Today’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.
CIA
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
pereceive “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:
“Re: Dusty¹s 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
were that once or twice a week, Dusty would host a poker game either at his
house in Vienna or Brent¹s place at the Watergate, later the Westin. These
things went on from the mid 1990¹s until Dusty went to Frankfurt in the
early 2000¹s. 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 Dusty¹s mind. When at Dusty¹s place, they were pretty much
all Agency guys, except for Brent. Dusty¹s 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 Dusty¹s 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,
their weren¹t 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 wasn¹t 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 don¹t know this to be the case. If Brent did, I doubt that he would¹ve
said anything to Dusty about it, because, for all of his judgmental
shortcomings, Dusty has enough of a political antenna to realize that he
shouldn¹t 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.
