Posted on 07/16/2007 6:44:59 AM PDT by Jimmy Valentine's brother
Washington, D.C. - Michael Maloof was back in the game. He and another Pentagon aide, David Wurmser, drove the short distance from the Pentagon to CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. It was early October, a good season in Washington, but Maloof’s nerves were on edge during the scenic ride along the tree-lined George Washington Parkway.
snip
Maloof was a legend within the Pentagon circle that tracked arms proliferation. His office was obscure, but it performed a crucial national security function.
snip
The Pentagon wanted years of intelligence reporting on al Qaeda, Iraq, Iran and other potential targets in the war against global terrorism. The Langley crew listened politely. But at the end, the CTC directors said, simply, no. The CIA, not Feith’s policy shop, would do such work — if ordered. There were follow-up requests. The answer was still no.
Finally, Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld’s deputy, interceded. The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) pressed the CIA to cooperate. Years of CIA intelligence reports — some mature, others raw and unconfirmed — started arriving at the Pentagon. Maloof and Wurmser set up shop inside the supersecure National Military Intelligence Center on the Pentagon’s third floor. By December, they had produced a 150-slide briefing on contacts among al Qaeda, Iraq and Iran.
“The agency blew a gasket,” Maloof recalled. Maloof did not fully realize how his mission offended the extremely territorial Langley. snip
Discouraged, Maloof subsequently retired after more than 20 years of tracking arms proliferation between Western countries and the bad guys. The intelligence community had bagged Maloof and damaged Feith in the process.
“When I drove out to the CIA, I thought we would be a team,” Maloof recalled of his October 2001 trip to Langley. “As I tell people now, Rome was burning and the barbarians were at the gate. By October, it was open warfare. They began leaking and making accusations and accusing us of setting up an operation to bypass the agency. They went after me for political reasons.”
And they won.
Rowan Scarborough will be on FOX News Channel’s "Hannity and Colmes" Monday evening at 9 p.m. EDT. He will also be on "Fox and Friends" on Tuesday morning (the show is broadcast 7-9 a.m. ET).
I read this today on the Metro into work. Very troubling.
Rowan Scarborough has been driving the Washington insiders crazy with his sources.
The book should be very interesting. I believe it will confirm that the CIA has been operating against the President as a political entity rather than providing intelligence assesments necessary to defend our country.
It’s not unknown for agencies to get territorial but this level is something else. Our own intelligence community sabotaged the war. We should be afraid. Very afraid.
The CIA was/is the real insurgency and we lost against it.
I believe you're absolutely right.
I am looking forward to reading this book. I have long maintained that Plamegate was a strategic operation that the CIA pulled off to damage the White House. Amazing thing is the White House still doesn’t get it.
bttt
They might get it but are unable to do anything about it.
Spook Daddy had to have warned young George about this. President Bush has no excuse for not having cleaned house at Langley the moment he took over. After eight years of making peace quilts for Bubba, the place had to be a total cesspool.
If that great ‘merican V. Plame is any indication, the CIA should be disbanded and we should start over with new folks and proceedures.
I’m sure the Clintons riddled the CIA with ideological appointees as a way to cripple it, with a view toward obstructing/undermining any more aggressive administration to follow. Hopefully our current President has been equally ideological in his hiring practices IOT reconfigure and protect the agency against a future Dem administration. The CIA’s incompetence has become legendary, beginning with the tragicomic George Tenet, whose preoccupation in retirement seems to be recovering his “reputation”, as if anyone cares; instead, he should be asking forgiveness for the lives lost and the political cost of his incompetence. And yet, like an Inspector Clouseau, for all his bumbling he will be rescued by our military’s victory; and rather than being the architect of defeat, he will be remembered as just a weak kneed confabulator whose sins prompted the reform of his institution.
Interesting excerpt, and I will add this to my book collection when it is published.
I will say this: the CIA’s ineffectivness did not start with Bill Clinton. That sad fact dates back to the Post-WWII Truman Administration, when the CIA was first created and carries onward from there.
I’ll be interested to contrast Rowan Scarborough’s accounts with what Tim Weiner had to say in his “Legacy of Ashes”.
Bingo on all that, especially the “still doesn’t get it” part.
Hmmm. Sounds like a very interesting book!
"Porter Johnston Goss (born December 10, 1938) is an American politician, who was the last Director of Central Intelligence and the first Director of the Central Intelligence Agency following the passage of the IRPTA 2004 Act, which abolished the DCI position. A CIA operative in Latin America during the Cold War, he served as a Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1989 until he took up his post at the agency.[1]
Goss represented the 14th congressional district of Florida, which includes Lee County, Fort Myers, Naples, and part of Port Charlotte. He served for a time as the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. Goss was a cosponsor of the USA PATRIOT Act and was a co-chair of the Joint 9/11 Intelligence Inquiry.
Goss resigned as Director of the CIA on May 5, 2006 in a sit-down press conference with President George W. Bush from the Oval Office[2] On May 8, 2006, Bush nominated USAF Gen. Michael Hayden to be Goss's successor.
"It's run its course," he said. "Now we're going to move on." Despite a long history of denouncing leaks, Bush declined to express any disappointment in the people who worked for him and who were involved in disclosing the name of a CIA operative. Asked about that during a wide-ranging news conference, the president gave a dodgy answer:
"It's been a tough issue for a lot of people in the White House."
He didn't even acknowledge the undisputed fact that someone working for him was the source, saying only that "perhaps somebody in the administration did disclose the name of that person."
If you want to read the entire article, it can be found here - http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2007/7/14/92900.shtml
My question is, why doesn’t President Bush name names? Why doesn’t he say – yes, there was a leaker in my administration. It was Richard Armitage, by his own admission. Scooter was not convicted of releasing the name of a CIA employee who was not a covert agent. Why was she not covert? Because she did not fall into that category as defined by law and as explained by the person who wrote the law.
Why won’t he defend his administration and put these punks in their place? Why doesn’t he clean house in the CIA? It is actions like above that makes it damned difficult to defend and support this President.
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