Report: Scandal may have played role in Goss resignation

Media sources say a corruption investigation may have forced White House to act quickly on Goss, and may also touch other defense and intelligence officials.

By Tom Regan, Christian Science Monitor
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A widening investigation into a corruption scandal in Congress may have played a key role in the decision by the White House to ask Central Intelligence Agency Director Porter Goss to step down.

The New York Daily News reported Sunday that a "little known White House advisory board" pushed President Bush to dump Mr. Goss as CIA head. The president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board was reportedly alarmed by the investigation of a spreading corruption scandal that had already looked into the actions of the CIA's number three official and its executive director, Kyle Dustin (Dusty) Foggo, and may have indirectly touched on Goss himself.

The investigations have focused on the Watergate poker parties thrown by defense contractor Brent Wilkes, a high-school buddy of Foggo's, that were attended by disgraced former Rep. Randy (Duke) Cunningham and other lawmakers. Foggo has claimed he went to the parties "just for poker" amid allegations that Wilkes, a top GOP fund-raiser and a member of the $100,000 "Pioneers" of Bush's 2004 reelection campaign, provided prostitutes, limos and hotel suites to Cunningham.
Cunningham is serving an eight-year sentence after pleading to taking $2.4 million in bribes to steer defense contracts to cronies. Wilkes hosted regular parties for 15 years at the Watergate and Westin Grand Hotels for lawmakers and lobbyists. Intelligence sources said Goss has denied attending the parties as CIA director, but that left open whether he may have attended as a Republican congressman from Florida who was head of the House Intelligence Committee.

Harpers.org, the website of Harper's Magazine, reported in late April that the FBI was investigating "current and former lawmakers on Defense and Intelligence comittees" as part of the scandal investigation. The Wall Street Journal also reported that in recent weeks the FBI has interviewed women from escort services in the Washington area, as well as obtained information from the Watergate Hotel, where many of the poker parties were allegedly held. While no other member of Congress has been implicated so far, if the FBI finds evidence of favors being given to lawmakers, it could lead to charges.

The New York Times reported Sunday that the investigation into Randy Cunningham's actions "has produced a second round of inquiries into the actions of officials at the CIA and the Homeland Security Department and of members of the House Intelligence Committee," according to government officials.

Writing for the progressive online news site truthout.org, Larry C. Johnson (who worked previously with the CIA and the US State Department's Office of Counterterrorism as a deputy director), says sources have told him that Goss did not directly take part in the any of the parties that Foggo attended, but that other members of his staff may have.

A former CIA buddy tells me that Porter's main problem, however, is a key staffer who is linked to both Brent Wilkes and the CIA's Executive Director, Dusty Foggo. My friend also said that it is highly likely that the Goss staffer did participate in the (parties). Goss, politician that he is, probably recognized that even though he did not participate ..., his staffer's participation created a huge problem for him that would be difficult to escape.

There also is truth to the rumor that Goss was not happy with presiding over a CIA that had been rendered a co-equal with the Department of Defense intelligence units. Prior to the creation of the National Director of Intelligence (NDI), the CIA was the lead intelligence agency. No longer. Ironically, part of the impetus for the creation of the NDI was the perceived "failures" of the CIA with respect to 9/11 and Iraq. Recent revelations by retired CIA officers, such as Paul Pillar and Ty Drumheller, make clear that the CIA basically got it right on Iraq and was ignored by the Bush administration.

Time magazine picks up on Mr. Johnson's second point - that the struggle between Goss and John Negroponte, the Director of National Intelligence, proved to be too much for Goss, and that the departure of the CIA director is a coup for Mr. Negroponte's bid to assume control over all branches of US intelligence. On the same front, the Los Angeles Times reports that Negroponte and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld are also in a turf war over whose office should have the largest say in intelligence matters, in particular the intelligence budget.

David Corn of The Nation says the important question is, even if Goss did not take part in any of the parties, did he know about what might have happened there, or about the close ties between Foggo and Brent Wilkes?

What's this got to do with Porter Goss? Maybe nothing. But here's the reason for speculation. Wilkes did hold parties and poker games for CIA officials and lawmakers, including members of the House intelligence committee. (Goss has been a CIA director, a lawmaker, and a member of the House intelligence committee.) Wilkes was pals with Foggo. (As CIA executive director, Foggo manages the CIA on a day-by-day basis for Goss.) So might Goss know anything about (a) a rigged contract; (b) bad behavior at Wilkes' poker bashes; (c) the non-recreational use of prostitutes; (d) all of the above or something we cannot even imagine?

The Washington Post reports that the White House's pick to replace Goss, Gen. Michael Hayden, will face challenges from both Democratic and Republican lawmakers who do not feel comfortable with a military officer heading a civilian agency. Also, The New York Times reported on Sunday that whoever becomes the next head of the CIA will face the daunting task of trying to fill in the holes in the agency's intelligence on Iran.

A year after a presidential commission gave a scathing assessment of intelligence on Iran, they say, American spy agencies remain severely handicapped in their efforts to evaluate its weapons programs and its leaders' intentions. Whoever takes the helm of the CIA after the resignation on Friday of Porter Goss will confront a critical target with few, if any, American spies on the ground, sketchy communications intercepts and ambiguous satellite images, the experts say.

Changing the Guard
By Mark Hosenball, Newsweek, Monday 08 May 2006

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While Bush's new CIA nominee preps for a tough nomination battle, agency No. 3 Dusty Foggo is leaving the agency.

By all accounts, Michael Hayden is one of the most knowledgeable and experienced intelligence officers currently working for the United States government. But the Air Force general - nominated today as President Bush's pick to lead the CIA - can expect to face a grueling round of confirmation hearings on whether he is a good candidate to take charge of the agency at a time when it is in turmoil and its mission is in question.

The upheaval at the CIA is unlikely to end anytime soon. Earlier today, the agency circulated an internal announcement that agency's third ranking official, Kyle (Dusty) Foggo, has decided to step aside. News of Foggo's departure inevitably will be overshadowed by the Hayden nomination, but its effects will continue to resonate within the agency. As NEWSWEEK first reported, the CIA's inspector general has been investigating whether Foggo helped steer agency contracts to companies run by Brent Wilkes, 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 in a Congressional bribery scandal. The CIA has acknowledged that its internal watchdog is investigating whether Foggo helped steer any contracts to Wilkes, an old friend. The inspector general was looking into at least one specific contract, worth between $2 million and $3 million, which a CIA base in Germany granted to a company run by a relative of Wilkes. At the time the contract was issued, Foggo headed the CIA base's logistics office, though he did not sign the contract.

Foggo has denied any wrongdoing, saying through agency spokespeople that any contracts he dealt with were "properly awarded and administered." However, a source has told NEWSWEEK that Foggo had acknowledged to associates that he may have tipped off Wilkes that CIA contracts were coming up for bid - an activity which, according to the source, Foggo said was neither improper nor illegal. The source is close to a group of poker players who took part in a 1999 game arranged by Wilkes and attended by Foggo, Cunningham and a nine-fingered former CIA officer named Brant Bassett, who worked for Goss when the outgoing CIA chief was House Intelligence Committee chair. Foggo denies giving Wilkes any such tip-offs, according to another source close to the outgoing CIA official; Bassett and lawyers for Wilkes and Cunningham had no comment.

A counter-terrorism official said that Foggo was already planning his departure before outgoing CIA director Goss unexpectedly announced his departure last week. Meanwhile, Bush's decision to replace Goss with Hayden has raised questions among both Republicans and Democrats who questioned the wisdom of putting a military officer in charge of the civilian spy agency. Currently chief deputy to National Intelligence Director John Negroponte, Hayden's official biography shows he has spent much of his more than three decades of military service in intelligence assignments, including a two-year stint as Air Force attaché to the US Embassy in Soviet-era Sofia, Bulgaria. Before he helped Negroponte to set up the new intelligence czar's office, Hayden served both Presidents Clinton and Bush as director of the ultra-secret National Security Agency.

From its sprawling headquarters at Ft. Meade, Md, halfway between Washington and Baltimore, NSA runs a worldwide electronic eavesdropping network and is responsible for deciphering messages encoded by potential enemies and deploying unbreakable code and scrambler devices for US government agencies. While at NSA, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Hayden was instrumental in setting up and managing a super-secret NSA anti-terror program whose disclosure caused controversy earlier this year when The New York Times reported that the agency was eavesdropping on suspected terror contacts inside the United States without warrants from a special Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

Hayden's role in creating and defending the warrantless wiretapping program, whose legality has been questioned even by prominent Republicans like Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Arlen Specter, is likely to spark the most heated debate during Hayden's Senate confirmation. For years after it was first established, Hayden and other intelligence officials, acting under orders from President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, limited briefings on the program to a "gang of eight" senior Congressional leaders (comprised of the majority and minority leaders of both Houses and the chairmen and ranking Democrats of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees). After Democrats and a handful of renegade Senate Republicans earlier this year threatened to open a full-scale investigation, however, the administration agreed to expand briefings on the program to more members of the intelligence committees.

Congressional sources familiar with those briefings, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the subject matter, say that some of the senators - including Democrats - who have received recent briefings on the NSA anti-terror program have largely been persuaded that the NSA has not been abusing its technology and authority to conduct sweeping witch hunts against American dissidents, war critics or Bush administration opponents. But sources familiar with the expanded briefings say that other senators who attended have not yet been convinced by arguments, advanced by Hayden and other officials, that the NSA activity is legal under existing law.

Hayden also is likely to be questioned about previous testimony he gave to Congress about the NSA's authority to eavesdrop on people inside the United States. When Hayden was questioned about the NSA's powers during an October 2002 hearing before the Joint Senate-House intelligence committee inquiry into the 9/11 attacks, he said that once people - including, he said, Osama bin Laden - set foot on US territory, they were protected against warrantless eavesdropping by the post-Watergate Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Hayden now may well be questioned about that testimony, whose accuracy has been questioned by some administration critics. He may also be questioned by Senate Democrats about what they perceive to be his zeal in defending administration rationales for the NSA domestic surveillance program. In a letter to the administration earlier this year, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, questioned whether Hayden had gone too far in supporting the White House public relations campaign to defend the NSA anti-terror effort.

Congressional investigators are also likely to review Hayden's oversight of NSA efforts to develop and acquire huge and expensive new surveillance and data management systems. According to several sources, during Hayden's tenure at NSA, Congress took away the agency's authority to make major purchases of new equipment on its own; instead, Congress required that big ticket NSA items had to be bought through officials at Defense Department headquarters in the Pentagon. Officials familiar with NSA operations said that the problem that resulted in Congress stripping the NSA of its major acquisitions authority was not all Hayden's fault: as one official described it, Hayden fought with an "entrenched" purchasing bureaucracy at NSA over major acquisitions, and was "not winning the fight." Even if other bureaucrats were principally responsible for the management problems, however, the official noted that Hayden was in charge of NSA at the time.

In an exhaustive investigation published in January, the Baltimore Sun, the NSA's hometown newspaper, also raised questions about the NSA's management, during Hayden's tenure, of a major classified project called Trailblazer. This project was supposed to modernize the agency's entire system for processing and sorting out "Signals Intelligence" reports - raw, and later, evaluated intercepts of messages collected by the NSA's worldwide eavesdropping network. One intelligence expert told the Sun that Trailblazer was "the biggest boondoggle going on now in the intelligence community." An intelligence official familiar with the program told NEWSWEEK that Congressional investigators now believe that much of the money that was poured into the program was wasted, and that Hayden's successor at NSA has now "abandoned" significant elements of Trailblazer.

A spokesman representing Hayden's current employer, the intelligence czar's office, said all questions about Hayden's tenure at NSA should be addressed to NSA. NSA had no immediate response to a set of questions e-mailed to their public affairs office.

Apart from questions about his handling of specific legal, management and financial issues while working for NSA, and, more recently, the intel czar's office, the debate over Hayden's confirmation is likely to cover broader questions about the role of the CIA under the post 9/11 reformed intelligence set-up. Outgoing CIA director Porter Goss had declared that one of his principal objectives was to rebuild, after years of decline, the agency's ability to recruit and handle human informants abroad, particularly informants who had inside information on difficult targets, such as tightly-knit terror groups. Hayden's principal experience is in managing and supervising complicated "technical" collection systems, such as spy satellites and eavesdropping stations.

The genial and collegial Hayden will also face an uphill struggle restoring CIA morale, including in the CIA's elite Operations Directorate, renamed the National Clandestine Service by Goss. Goss and his aides, apparently operating with White House encouragement, drove out a number of highly-regarded veteran spies and managers, sometimes replacing them with lesser known, or even controversial agency figures like the soon-to-depart Foggo.

At a press conference today discussing Hayden's nomination, Negroponte indicated that the "leading candidate" to become deputy CIA director under Hayden was Steve Kappes, who headed the agency's vaunted Operations Division when Goss arrived but quickly left after a confrontation with the outgoing CIA chief's Praetorian Guard. Kappes's return to the agency could be a major morale booster.

Defending Spy Program, General Reveals Shaky Grip on 4th Amendment
Editor and Publisher | January 24 2006

NEW YORK The former national director of the National Security Agency, in an appearance today before the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., today, appeared to be unfamiliar with the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution when pressed by a reporter with Knight Ridder's Washington office -- despite his claims that he was actually something of an expert on it.

General Michael Hayden, principal deputy director of National Intelligence with the Office of National Intelligence, talked with reporters about the current controversy surrounding the National Security Agency's warrantless monitoring of communications of suspected al Qaeda terrorists. Hayden has been in this position since last April, but was NSA director when the NSA monitoring program began in 2001.

As the last journalist to get in a question, Jonathan Landay, a well-regarded investigative reporter for Knight Ridder, noted that Gen. Hayden repeatedly referred to the Fourth Amendment's search standard of "reasonableness" without mentioning that it also demands "probable cause." Hayden seemed to deny that the amendment included any such thing, or was simply ignoring it.

Here is the exchange, along with the entire Fourth Amendment at the end.

QUESTION: Jonathan Landay with Knight Ridder. I'd like to stay on the same issue, and that had to do with the standard by which you use to target your wiretaps. I'm no lawyer, but my understanding is that the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution specifies that you must have probable cause to be able to do a search that does not violate an American's right against unlawful searches and seizures. Do you use --

GEN. HAYDEN: No, actually -- the Fourth Amendment actually protects all of us against unreasonable search and seizure.

QUESTION: But the --

GEN. HAYDEN: That's what it says.

QUESTION: But the measure is probable cause, I believe.

GEN. HAYDEN: The amendment says unreasonable search and seizure.

QUESTION: But does it not say probable --

GEN. HAYDEN: No. The amendment says --

QUESTION: The court standard, the legal standard --

GEN. HAYDEN: -- unreasonable search and seizure.

QUESTION: The legal standard is probable cause, General. You used the terms just a few minutes ago, "We reasonably believe." And a FISA court, my understanding is, would not give you a warrant if you went before them and say "we reasonably believe"; you have to go to the FISA court, or the attorney general has to go to the FISA court and say, "we have probable cause."

And so what many people believe -- and I'd like you to respond to this -- is that what you've actually done is crafted a detour around the FISA court by creating a new standard of "reasonably believe" in place of probable cause because the FISA court will not give you a warrant based on reasonable belief, you have to show probable cause. Could you respond to that, please?

GEN. HAYDEN: Sure. I didn't craft the authorization. I am responding to a lawful order. All right? The attorney general has averred to the lawfulness of the order.

Just to be very clear -- and believe me, if there's any amendment to the Constitution that employees of the National Security Agency are familiar with, it's the Fourth. And it is a reasonableness standard in the Fourth Amendment. And so what you've raised to me -- and I'm not a lawyer, and don't want to become one -- what you've raised to me is, in terms of quoting the Fourth Amendment, is an issue of the Constitution. The constitutional standard is "reasonable." And we believe -- I am convinced that we are lawful because what it is we're doing is reasonable.

Here's the Fourth Amendment: (Emphasis added by Editor) "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. "

A new Gallup poll released Monday showed that 51% of Americans said the administration was wrong to intercept conversations involving a party inside the U.S. without a warrant. In response to another question, 58% said they support the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate the program.

Code Names

"Curing Analytic Pathologies: Pathways to Improved Intelligence Analysis

Michael Brown Was Set Up: It's All in the Numbers


Homeland Security Presidential Directive 8

National Planning Scenarios

Behind the Goss toss
W's 'alarmed' panel sealed top spy's fate
BY RICHARD SISK, NY DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU, May 7, 2006

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WASHINGTON - A little-known White House advisory board convinced a reluctant President Bush to launch yet another high-profile shakeup of the nation's intelligence community and can CIA Director Porter Goss, sources said yesterday.
Bush had already gotten an earful from Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte on the shortcomings of Goss, but the final push came from the "very alarmed" President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, intelligence and Congressional sources said.

Alarms were set off at the advisory board by a widening FBI sex and cronyism investigation that's targeted Kyle (Dusty) Foggo, the No.3 official at the CIA, and also touched on Goss himself.

The 16-member bipartisan board, now headed by former Goldman Sachs executive Stephen Friedman, has the mandate to conduct periodic assessments on "the quality, quantity and adequacy of intelligence collection."

The board, which includes longtime Bush confidant and former Commerce Secretary Don Evans, joined in the growing chorus inside and outside the CIA calling for Goss' ouster, persuading Bush to act, sources said.

The result was the awkward Oval Office announcement Friday at which neither Goss nor Bush gave a specific reason for Goss' return to Florida. Goss told CNN yesterday his resignation was "just one of those mysteries."

White House spokeswoman Dana Perrino said a "collective agreement" led to the decision to find a new CIA director, but "reports that the President had lost confidence in Porter Goss are categorically untrue."

Bush was expected to name a new spy chief, possibly as early as tomorrow, with Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, Negroponte's top deputy, and White House homeland security adviser Fran Townsend heading up a short list.

But the spillover from the continuing FBI investigation, coupled with a parallel probe by the CIA's inspector general, could impact on what were already expected to be difficult Senate confirmation hearings for the new director.

The investigations have focused on the Watergate poker parties thrown by defense contractor Brent Wilkes, a high-school buddy of Foggo's, that were attended by disgraced former Rep. Randy (Duke) Cunningham and other lawmakers.

Foggo has claimed he went to the parties "just for poker" amid allegations that Wilkes, a top GOP fund-raiser and a member of the $100,000 "Pioneers" of Bush's 2004 reelection campaign, provided prostitutes, limos and hotel suites to Cunningham.

Cunningham is serving an eight-year sentence after pleading to taking $2.4 million in bribes to steer defense contracts to cronies.

Wilkes hosted regular parties for 15 years at the Watergate and Westin Grand Hotels for lawmakers and lobbyists. Intelligence sources said Goss has denied attending the parties as CIA director, but that left open whether he may have attended as a Republican congressman from Florida who was head of the House Intelligence Committee.

A Short History of the CIA: A glimpse into the CIA operations in the past bodes ill for an agency increasingly closed to the public, and with the possibility of an appointed director from the military.