the
included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of
intelligence and law enforcement organizations, their activities, methods,
techniques, human rights, civil liberties, social justice and other
intelligence related issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes
only. We believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material
as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use
this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,'
you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
For more information go to:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml
Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/osint/
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
