Porter Goss, Hookergate and What Gender are the Hookers?

Re: Porter Goss, Hookergate and What Gender are the Hookers?

Yawn, yawn, yawn...

You've got a government that's changed the country in myriad, far-reaching destructive ways, and you choose to spend time going on about who might possibly have done what illicit sex act with whom?

Jesus, I mean, get a life.

What nimh said.

What gender are the hookers? And what age. There are reports that the Grand Jury has heard testimony of child prostitutes being used. That's a bit more than just hiring a hooker.

Re: Porter Goss, Hookergate and What Gender are the Hookers?


Jesus get a life? Jesus died for your sins. He can't get a life, he gace it up so that you may enjoy eternal life. Praise God!

33

Well, that was original, at least.

Yeah, you should try it some time.

Re: Porter Goss, Hookergate and What Gender are the Hookers?

No.

And I probably won't remember "hookergate" by tomorrow.

Re: Porter Goss, Hookergate and What Gender are the Hookers?
You act as if any political conversation on A2K had any substance or consequence on anything. It's all the bullsh!t. Hookers are no more ridiculous then anything else in American politics. All political conversations on A2K are missing the truths and "real politik" to render them anything more then ramblings of misguided, willfully ignorant, dissinformed, under informed, overconsuming, coerced marketing subjects that make up the average American citizen.

Hookers?

Yes, Hookers, drawings of fictional mobile WMD labs, Trials of insane man as national villains to feed the public, fabercated intelligence, etc, etc.

It's all the same thing.

Amigo is correct. This country has gone from an era in which the government and its functionaries were up front with the people when the brilliant William Jefferson Clinton was president to a shameful time in which, as Amigo says, "drawings of ficitional mobile labs, trials of insane man as national villian to feed the public and fabercated( sic) intelligence" are presented.

Perhaps the integrity and forthrightness of Hillary Rodham Clinton can lead us out of this mess and back to the good days in the last decade of the nineties.

Thanks Bernard.

And lets not forget our "President" revealed the identity of an agent of our own country who was also working on WMDs ....IN IRAN!!!!!!!

and now all that work and intelligence of that agent and any agents connected to her is a dead deal.

Why did our President do that???? Inless we can comprehend the underlying truth and irony in the my last three sentinces we do not understand sh!t.

Which is why Politics on A2K amounts to a little pile on baby poop.

Conversations about hookers are far more creditable.
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We do not know what is happening to us, and this is precisely what is happening to us, not to know what is happening to us: the man of today is beginning to be disoriented with respect to himself, dépaysé, he is outside of his country, thrown into a new circumstance that is like a terra incognita. (1926) -José Ortega y Gasset

'Heckuva Job, Porter': Dana Priest Reveals CIA Disaster
'Heckuva Job, Porter': Dana Priest Reveals CIA Disaster
By E&P Staff
Published: May 06, 2006 12:25 PM ET

With the sudden departure of Porter Goss as director of the CIA on Friday, it became clear that the press would have a field day, as the magnitude of another disastrous high-level appointment became clear. Just as President Bush was likening the war on terror to "World War III," the man he had appointment as a frontlines officer was revealed as the wrong man for the job from the outset who had seriously undermined that "war."

Not surprisingly, the reporter who provided the most informed, and lacerating, critique was The Washington Post's Dana Priest. She has had an unfortunate link with Goss in recent weeks, ever since at Goss's order a CIA officer named Mary McCarthy was fired amid allegations that she had leaked information to Priest for her Pulitzer-winning "secret prisons" stories. McCarthy has denied this.

Today, Priest in a front-page Post story, painted this picture of Goss:

"Porter J. Goss was brought into the CIA to quell what the White House viewed as a partisan insurgency against the administration and to re-energize a spy service that failed to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks or accurately assess Iraq's weapons capability.

"But as he walked out the glass doors of Langley headquarters yesterday, Goss left behind an agency that current and former intelligence officials say is weaker operationally, with a workforce demoralized by an exodus of senior officers and by uncertainty over its role in fighting terrorism and other intelligence priorities, said current and former intelligence officials.

"In public, Goss once acknowledged being 'amazed at the workload.' Within headquarters, 'he never bonded with the workforce,' said John O. Brennan, a former senior CIA official and interim director of the National Counterterrorism Center until last July. 'Now there's a decline in morale, its capability has not been optimized and there's a hemorrhaging of very good officers,' Brennan said.... Brennan added: 'Porter's a dedicated public servant. He was ill-suited for the job.'

"As a result of all these factors, said these sources and outside experts who work with the CIA, the number of case officers has skyrocketed, but there has been no dramatic improvement in how spies collect intelligence about terrorist targets.

"As important, Goss -- who did not like to travel overseas or to wine and dine foreign intelligence chiefs who visited Washington -- allowed the atrophy of relations with the foreign intelligence services that helped the CIA kill or catch nearly all the terrorists taken off the streets since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, in the view of these officials and several foreign intelligence officials."

The remainder of the article can be found at www.washingtonpost.com

Elsewhere, two reporters for the New York Daily News write on Saturday that, actually, the Goss departure is closely linked the the emerging "Hookergate" scandal.

Richard Sisk and James Gordon Meek declared that Goss abruptly resigned "amid allegations that he and a top aide may have attended Watergate poker parties where bribes and prostitutes were provided to a corrupt congressman.

"Kyle (Dusty) Foggo, the No. 3 official at the CIA, could soon be indicted in a widening FBI investigation of the parties thrown by defense contractor Brent Wilkes, named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the bribery conviction of former Rep. Randall (Duke) Cunningham, law enforcement sources said....

"Intelligence and law enforcement sources said solid evidence had yet to emerge that Goss also went to the parties, but Goss and Foggo share a fondness for poker and expensive cigars, and the FBI investigation was continuing."

It's "all about the Duke Cunningham scandal," a senior law enforcement official told the Daily News in reference to Goss' resignation.

Hayden Nominated to Head CIA
Hayden Nominated to Head CIA
By Dafna Linzer and Fred Barbash
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 8, 2006; 9:45 AM

President Bush named Gen. Michael V. Hayden as CIA director today in the face of heavy criticism from Republicans as well as Democrats.

Bush cited Hayden's background of "more than 20 years of experience" as he announced the nomination, which was widely reported over the weekend.

Anticipating the fight ahead, the administration began defending the appointment even before it was made. Stephen Hadley, Bush's national security adviser, said on NBC's "Today" show and on ABC's "Good Morning America" today that Hayden is a "change agent," the "best person" for the job, "the right man at the right time."

Responding to concerns about having a military officer in the key civilian intelligence job, Hadley said that "the military background is in many ways a plus. . . . But make no mistake," Hadley said, "when he steps in, he will not be reporting to Don Rumsfeld," the secretary of defense.

Hayden is a four-star Air Force general, a former director of the National Security Agency and currently deputy director of national intelligence serving under director John Negroponte in the new office created by Congress in response to criticism of the CIA's failure to anticipate the terrorists attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Republican chairmen of the House and Senate intelligence panels raised serious concerns Sunday about Hayden, whose name surfaced for the job immediately after the abrupt resignation of Porter Goss on Friday, with Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.) calling him "the wrong man at the wrong place at the wrong time."

Other Republicans and Democrats, appearing on Sunday talk shows, praised Hayden's credentials but said they, too, are troubled by President Bush's decision to place a military officer at the helm of a civilian intelligence agency. Hayden has defended Bush's domestic eavesdropping program, run by the NSA under Hayden's leadership, since its disclosure in December.

"I would point out that there have been several heads of the Central Intelligence Agency who have been military officers, Hadley said on "Good Morning America."

"There are officers serving in that agency. The question is not military versus civilian; the question is the best man for that job. And Mike Hayden really has that capacity.

"He's run a big organization. He knows how to transform a big organization. He's committed to the agenda of intelligence reform."

"And," said Hadley, "he's not just a military officer; he's had broad experience in the intelligence business. He's been involved in human intelligence, has been in an embassy overseas, which involves him in the overseas operations. He's served on the National Security Council staff in terms of the presidency of Bush 41," Hadley continued. "So this is a kind of broad-gauged guy, a change agent committed to reform, and he can really do great things for the country as head of the Central Intelligence Agency."

The challenges to Hayden's nomination come when Bush is politically at his weakest and Republicans are distancing themselves from the White House in the hopes of retaining their grip on Congress in the midterm elections.

White House officials said they would not shy away from a fight with Democrats over what Bush has termed a "terrorist surveillance program," if that becomes the focus of Hayden's hearings. With the country essentially divided on the effort, which has allowed the NSA to scan the calls and e-mails of more than 5,000 Americans, the president has more support on that issue than most others.

Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), who chairs the Judiciary Committee, has fought to obtain more information about the program, which he has said he believes is operating outside the law.

Although Hayden is considered to be one of the most popular intelligence briefers on the Hill, Specter has said he has been frustrated by the amount of information Hayden has shared with the committee. As a result, Specter said, confirmation hearings should center on the legality of the program that Hayden designed and ran in secret after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

"There is no doubt there's an enormous threat from terrorism, but the president does not have a blank check," Specter said on "Fox News Sunday." "Now, with General Hayden up for confirmation, this will give us an opportunity to try to find out."

Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), who heads the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said he supports the NSA program and likes Hayden personally, but he did not embrace the expected nomination. "I'm not in a position to say that I am for General Hayden and will vote for him," said Roberts, whose committee will conduct Hayden's confirmation hearings.

That stance was in marked contrast to the overwhelming support Hayden had at his confirmation hearing to the national intelligence post in April 2005.

Roberts, who introduced Hayden at the time, began by saying that he had erred when describing him as "excellent." Roberts then said: "I have crossed that out and put 'outstanding.' " Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said the president "could not have made a finer appointment" than Hayden, and Sen. Carl M. Levin (Mich.), the only Democrat who questioned Hayden during the hearing, called him "a wonderful choice."

In a 1999 New Yorker magazine article, two years before the attacks that led to the establishment of the domestic spying program, Hayden was asked whether the agency could target Americans.

"I'm a kid from Pittsburgh with two sons and a daughter who are closet libertarians," he said. "I am not interested in doing anything that threatens the American people, and threatens the future of this agency. I can't emphasize enough to you how careful we are."

Hayden left the NSA last year to become the first deputy director for national intelligence, a coordination position established as part of a massive intelligence restructuring in response to failures before Sept. 11.

But the changes have weakened the CIA while empowering the defense secretary, and critics of Hayden's nomination cited that as one reason a military officer should not be put in charge at Langley.

Hayden, who is not considered close to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, could retire to alleviate concerns about his Pentagon ties. Roberts said that might help his nomination.

Hoekstra disagreed. "It makes absolutely no difference to me whether he is a general or a retired general," he said in an interview yesterday. "Either way, it sends the exact wrong signal to CIA officers in the field at a critical time."

Thirteen of the 19 CIA directors had military service before their appointment, and the tradition had been to balance a military director with a civilian deputy or vice versa.

Hoekstra will not preside over the hearings, but he is an influential Republican voice on intelligence matters and works closely with the CIA in conducting oversight. With the president's popularity at all-time lows, Hoekstra criticized the decision to dismiss Goss, less than two weeks after Goss fired a CIA employee accused of leaking classified information. "It undermined Porter's efforts to stop leaks," Hoekstra said.

The CIA has been in turmoil for much of Bush's presidency, after the failures to prevent the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the flawed prewar assessments of Iraq's weapons programs. Those events were followed by 18 months of CIA management under Goss, who was forced aside last week amid an exodus of top officers at the agency and plummeting morale during a time of war.

Vice President Cheney, who is close both to Goss and to Hayden, said the next director will need to focus on the agency's core mission of sending out spies to collect information on targets such as al-Qaeda.

"We're faced with trying to find ways to figure out what a small group of terrorists are going to do. They're difficult to penetrate, difficult to track by national technical means," Cheney said in an interview with NBC News.

Hayden's intelligence expertise is not in the clandestine service, but in the technical world of communication intercepts and the use of satellite imagery to detect threats.
------------------------------------------------

Staff writer Peter Baker contributed to this report.

I smell a plot thickening
I smell a plot thickening. It appears Hayden and HSA head Negroponte are in cahoots to force Donald Rumsfeld out of the Pentagon. Has Rummy finally met his match?

BBB

New tack since your "hooker" story didn't pan out?

Behind the Goss Toss
Behind the Goss Toss
By Richard Sisk
The New York Daily News
Sunday 07 May 2006

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.
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"Nine Fingers," Poker-Playing CIA Man, ID'd
By Justin Rood
TPM Media
Sunday 07 May 2006

A lot of folks, including us, noticed a strange detail in one of the first articles about Brent Wilkes' poker-and-more parties.

"Another player was a CIA agent known as 'Nine Fingers,' so named because he lost one of his digits while on assignment," the San Diego Union-Tribune reported over a week ago in what appeared to be an almost throwaway bit of color.

The Mafia-esque moniker has attracted attention and jokes -- but little new information, until now: Newsweek magazine is the first to identify Nine Fingers as Brant Bassett, whom they also say is "a former Goss aide."

He may be a more central character in our story than the SDUT made him out to be.

Bassett is reported to have been a case officer with the CIA's Directorate of Operations, where Foggo worked. Their paths crossed a number of times over the years and they became friendly, I'm told, which isn't a stretch, given that two publications now put Bassett in poker games with Foggo and Wilkes.

An enduring mystery to this fiasco is why Porter Goss promoted "Dusty" Foggo to the very top of the CIA. Now, informed sources are speculating that Bassett may be the link that explains that mystery, at least in part. Bassett, a counsel and staff director for the Human Intelligence panel of Goss' House Intelligence Committee, had ample opportunity to introduce Goss and his close aide Patrick Murray to Foggo. Did he?

I gave Mr. Bassett a call a few days ago in the hopes he'd be willing to discuss the matter, but he didn't call me back. Newsweek reported that he didn't return their call, either.

Spy Czar, Rumsfeld in a Turf War
Spy Czar, Rumsfeld in a Turf War
By Doyle McManus and Peter Spiegel
The Los Angeles Times
Saturday 06 May 2006

Washington - After a little more than a year in his newly created job, John D. Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, has won an initial battle to establish authority over the vast US intelligence community - Porter J. Goss, who resisted Negroponte's moves to limit the autonomy of the CIA, is gone.

But Negroponte faces a larger and much more difficult challenge: a struggle with Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's Department of Defense, which runs more than 80% of the nation's intelligence budget and is busy expanding its role even further.

Negroponte's job is to coordinate the work of 16 intelligence agencies, including the CIA and the giant National Security Agency - which eavesdrops on international communications - as well as the Energy Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration. The post was created in 2005 in response to charges - made most tellingly by the commission that investigated the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 - that the federal government's intelligence effort was uncoordinated and needed central direction.

When Negroponte took office in April 2005, the veteran diplomat moved quickly to exert his authority over the CIA. He took over the job of giving President Bush his daily intelligence briefing, a task that once allowed CIA directors to bond with the presidents they served. He took a central role in briefing Congress on intelligence issues. He transferred some CIA officers to new joint intelligence centers. And when it appeared that Goss was not fully on board, officials said, Negroponte and his deputy, Air Force Gen. Michael V. Hayden, quietly complained to the White House - apparently contributing to Goss' decision to resign Friday.

But Negroponte, who once worked as an aide to former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, has been much more cautious in confronting the Pentagon, officials and members of Congress have said. (Kissinger once complained that Rumsfeld was the toughest bureaucratic warrior he had ever met.)

When Negroponte has sought to push through changes at the Defense Department, "they told him to take a flying leap," said one US intelligence official who said he was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter. "If you get the shove from DOD, where else can you go?"

The Pentagon has said it is cooperating with Negroponte. But even before the intelligence director's job was created, Rumsfeld made it clear that he thought its power should be limited, and he lobbied successfully in Congress to curtail much of Negroponte's clout over personnel and budgets.

Rumsfeld explained at the time that he did not want to weaken the Pentagon's ability to deliver tactical military intelligence to soldiers in the field by involving a new authority outside the military.

"We would not want to place new barriers or filters between the military combatant commanders and [Defense intelligence] agencies when they perform as combat support agencies," Rumsfeld said in congressional testimony at the time.

But in recent months, the Pentagon has asserted its authority to expand its own intelligence operations far beyond tactical support for soldiers. The move has drawn criticism from some members of Congress, who say they worry about an effort to create parallel intelligence-gathering capabilities - including reportedly setting up covert special operations teams to spy in foreign countries.

The Pentagon is in the middle of a wide-reaching restructuring of its own intelligence-gathering and analysis abilities, run by Stephen A. Cambone, a close Rumsfeld aide who is the department's intelligence chief, and his deputy, Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin. Some critics have warned that the effort is turning into a bid for even more control over national intelligence assets.

"They started from an advantageous position because, even 10 years ago, they had about 85% of the intelligence budget," said Steven Aftergood, a civilian analyst who tracks intelligence issues for the Federation of American Scientists. "But with the onset of war in Iraq, intel support for military operations has only increased, and the Pentagon has been increasingly assertive about its role as an intelligence-gatherer and analyst."

Last month, Rumsfeld gave the green light to a new Defense Joint Intelligence Operations Center, which officials have described as an effort to centralize all military intelligence to better serve commanders in the field.

In a briefing to reporters, Boykin said military officials were in talks with the CIA to allow the new center to win access to the agency's raw intelligence, a move he characterized as an effort to get analysts in combat zones all the information they might need about potential threats.

"We want access to databases from other agencies, where appropriate," Boykin said.

Already, the Pentagon's intelligence budget dwarfs that of the CIA. Although the budgets remain classified, the CIA is believed to get about $5 billion annually, less than the National Security Agency, which gets $6 billion to $8 billion a year. The Defense Department's National Reconnaissance Office, the operator of military satellites, also gets $6 billion to $8 billion a year.

Other Pentagon agencies have sizable budgets - the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the department's mapping office, has a budget of about $3 billion, and the Defense Intelligence Agency gets $1 billion to $3 billion annually. The individual military services, which all have their own intelligence-gathering operations, also have large budgets.

Negroponte declined to speak about these issues in the wake of Goss' resignation Friday. But in a speech last month, he said - in an implicit criticism of at least some of the intelligence agencies he supervises - that his basic goal is to "optimize the [intelligence] community's total performance as opposed to optimizing its members' individual operations."

"We are in the process of remaking a loose confederation into a unified enterprise," Negroponte added.

His key weapon, he said, would be control over the intelligence budget, which he called "a powerful integrating force." By controlling which agencies and which programs are funded, he said, he can nudge the separate agencies toward greater collaboration.

Still, Negroponte acknowledged at a Senate hearing in March, there had been open conflict with the Pentagon over at least one issue: personnel.

The law setting up his job gave Negroponte the authority to transfer professionals from individual intelligence agencies into joint centers or other agencies to make the integration process work. But the Pentagon has made that process difficult, officials said, in part by issuing a directive that any such transfer required the "concurrence" of its intelligence chief, Cambone.

"We look at those people as intelligence people, and the secretary [Rumsfeld] certainly looks on those as DOD folks," Negroponte said.

"I think we'll work our way through it," he said.

Negroponte's cautious approach produced an unusual bipartisan rebuke last month from the leaders of the House Intelligence Committee, who complained that he had built a staff of more than 1,500 but shown few concrete results.

Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), chairman of the panel, said he worried that Negroponte was "slowing down the process."

Rep. Jane Harman (D-Venice), the senior Democrat on the committee, said: "We don't want more billets, more bureaucracy, more buildings. We want more leadership."

Negroponte's speech before the National Press Club two weeks ago was his public response, and it boiled down to: Lay off.

"Integrating our intelligence community - foreign, military and domestic - is a tall order," he said. "Intelligence reform hasn't been a theory-based experiment or an exercise in bureaucratic bloat. Government programs require government officials to implement them."

Why Did Goss Resign?
Why Did Goss Resign?
By Larry Johnson
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Saturday 06 May 2006

Yesterday's surprise announcement by Porter Goss comes on the heels of press stories that members of Congress received sexual favors from prostitutes allegedly procured by Brent Wilkes, an entrepreneur implicated in the bribery of Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham. Wilkes, we are told, hosted poker and hooker parties at the Watergate Hotel. Wilkes also happened to be an old high school buddy of the CIA's number three man, Dusty Foggo.

Speculation in the blogosphere suggested that Porter Goss selected Foggo because of his ties to Wilkes and may be implicated in the sexscapades. I'm told by a friend who used to work at the Agency that Goss, on this charge, is clean. In fact, Goss may be a victim, guilty only of selecting some lousy staff.

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 hooker extravaganza. Goss, politician that he is, probably recognized that even though he did not participate in the sexual escapades and poker games, 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, 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.

Porter Goss, to his credit, did make a valiant effort to revitalize the human collection side of the Agency. He reopened CIA posts overseas that his predecessor, George Tenet, had closed. On the demerit side of the ledger, however, Goss also politicized the CIA. He brought political operatives into the CIA who made loyalty to the Bush presidency the primary concern. This helped drive out much needed talent and weakened the CIA's ability to conduct overseas operations while tarnishing the CIA's tradition for offering objective analysis.

It appears there will be another victim in this mess - Dusty Foggo, the CIA's Executive Director. Dusty is an old friend of Brent Wilkes and there has been plenty of speculation and rumor suggesting that Dusty got his job because of Porter's intervention. Not so says a friend. Dusty got the job thru the intervention of one of Porter's senior aides, who pushed and got Dusty the job. While the rumor mill tries to suggest Dusty was implicated in the hooker scandal, a friend tells me no. According to my friend:

"Regarding Dusty's poker games, I guess guilt by association is a favored game in Washington on both sides of the political spectrum, but really, these events were quite innocent, at least when viewed from the perspective of if Dusty is guilty of anything beyond keeping too high a profile in what turned out to be the wrong company. If you want to know, the way these things worked was that once or twice a week, Dusty would host a poker game either at his house in Vienna or Brent's place at the Watergate, later the Westin. These things went on from the mid 1990s until Dusty went to Frankfurt in the early 2000s. Basically, Dusty used these games to take his mind off of his feud with Buzzy Krongaard, which was a minor thing to Buzzy, but weighed pretty heavily on Dusty's mind. When at Dusty's place, they were pretty much all Agency guys, except for Brent. Dusty's wife laid out the food and drink. When downtown, Brent would invite Duke and some other denizens from the Hill, but the majority were always Dusty's Agency poker buddies. Brent would pop for the drinks and snacks downtown, and the ambiance was kind of like the poker game on "The Sopranos." At either location, Dusty was the center of attraction and kind of the host. There was always a lot of bitching about Buzzy, even in front of the Hill guys. These were always all guy things, there weren't any women there. Dusty is a big cigar aficionado, in fact, he used to have the license plate CIGRMAN on his car. The room was always filled with smoke. Downtown, it wasn't unusual for guys to crash in the bedrooms or on the couch before going home at dawn to catch a shower and go in to work. It would not surprise me if Brent used the same rooms at the Watergate and Westin for subsidized Congressional encounters with hookers, but I don't know this to be the case. If Brent did, I doubt that he would've said anything to Dusty about it, because, for all of his judgmental shortcomings, Dusty has enough of a political antenna to realize that he shouldn't be playing poker in the same room where Duke was availing himself of free hookers. As you probably know, Dusty is the type of guy who people either love or hate. In my experience, women who hate him do so because he is an unabashed chauvinist of the old school. Guys who hate him pretty much do so because they wish they had the moxie to get as much poontang as they think he is getting. So there you have it, at least my take."

Unfortunately for Dusty, his days at CIA are probably numbered. What is even more unfortunate is the effect of this scandal on the CIA and ultimately this nation. The CIA has endured the shame of the president, the vice president, and the Republican controlled Congress, blaming it for intelligence failures in Iraq when in fact, the CIA told the truth on critical issues but the leaders did not want to hear it. The CIA also has endured a president and vice president whose immediate staff have been implicated in the outing of an undercover CIA officer. Despite a promise to get to the bottom of this breach of secrecy, President Bush has permitted one of the participants in that leak - Karl Rove - to stay on the job. And now a sex scandal that implicates, by association, the former Director of the CIA and the number-three man at the Agency.

Hopefully, President Bush will seize this opportunity to remove the taint of politics from the CIA. We need a professional, not a political hack running the CIA. We live in a dangerous world that requires an organization like the CIA capable of operating in the world of the covert and clandestine. Faced with a crisis of leadership and confidence, however, the CIA may be distracted from its mission of helping protect this nation. Viewed in this light, the sudden departure of Porter Goss is a real tragedy.



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Larry C. Johnson is CEO and co-founder of BERG Associates, LLC, an international business-consulting firm that helps corporations and governments manage threats posed by terrorism and money laundering. Mr. Johnson, who worked previously with the Central Intelligence Agency and US State Department's Office of Counter Terrorism (as a Deputy Director), is a recognized expert in the fields of terrorism, aviation security, crisis and risk management. Mr. Johnson has analyzed terrorist incidents for a variety of media including the Jim Lehrer News Hour, National Public Radio, ABC's Nightline, NBC's Today Show, the New York Times, CNN, Fox News and the BBC. Mr. Johnson has authored several articles for publications including Security Management Magazine, the New York Times and The Los Angeles Times. He has lectured on terrorism and aviation security around the world.

One vote to do Cunnigham for 10k per hour. Hmm...maybe so, depending on what he would want done...and if it involved what I suspect he would want, I might even do it for free.

She might not like it but I am sure the Dukester would be begging for more!