WASHINGTON (AFP) - President George W. Bush is beginning his second term with a volatile intelligence crisis on his hands as resignations of senior CIA officials underscored the low morale at the intelligence agency amid fears of a purge.
Central Intelligence Agency Director Porter Goss warned in an email to CIA employees Monday that more personnel and organizational changes were coming, an intelligence official said Tuesday.
Goss has tapped the current head of the agency's counter-terrorism center as deputy director of operations, succeeding Stephen Kappes, who resigned on Monday along with associate deputy director of operations, Michael Sulick, the official said.
"The work of the agency is continuing. The men and women of the intelligence community have an important job to do and will move ahead to get done what has to get done," said the official. "There are always changes that are made when a new director comes in."
Goss, a former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, took office two months ago with a mandate to reform the agency in the wake of intelligence failures in Iraq and the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.
But morale at the agency has suffered and some mid-level officers eligible for retirement are leaving, said Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA counter-terrorism chief.
"He's got a mandate to carry out change and reform, and certainly there are changes that are necessary. But the way they are doing it is more like using a meat cleaver, rather than a pruning shear," said Cannistraro.
"The effect is demoralization in the middle rank, which is very unfortunate because that is the area where you need to have people totally dedicated, totally on alert, particularly on the threats such as terrorism, which is a primary mission," he said.
Driving the changes, in part, is administration anger over intelligence leaks that undercut Bush's positions on Iraq during the elections, prompting suspicion among conservatives that "rogue" elements in the CIA had sided with the Democrats.
"It's not a side issue. It's a major issue," said Cannistraro. "Some of the leaks embarrassed the vice president."
They included disclosures of US intelligence warnings of possible insurgency in Iraq, that intelligence findings on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were hedged, and that no substantive connection was found between Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
"I guess the most serious incident from the vice president's point of view is the fact that he kept saying there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and Zarqawi and Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda," said Cannistraro, referring to Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
"The agency kept providing analyses that said, 'No, that wasn't the case.' But worse than that then they leaked it before election that there wasn't a connection. I think that drove the vice president over the edge," he said in an interview.
CIA's Deputy Director John McLaughlin announced last week that he is stepping down. He was followed by Kappes and Sulick who submitted their resignations after a confrontation with Goss's chief of staff Patrick Murray.
According to the Washington Post, Kappes and Sulick resigned in protest over Murray's treatment of another senior official, the associate deputy director for counter-intelligence.
The Post said Murray had warned her she would be held responsible if information from the personnel file of a Goss appointee to the post of executive director was leaked to the press.
Goss's first appointee to that position, Michael Kostiw, withdrew his name following news reports that he had left the agency 20 years earlier under a cloud because of a shoplifting incident.
Goss' aloofness and reliance on aides who came with him from Congress to oversee key areas of the intelligence community have added to the morale problems, according to former officials.
Goss has not spoken in person to CIA employees about the current crisis, the intelligence official said.
Michael Scheuer, who headed the CIA unit that tracked Osama Bin Laden from 1996 to 1999, said he quit the agency last week in part to speak out publicly against the "scapegoating" of the CIA's clandestine services for intelligence failures that lie with US leaders.
"I think clearly the agency needs to loose some of its senior officers who are kind of chronically risk averse, but Mr. Kappes is surely not one of those people," he said in an interview.
"He is a distinguished officer, he has done a lot of hard things in his career in dangerous places. His loss is, I think, a substantial one," he said.
11/17/2004 - 07:33 GMT - AFP