Porter Goss hopes to usher in a return to the glory days at the CIA, the NY Sun's Eli Lake reports:

The New York Sun has learned that director Porter Goss is already setting up meetings with retired CIA officers whose service coincided with America's victory in the Cold War. They are reportedly being considered for senior management slots in the agency, according to a former CIA senior officer and a current administration official. These sources confirm that Mr. Goss, a former operations officer himself, is offering two-year temporary contracts to the retired officers to run key departments in the much-maligned spy service as a new generation of officers prepares for senior positions. . .

"They are going to take a lot of these managers and move them to the war
college. They have identified some 80 people who are holding jobs they should not be holding. He's going to clean house. I can't complain," a former CIA intelligence officer who worked with the Iraqi opposition in the mid 1990s, Robert Baer, said yesterday.

Mr. Baer, who has written a memoir of his work as a spy and a book predicting the fall of the Saudi royal family, added, "A lot of people in the CIA bet on the wrong horse. My feeling is Goss is going to clean house. He is looking for a legacy in terms of bringing the CIA back to what it was in his era, when we won the cold war and had penetrations of the Soviet Union." . . .

A former political appointee in the first Bush administration predicted that Mr. Goss would likely bolster the clandestine service, the branch of the CIA that collects intelligence, but would punish senior analysts inside the directorate of intelligence, the branch of the agency that analyzes intelligence.

"The directorate of intelligence has tried to actively undermine the president and the administration," said the source, who declined to be named. "There has been an aggressive campaign of leaks of classified data. It is good news for the young Turks in the clandestine service and some of the old bulls around in (President Reagan's director of central intelligence) Bill Casey's day. These guys who are used to going out there and getting it done."

I am not sure if this last quote is code for clandestine services operating without excessive concern for Congressional oversight, but it seems to have the whiff of nostalgia for the excesses of that era about it. It also seems to reflect a twinge of wishful thinking. And hearing from the 9/11 commission and others how very few human intelligence officers were actually operating in the greater Middle East in recent years, some sort of bolstering of the clandestine services would seem to make a great deal of sense. A well informed intel-observer friend writes, the kinds of people Goss is bringing back are in fact a good thing: "But in short, what this does mean is the return, in some way or form, of the better old hands...."

Posted by Laura at November 9, 2004 03:18 PM