Soccer Dad

Thoughts on Goss

Efraim Halevy recently wrote a stinging rebuke of the 9/11 commission for the Economist:

American leadership in these sensitive areas cannot be taken for granted. Mr Tenet inspired the confidence of his subordinates and peers in all four corners of the earth, and this was a vital ingredient in the war effort. It still is. The manner of Mr Tenet's departure, and his public castigation at the hands of the inquiry commissions, will make it extremely difficult for any successor to lead the world in the clandestine war which is such a key theatre in the current international conflict.

In other words Halevy, a former head of Israel's Mossad, felt that the commission will make future leader of the CIA more cautious rather than less when one of the problems.
Paul Greenberg also pointed to another of Tenet's accomplishments:

And does anybody remember when the war in Afghanistan was going nowhere? Not for the first or last time, the word of the day among the chattering class in Washington and New York was Quagmire! Critics like Arizona's much-admired John McCain - war hero, senator, maverick and loose cannon - demanded that a huge American expeditionary force be dispatched to the Afghan wastes at once.

But while others all about him were losing their heads, George Tenet held out for sending a few CIA teams over there to organize the native resistance to the Taliban. American forces were kept to a minimum, and that approach (and patience) worked. No, it wasn't easy. It still isn't. But now Afghanistan is largely free and stable, the kind of success story some of us would gladly settle for in Iraq.

This was documented by Bob Woodward here:

The units are part of a highly secret CIA capability, benignly named the Special Activities Division, that consists of teams of about half a dozen men who do not wear military uniforms. The division has about 150 fighters, pilots and specialists, and is made up mostly of hardened veterans who have retired from the U.S. military.

The division's arsenal includes helicopters and airplanes and the unmanned aerial Predator drones equipped with high-resolution cameras and Hellfire antitank missiles. Last week, a CIA-run Predator provided intelligence resulting in three days of strikes that killed key al Qaeda leaders. But it was unclear what role CIA information played in the successful attack on Muhammad Atef, the senior operations lieutenant for Osama bin Laden whose death was confirmed yesterday by the Taliban.

(An aside: read this about how President Bush approached the war in Afghanistan:

"You know what? We need to be patient," Bush said. "We've got a good plan."

"Look, we're entering a difficult phase. The press will seek to find divisions among us. They will try and force on us a strategy that is not consistent with victory."

In the secrecy of the room, the president had voiced one of his conclusions -- the news media, or at least some elements, did not want victory or at least acted as if they did not.

"We've been at this only 19 days. Be steady. Don't let the press panic us." The press would say they needed a new strategy, that the current strategy was a failed one. He disagreed. "Resist the second-guessing. Be confident but patient. We are going to continue this thing through Ramadan," the Muslim holy month. "We've got to be cool and steady. It's all going to work."

Hadley thought the tension suddenly drained from the room. The president was saying he had confidence and they should have confidence. In their souls, Hadley believed, some of them had to wonder whether the president might be losing confidence in them. Presidential confidence, once bestowed, was vital for all of them to function. Any hint of less than full confidence would be devastating. They served at his pleasure. They could be gone or sidelined in an instant. Not only had Bush declared confidence in their strategy, but more important, Hadley believed, he had declared confidence in them.

Tenet wanted to stand up and cheer. He went back to CIA headquarters and told his senior leadership what the president had said. What it meant, Tenet said, was simple: Keep going.

Rice believed it was one of the most important moments. If the president had opened up to alternatives, the war cabinet would have lost the focus of trying to make the strategy work and flitted off to think up alternatives. She hoped that the recommitment would cause everyone to redouble their efforts on the current strategy that he had just then fully blessed.

- See Bob Woodward isn't all bad. In fact here's the page that links to the various excerpts from "Bush at War." This must have been what Greenberg was referring to when he talked about how the CIA approach worked. This also shows that the President does not make or change decisions lightly. A good quality for a leader wouldn't you say?)
Look I'm not going to say that Tenet was perfect, but maybe he had more successes than we realized. (I also think that his Middle East Peace plan was a disaster.) But these successes may not have been his only qualification.
That other quality was that he had the trust of President Bush. He met with President Bush daily. No Director of Central Intelligence met with Clinton daily; in fact Clinton rarely met with his first DCI, James Woolsey, ever. Clinton just didn't make intelligence a priority as President Bush apparently has.
So then, one of the most important qualities a DCI can have is to have the trust of the president. I don't know if Rep. Goss has that trust or not, but that should be one of the qualities the confirmation process should be looking at. Has the President worked with Goss before?
Actually, one of the disqualifications of Goss would be that he was a member of the House intelligence committee. If the CIA failed it's also apparent that the congressional oversight failed. And Rep. Goss would have been part of that oversight.
Fred Kaplan in "Spies like Goss", I think is too cynical. He uses the Wilson/Plame case against Goss, but it would appear that, despite the special prosecutor, not much will come of that. (Novak, no supporter of the war in Iraq, was probably baffled why the Bush administration would appoint an opponent of the war to verify the yellowcake story. Someone answered him, oh his wife recommended him.)
Nor would I make too much of the fact that Goss and Tenet didn't exactly get along. Tenet has already stepped down and there's no indication that he was pushed. President Bush chose to go with whom he thought was the best person for the job without worrying about hurt feelings.
So my best guess is that Goss is someone who inspires the President's confidence. There's nothing wrong with that.

Posted by SoccerDad at August 12, 2004 03:40 AM | TrackBack