Sudden
Resignation Of CIA
Director Goss: Another Tremor
In Bush Administration
By Patrick Martin
09 May 2006
World Socialist Web
The
resignation of CIA Director Porter Goss, announced abruptly by the White
House on Friday, is another demonstration of the instability and vicious
infighting within the Bush administration. Goss ends a relatively brief
18-month tenure at the agency, a period during which he conducted a
political purge in which at least a dozen top CIA officials were driven
out.
The Goss resignation is the
outcome of a protracted and murky conflict within the military and intelligence
agencies. It involves John Negroponte, Bush’s choice as the first
Director of National Intelligence; the Pentagon intelligence apparatus,
headed by Stephen Cambone, the most trusted deputy of Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld; and multiple factions within the CIA itself.
Negroponte apparently has
emerged as the victor in this infighting, with his deputy, Air Force
Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, former head of the National Security Agency,
named by White House officials as the likely choice to succeed Goss
at CIA. In an indication that the conflict is continuing, however, the
Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Peter Hoekstra,
appeared on “Fox News Sunday” to oppose the as-yet-unannounced
selection of Hayden, saying that the career military intelligence official
has experience only in electronic information-gathering, not in covert
operations.
There are no clear policy
differences among Negroponte, Rumsfeld, Cambone and Goss. They all share
responsibility for the Bush administration’s criminal war of aggression
in Iraq, and for the debacle that the US occupation of the oil-rich
country has become. To some extent, there is an institutional conflict
between the Pentagon, which controls 85 percent of the vast intelligence
budget, and Negroponte’s new agency, established in 2005 to centralize
control over all 16 US intelligence agencies, including the CIA.
The immediate impulse for
Goss’s ouster, however, is his apparent link to the sex and bribery
scandal involving former Republican Congressman Randy Cunningham, who
resigned from Congress last fall and has been sentenced to prison for
steering military contracts to several favored companies in return for
cash and other payoffs.
Three major newspapers—the
Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and San Diego Union-Tribune—have
published articles in the last 10 days reporting that the investigation
into Cunningham’s corrupt practices, once thought to be limited
to several defense contractors, had been expanded to include other congressmen
and government officials, including the number-three official at the
CIA, executive director Kyle (Dusty) Foggo, who was installed in that
position by Goss.
One contractor named as an
unindicted co-conspirator in the Cunningham case, Brent Wilkes of San
Diego, California, is reportedly suspected of arranging for a Washington-area
limousine company to provide prostitutes for Cunningham. These services
were provided in conjunction with weekly poker parties in the capital,
attended by Republican politicians, government officials and businessmen,
which Wilkes has hosted for the past 15 years. A CIA spokesman has confirmed
that Foggo, a boyhood friend of Wilkes, had been a regular at those
parties.
Christopher Baker, president
of Shirlington Limousine and Transportation Inc., the company which
provided the limos for these parties, was awarded a $21 million contract
by the Department of Homeland Security last year to provide transportation
services for top DHS officials. This was despite Baker’s criminal
record for drug possession, attempted petty larceny, and two felony
charges for attempted robbery and car theft, two personal bankruptcy
filings and a tax lien from the Internal Revenue Service, which seized
his house in 1998.
The Post said that the source
of the allegations against Wilkes and Baker was Mitchell J. Wade, one
of the defense contractors who admitted bribing Cunningham. Wade has
pled guilty to charges in that case and is cooperating with prosecutors.
“Wade said limos would pick up Cunningham and a prostitute and
bring them to suites Wilkes maintained at the Watergate Hotel and the
Westin Grand in Washington,” the newspaper reported. The Union-Tribune
cited a statement from Baker’s attorney confirming that Baker
had provided limousine services for Wilkes’s poker parties from
1990 on, but denying any link to prostitution.
Baker’s business arrangements
with the DHS were highly unusual. In addition to his own criminal record,
which would ordinarily make him an unlikely candidate for a contract
to transport top officials in charge of US domestic security, Shirlington
Limousine was in poor financial shape. It lost a contract with Howard
University for non-performance, and was repeatedly sued for non-payment.
At a critical time, in April 2004, the company was awarded a $3.8 million
DHS contract for which it was the sole bidder. A year later, Baker succeeded
in escaping bankruptcy, paying $125,000 to his creditors. In October
2005, his company won a much larger one-year contract for $21.2 million.
A DHS spokesman sought to
explain the relationship with the preposterous claim that while the
department conducted criminal background checks for all the limousine
drivers, no such check was required for the company’s owner. The
agency was unaware of Baker’s long record of petty crime, the
official said.
The connections between Foggo
and the Cunningham case may go beyond the seedy questions of gambling
and prostitution. Several press reports indicate that the CIA inspector
general is examining whether Foggo rigged any contracts from the agency
to companies associated with Wilkes. Foggo has told his CIA associates
that he will follow Goss into retirement, stepping down as the CIA executive
director.
The New York Daily News reported
Saturday that Goss himself “may have attended Watergate poker
parties where bribes and prostitutes were provided to a corrupt congressman,”
adding that Foggo could soon be indicted in the case. The newspaper
cited statements by former CIA operative Larry Johnson, a frequent critic
of the Bush administration, that Goss and Foggo “share a fondness
for poker and expensive cigars,” and that he understood Goss had
occasionally attended the parties thrown by Wilkes. According to the
News, “One subject of the FBI investigation is a $3 million CIA
contract that went to Wilkes to supply bottled water and other goods
to CIA operatives in Iraq and Afghanistan, sources said.”
While the tabloid newspaper
focused attention on sex and bribery, the more establishment press—particularly
the New York Times and Washington Post—were careful to distance
the Goss resignation as much as possible from the sordid details of
the case. The Times went so far as to publish separate articles on the
two subjects Sunday, as though it were possible to consider the political
conflicts within the Bush administration outside of the gross corruption
that is such an essential part of its character.
Foggo is a career CIA mid-level
official who was suddenly vaulted into the top ranks when Goss became
director and forced out the previous number-three executive, Michael
Kostiw, as part of a purge of allegedly anti-Bush officials in the upper
reaches of the agency. Foggo reportedly became a Goss crony while serving
as chief of logistics at the CIA station in Frankfurt, Germany, during
the period when Goss, then chairman of the House Intelligence Committee,
was on inspection trips to CIA offices overseas.
Goss’s tenure as CIA
director has been one of near-continual crisis, particularly the last
eight months, since the existence of clandestine CIA detention centers
overseas was made public by the Washington Post. This was followed by
a frenzied anti-leaking campaign spearheaded by Goss personally, in
an effort to find the source of the Post report. Last month, a veteran
CIA official in the inspector general’s office, Mary McCarthy,
was fired only a week before her scheduled retirement, allegedly for
failing a lie detector test about contacts with the press, including
the Post. But McCarthy has subsequently denied even knowing of the secret
prisons, let alone being the source, and CIA officials admitted that
there was no evidence against her on that leak.
The nomination of Hayden
could prove to be a political time-bomb for the administration, since
confirmation hearings would likely feature questioning about his work
at the NSA, where he was responsible for the secret electronic surveillance
of American citizens, an operation whose existence was revealed to the
New York Times in December. This leak produced another high-pressure
internal security investigation, although no one has yet been fired
or charged with being the source.
The leaks and counter-leaks
demonstrate the increasingly Byzantine atmosphere in official Washington.
With all political issues funneled through the increasingly dysfunctional
channels of a two-party system in which the nominal opposition, the
Democratic Party, offers no alternative to the Republicans, policy disputes
within the ruling elite cannot find expression in open debate.
Moreover, so great is the
chasm between the official rhetoric of the “war on terror”
and reality of predatory seizure of oil resources and strategic positions
to benefit American imperialist interests, that no one in the Bush administration,
Congress or the corporate-controlled media can discuss foreign policy
and security issues publicly in a realistic and serious way.
Hanging over all these debates
is the question of the 9/11 attacks and the ample warnings that the
military and intelligence agencies received in advance. After countless
toothless investigations, not a single top official has been punished
for what was either colossal incompetence or deliberate malfeasance.
Instead, the conflicts within the intelligence apparatus are taking
on the character of a veiled struggle within a palace court.