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Porter Goss and the CIA


John Simkin

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Porter Goss told CIA staff this week that their job was “to support the Bush administration” and its policies in our work”. Some senior CIA figures who opposed the Iraq War have already resigned. This includes Michael Scheuer, former head of the “Bin Laden Station”.

Vincent Cannistraro, a former head of the CIA’s counter-terrorist centre, has commented: “It can only be interpreted one way – there will be no more dissenting opinions.”

I wonder if John McCone told CIA staff in 1963 that their job was “to support the Johnson administration”?

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John,

There are some very serious issues involved here. First, in James Bamford's PRETEXT FOR WAR, a high ranking CIA official is quoted as telling another large staff meeting that their responsibility was to provide the President with the information he needed to carry out his policy of War in Iraq. Many CIA agents were shocked at this politicization of the intelligence gathering process. Tenet and Powell lying to the United Nations and George Bush lying to the nation (Cincinatti speech)were the result. Porter Goss is a political loyalist and was a very lame watchdog. The politicization, or pre-conceived conclusions, at CIA is very likely to leave us blind-sided again. I think the pendulum has swung too far toward a safe, risk-averse, timid CIA, one where having agents on the ground in Iraq circa 2001 was illegal, where Pakistan and India could build and detonate nuclear weapons without the CIA knowing, and where Al Quaeda could meet in Malaysia, infiltrate the U.S. and carry out multiple Hijackings. Bureaucratic non-entities sit in their offices reading transcripts while hostile forces organize and act. The CIA ain't what it used to be, I almost would rather have Colby and Helms in power than the lame shirkers and lapdogs up there now...we researchers do a better job than they do, because we don't have blinders on. We don't have to follow a script and worry what Rummy and Cheney will think of our conclusions......

Shanet

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I thought JFK had a good idea about what to do with the CIA, if he actually did say he wanted to "scatter it to the winds."

But I'm sure that if we got rid of the CIA, we'd have a hard time getting by with only 14 other intelligence agencies.

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I am serious---James with his photos, Tim the historian, John, Tosh, Ron, Al, myself; We could better ascertain the intentions and capabilities of hostile countries like Korea and Iran than the bureaucrats and Brown graduates communting around Northern Virginia right now. They look for political directions, not hostile intentions, ---of course critical, penetrating, independent minds like ours will never be welcome inside the "Cone of Silence" ---much to our nation's loss. People like Anthony Summers, Seymour Hersh and James Bamford are utterly blackballed from the security 'game' so, in effect, we have do their work for them, after the fact, and for free, out of patriotism and a sense of right and wrong...digging through de-classified material years after the fact, exposing their crimes, errors and falsifications.

Speaking of the agency, here's a file I pulled down from the web:

Name Roster of the Secret Establishment

There were so many "Yalies" in the OSS that Yale's drinking tune, the "Whiffenpoof Song", became an "unofficial" song of the OSS.

Many in the OSS were "Bonesmen" or belonged to the other Yale senior societies.

Robert Lovett ('18), Harriman's childhood friend, had been tapped into Skull & Bones by Prescott Bush's cell of '17 and was a director at Brown Brothers, Harriman. Again, from "George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography": "On October 22, 1945, Secretary of War Robert Patterson created the Lovett Committee, chaired by Robert A. Lovett, to advise the government on the post-World War II organization of U.S. intelligence activities.... The new agency would 'consult' with the armed forces, but it must be the sole collecting agency in the field of foreign espionage and counterespionage. The new agency should have an independent budget, and its appropriations should be granted by Congress without public hearings. Lovett appeared before the Secretaries of State, War, and Navy on November 14, 1945.... Lovett pressed for a virtual resumption of the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS).... The CIA was established in 1947 according to the prescription of Robert Lovett, of Jupiter Island."

Gaddis Smith, a history professor at Yale, said, "Yale has influenced the Central Intelligence Agency more than any other university, giving the CIA the atmosphere of a class reunion." And "Bonesman" have been foremost among the "spooks" building the CIA's "haunted house."

F. Trubee Davison ('18) was Director of Personnel at the CIA in the early years. Some of the other "Bonesmen" connected with the intelligence community are:

Sloane Coffin, Jr. ('49)

V. Van Dine ('49)

James Buckley ('44)

Bill Buckley ('50)

Hugh Cunnigham ('34)

Hugh Wilson ('09)

Reuben Holden ('40)

Charles R. Walker ('16)

Yale's 'unofficial' Secretary of War, Robert D. French ('10)

Archibald MacLiesh ('15)

Dino Pionzio ('50), CIA Deputy Chief of Station during Allende

overthrow

William and McGeorge Bundy

Richard A. Moore ('3?)

Senator David Boren ('63)

Senator John Kerry ('66)

...and, of course, George Herbert Walker Bush. Bush tapped Coffin,

who tapped Buckley.

Some other prominent Bonesmen include:

Henry Luce ('20), Time-Life

John Thomas Daniels ('14), founder Archer Daniels Midland

Gifford Pinchot ('89), President Theodore Roosevelt's chief forester

Frederick E. Weyerhaeuser ('96)

Harold Stanley ('08), founder of Morgan Stanley, investment banker

Alfred Cowles ('13), Cowles Communication

Henry P. Davison ('20), senior partner Morgan Guaranty Trust

Thomas Cochran ('04) Morgan partner

Senator John Heinz ('31)

Pierre Jay ('92), first chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New

York

George Herbert Walker, Jr. ('27), financier and co-founder of the NY

Mets

Artemus Gates ('18), President of New York Trust Company, Union

Pacific, TIME, Boeing Company

William Draper III (50), the Defense Department, UN and

Import-Export Bank

Dean Witter, Jr.('44), investment banker

Senator Jonathan Bingham ('36)

Potter Stewart ('36), Supreme Court Justice

Senator John Chaffe ('47)

Harry Payne Whitney ('94), husband of Gertrude Vanderbilt,

investment banker

Russell W. Davenport ('23), editor Fortune Magazine, created Fortune

500 list

Evan G. Galbraith ('50), Ambassador to France and Managing Director

of Morgan Stanley

Richard Gow ('55), president Zapata Oil

Amory Howe Bradford ('34), husband of Carol Warburg Rothschild and

general manager for the New York Times

C. E. Lord ('49), Comptroller of the Currency

Winston Lord ('59), Chairman of CFR, Ambassador to China and

assistant Secretary of State in the Clinton administration

Ever since Nixon re-established America's political relationship

with China, many of our ambassadors to that country have been

Bonesmen, including George Bush, the first Chief U. S. Liaison

Officer to the Peoples Republic of China.

These are just the "name" guys, corporate boards and international banking and law firms are full of Skull and Bones members who names aren't as well known.

This is disturbing. I wouldn't call them Illuminati, but rather an inbred elite power center hostile to democratic representative government.

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  • 3 weeks later...

There is major news: the gridlock has broken and the House Republicans dropped their opposition to the new National Intelligence Director. I have very mixed feelings on all this, based on the primary research (see 1970s thread) I posted on the Intelligence reform tradition, some themes and lessons. No one saw fit to publish it so enjoy, its a real free Foreign Affairs type political history of the late seventies intelligence community reform effort.

Porter Goss, DCI, brought in staffers from his Congressional Committee as top operational managers and started a revolt.

CIA is leaking like a sieve, no report stays classified, all bad news, strange days at the information hole. A director of operations and plans, whose name is known, has left and another deputy director of plans , name withheld, a top agent running case officer senior executive, has left.

Repeat the Directorate of Operations and Plans is in a chickenfight with the Director of Intelligence, the congressman Porter Goss from Florida, has antagonized everyone with a shake-up.

THis complicates the process of forcing co-operation onto the Fifteen Agencies, the Big three, FBI, NSA and CIA, will be sharing more. The recent Vanity Fair outlines the extent of the petty feuding between the bureau and the agency.

It was against the law for any CIA operative to be in Iraq, they missed India, Pakistani weapons, the record is clear that the National Security Advisors, who are supposed to be the National Intelligence Director if they would do their jobs, the Brezhinski material will shed light on the Pentagons overwhelming power to dominate civilian control.

To concentrate this new power may make for co-operation, but with it, risks.

The NID era will end a period of checkerboard fiefdoms in intelligence, when nobody showed the other teams what they had (and I doubt if that is fair, State and Agency shared through the ambassodors, chief of mission and the CIA chiefs of station, among other ways. True FBI and CIA relations were bad leading up to september eleventh, but the important questions about future technology competitions are clouded by secrecy.

The Colby admissions, Nelson Rockefeller's committee and classified reports, the attempts by Carter to re-charter the 1947 agency system, is in my 1970s thread.

Here's a true anecdote about the public side of the CIA.

In 1979, I was the William Randolph Hearst / United States Senate Scholar --- week in Washington, I was sent to Washington and quite invited into the Federal departments, Foggy Bottom and the CIA: I have been inside the geodesic dome at Langley, and when I was there I asked hard questions about the missing plutonium the CIA climbers had lost in the Himalayas in the 1960's while trying to spy on China. The poor CIA Public Relations agent was stunned speechless, and a more senior officer took the microphone and said that I had "very good sources of information, the Indian government has taken full responsibility for that in a treaty signed in 1967..." No Foggy Bottom job for me, and they never found the Ganges plutonium .... This was all back in High School...

goodnight

Shanet

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There are some very serious issues involved here. First, in James Bamford's PRETEXT FOR WAR, a high ranking CIA official is quoted as telling another large staff meeting that their responsibility was to provide the President with the information he needed to carry out his policy of War in Iraq.  Many CIA agents were shocked at this politicization of the intelligence gathering process.  Tenet and Powell lying to the United Nations and George Bush lying to the nation (Cincinatti speech) were the result. Porter Goss is a political loyalist and was a very lame watchdog.  The politicization, or pre-conceived conclusions, at CIA is very likely to leave us blind-sided again.  I think the pendulum has swung too far toward a safe, risk-averse, timid CIA, one where having agents on the ground in Iraq circa 2001 was illegal, where Pakistan and India could build and detonate nuclear weapons without the CIA knowing, and where Al Quaeda could meet in Malaysia, infiltrate the U.S. and carry out multiple Hijackings.  Bureaucratic non-entities sit in their offices reading transcripts while hostile forces organize and act.  The CIA ain't what it used to be, I almost would rather have Colby and Helms in power than the lame shirkers and lapdogs up there now...we researchers do a better job than they do, because we don't have blinders on. We don't have to follow a script and worry what Rummy and Cheney will think of our conclusions......

Shanet

Shanet:

Your points are reminiscent of those made by JFK after the Bay of Pigs, when he issued NSAM 55, which re-asserted the CIA's role as an intelligence gathering agency. When the CIA becomes the Pentagon's mouthpiece, we get into trouble. The lack of human resources on the ground performing intelligence is a part of the grand Military Industrial Complex design of spy satellites, Star Wars even, at the expense of vastly less expensive and more relevant infiltration agents. In this regard, I absolutely agree with your statement: "I almost would rather have Colby and Helms in power than the lame shirkers and lapdogs up there now."

This latest intervention against intelligence reform in a letter to Congress signed unanimously by the JCS is a remarkable politicization of the military. And how could Tenet be the only head to roll when he had it right (despite the Procrustean Bed circumstance) and the military so wrong? The generals never seem to get it that they have no business forging policy. And when the Pentagon gets that uppity, with White House support, the CIA has little choice but to produce intelligence on the basis of politics rather than facts. As for your point: "Porter Goss is a political loyalist and was a very lame watchdog," I recall my astonishment that Goss' Congressional counterpart watchdog, Jane Harmon, immediately supported Goss to head the CIA. It just made no sense to me at the time. Now, as I write this, CNN is interviewing her about the notion that she is a leading candidate for Intelligence Director. Unbelievable!

Tim

Edited by Tim Carroll
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Great post, Tim.

The intertwining is the problem. The shroud of wartime secrecy that the commander in chief can conjure up is a stiff blinder, and the only thing I will say is that this news today shows the end of the stalking horse strategy.

Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld have played the Joints' opposition for all its worth, and the stalking Horse in the House, Hastert and the Armed Forces Committee and the Appropriation Committee heads have run out of steam. The political damage of continuing is too great, the dodge has ended. I predicted this in my May Intelligence piece, solicited work. The structures are changing. The National Security Adviser and the Secretary of State, with the Vice President and President, the old four man oversight for the CIA and military operations has been enlarged. We have seen the Vice Presidents serve a security portfolio under Mondale and ROckefeller, and the development of investigatory commission norms.

That is why Porter Goss was so immediately accepted. As a house oversight figure, was administratively "investigatory" so that was a good thing. Tenet had been a top Congressional staffer, and Goss had the clearances, the familiarity.

The Democrats did not want to appear obstructionist...Porter Goss wasn't too far out and the Democrats assented, knowing that a NID was coming and shaking everyone out, including Goss.

John Deuch and Stansfield Turner had battled the NSA and Pentagon, Carter allowed Bobbie Ray Inman an Admiral at NSA to hold the Civil Agencies at bay.

Here's the big policy secret: Rumsfeld and the Joint Chiefs hold all the cards.

CIA and ambassadors are nothin' That is the way it fell after Maxwell Taylor.

The 80% of the intelligence budget part means they will drag their feet and use the Armed/Appropriations committees to stall for a weaker civilian Cabinet overseer.

"12036 Executive Order January 1978: chronic structural problems in US intelligence" my article on the probem is on the 1970s intel thread.

shanet

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Kerik dropped out of the running for Homeland Security Cabinet Seat, which controls border patrol, customs and secret service now, unlike 1963 when Treasury controlled it. Guiliani's parner in some security corporate things.

Kerik's out. Ashcroft is out. Powell is out at State and Rice is in as Secretary of State.......havoc?

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  • 2 months later...

MADCOWPROP, a cool website, has posted this story on Porter Goss:

"Look out kid, They keep it all hid.”

Bob Dylan “Subterranean Homesick Blues”

Aug 24 2004-Venice,FL.

by Daniel Hopsicker

THE MAN PICKED by President George W Bush to head America’s Central Intelligence Agency is even more of an intelligence insider than has so far been revealed...

Although membership in a secret society would seem to compromise a bit anyone being considered to lead an Agency which is itself a secret society, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Republican Porter J Goss of Sanibel Island Florida is a member of the secret society “Book & Snake” at Yale.

President George W Bush's nominee to head the nation's flagship intelligence agency also appears to be visible in a photograph taken in 1963 in a Mexico City nightclub of members of the CIA’s secret assassination squad known as “Operation Forty."

The twin discoveries come as news reports indicate that Democrats have decided not to make a serious issue of Goss’s appointment. The top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee went so far as to warn fellow Democrats Sunday against trying to block the nomination.

“Democrats should ask tough questions of Goss at Senate confirmation hearings next month, but my view is this is the wrong fight," Rep. Jane Harman, D-CA., said on NBC's "Meet the Press."

Heavy on the Secret Sauce

Could the skittishness about scrutinizing Goss be due to a secret past that would have difficulty passing closer scrutiny?

No questions have yet been raised about the propriety of confirming as CIA Director someone who may have belonged to an assassination squad which was reportedly a joint collaboration between the CIA and the Mob.

But questions have already been asked about the influence of secret societies on America’s supposedly democratic institutions, especially since both major Presidential candidates belong to a secret society, too: "Skull & Bones."

Because no matter which candidate wins the Presidential election this November, it will be safe to exchange a discreet secret handshake in national security meetings in America for years to come.

We first learned that Porter Goss owned multiple decoder rings from Kris Millegan, scholar of secret societies and editor of the recent “Fleshing Out Skull & Bones” (Trine Day 2003).

Millegan unearthed a document listing “Book & Snake’s Class of 1960 roster. On the list, which also names deceased Secretary of Defense Les Aspin, is the name “Porter Johnston Goss.’

News that America's new Top Spook is a previously-undisclosed member of a secret society who will be chatting in the Oval Office with a boss who is also a member of a secret society raises a question of undue influence...

Or, at the very least, of piling on.

If being able to sing several verses of “The Whiffenpoof Song” is a prerequisite for a top job in American national security, the Founding Fathers should have enshrined it in the Constitution.

Because if it is not, the question is: what gives?

More Secrets in the Secret Sauce

The notion that a young Porter Goss is visible in a photograph taken in a Mexico City nightclub on January 21 1963 was first broached to us in a letter from someone who noticed what he felt was a more than passing resemblance…

“I saw a photo of Porter Goss taken in the 1970’s after he was elected to the Sanibel City Council and he looks virtually identical to the Mexico City Operation Forty person!” the letter asserted.

We paid little heed, however, until a profile of the CIA nominee in the New York Times ran a picture of Goss taken in 1984. Even separated by two decades from the time the Mexico City picture was taken, we found the resemblance uncanny.

If Goss is in the picture, it dovetails nicely with what is known of his CIA career. But it would be a 40-year old 'mistake' come back to haunt him. Because, we learned, there weren’t supposed to have been any pictures…

According to numerous news accounts, the CIA recruited Goss during his junior year at Yale, where he completed his bachelor's degree in ancient Greek in 1960. "During his junior year, he met a CIA recruiter through his ROTC commanders,” reported the September 24, 2002 Orlando Sentinel, in a story headlined “TERRORISM FIGHT KEEPS REP. GOSS IN POLITICAL FRAY.”

“It is true I was in CIA from approximately the late 50's to approximately the early 70's,” Goss told recent antagonist Michael Moore.

"Guido, meet the General. General, meet Guido."

The Mexico City nightclub photo reveals a mixed group of apparent Cuban exiles, Italian wise guys, and square-jawed military intelligence types. It was discovered among keepsakes kept in the safe of the widow of CIA pilot and drug smuggler Barry Seal (third from left). It appears on the cover of “Barry & ‘the boys:’ The CIA, the Mob & America’s Secret History” (MadCow Press, Eugene OR. 2001).

Goss appears second on the left. He is seated between notorious CIA pilot and drug smuggler Barry Seal (third left) and the equally-notorious CIA assassin Felix Rodriguez (front left), a Cuban vice cop under the corrupt Mob-run Batista regime who later became an Iran Contra operative and a confidant of the first George Bush.

The only one of the spook celebrants displaying any hint of tradecraft (seated on the other side of the table covering his face with his sport coat) is Frank Sturgis, most famous as one of the Watergate burglars.

Beside him sits (front right) William Seymour, New Orleans representative of the Double-Chek Corporation, a CIA front used to recruit pilots (like Seal), and a man who many Kennedy assassination researchers believe impersonated Lee Harvey Oswald on several occasions when the lone nut gunman was out of the country and so unable to impersonate himself.

As we saw it, the photo was in a yellowed frame, the kind used by nightclub photographers to create instant keepsakes. Seal’s widow Debbie Seal kept it in her safe, where it was overlooked by a 7-man team from the State Department which arrived at her house in 1995 to comb through her records.

It bears the name of a nightclub in Mexico City, and is stamped January 22, 1963, which, if you’re counting, was exactly ten months to the day before the Kennedy assassination.

Barry Seal was then a young-looking 24-year old. Porter Goss was the same age.

"You don't have the negative too do you?"

The sensitive nature of this picture was confirmed to us by a person who had known and worked with Seal since 1964, an individual who had obviously been close with the Louisiana native, the basis for the hit song in the 'mid-60's by buddy Johnny Rivers, called "Secret Agent Man.”

Seal’s will had named this man executor of his estate. And his reaction to seeing the picture was instantaneous and shocked. “Where did you get that?” he demanded. “I didn’t know there were any…Where did this picture come from? ”

Seated with Seal in that nightclub in Mexico City in 1963 are men whose lives and careers comprise a large part of America’s recent secret history, we learned. Arrayed around the table were members of the CIA’s much-whispered about assassination squad, Operation Forty, first helmed by then-Vice President Richard Nixon.

Barry Seal was one of them. Perhaps so was Porter Goss.

There are many intriguing connections hinted at by Goss’s presence in the photo: at the time it was taken the CIA's covert action chief in Mexico City was David Atlee Phillips, AKA Maurice Bishop, who reportedly met with Oswald in Dallas before the assassination.

Other connections: in the well-received “Deadly Secrets,” authors Warren Hinkle and William Turner name Rafael 'Chi Chi' Quintero, Lois Posada Carriles, Felix Rodriguez and Frank Sturgis as members of Operation Forty, under the overall control of E. Howard Hunt.

Sturgis, a member of the team that broke into Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex in 1972, later admitted to having been part of Operation Forty.

More famous names: Thomas Clines, the notorious Edwin Wilson and "Blond Ghost" Ted Shackley, Mr. Spook himself… all involved with Operation Forty, as was Barry Seal.

“Yeah, Barry was Op Forty,” Gerald Hemming confirmed to us. “He flew in killer teams inside the island (Cuba) before the invasion to take out Fidel.”

CIA Colonel William Bishop showed author Dick Russell a series of photographs of "Latin-looking individuals. On the backs of the pictures were the words "Special talent 1960-65, Ice pick man ... Butcher... Sniper and demo [demolition] expert ... Propaganda ... Knife man... Pilot and navigator ... Mutilator."

“Bishop said, ‘We weren't playing a nice game.’”

"It Depends on Your Definition of ‘Is’”

When nephew Chuck Giancana wrote about Mob Boss Sam Giancana’s strategic move to Mexico in early 1963, he too touched on Operation Forty. "It was to be an all-out, no-holds-barred Latin American push. Mooney (Giancana) settled into a lavish Mexico City apartment and went right to work, drawing on the expertise and mammoth resources of the recently-formed CIA team of assassins and operatives specifically trained for Latin American clandestine operations. CIA insiders jokingly dubbed the team the White Hand, an allusion to the Mafia killer progenitors the Black Hand."

“Rep. Porter J. Goss has disclosed precious few details of his CIA employment from roughly 1960 to 1971,” reported a profile in the Associated Press. Reuters called him a “mystery man,” and said he had been “close-mouthed about his past.”

“He worked in Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Mexico-tumultuous countries during that decade of the Cold War,” Reuters reported.

During a 2002 interview with The Washington Post, Goss joked that he performed photo interpretation and "small-boat handling," which led to "some very interesting moments in the Florida Straits."

He acknowledged he had recruited and run foreign agents and said he would be uncomfortable traveling to Cuba but wouldn't say more.

America’s vaunted free press shows no inclination to press him on the matter. And when a citizen becomes a little too inquisitive, disinformation appears to be the order of the day: In a Metro section Q&A in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (Aug 20 2004) a reader asks:

“I know both President Bush and Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) were members of Skull and Bones, the secret society at Yale University, when they were students.”

“Bush's nominee for CIA director, Rep. Porter Goss (R-FL.), also is a Yale graduate. Was he, too, a member of Skull and Bones?”

“Goss, who graduated from Yale in 1960, had no affiliation with Skull and Bones, said his spokeswoman, Julie Almacy,” the paper’s editors replied.

"You're not cleared for that information."

Nothing about “Book & Snake." Not even points for a good guess. The party line rings out from everywhere... “With a prep-school education and a Greek major at Yale, Goss passed up the conventional life to be a CIA spook,” reads one typical wire service account.

Actually, the facts lean heavily towards the proposition that with “a prep school education and a Greek major at Yale,” Goss’s choice to become a CIA spook was an entirely conventional one.

In testimony before Congress on February 9, 2004, Chief Weapons Inspector David Kay noted that "closed orders and secret societies, whether they be religious or governmental, are the groups that have the hardest time reforming themselves in the face of failure without outside input."

When was the last time anyone heard a weapons inspector mention secret societies?

The appointment of Porter Goss reveals that what passes for American civic life may in reality be just an elaborate game of Inside Baseball. For example, Goss found himself paired with fellow Floridian, Democratic Sen. Bob Graham, then the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, leading the joint congressional inquiry into the attacks.

They share another unique distinction: both men were having breakfast on the morning of September 11th with a man who had reportedly wired $100,000 to Mohamed Atta, said news accounts. "When the news [of the attacks on the World Trade Center] came, the two Florida lawmakers who lead the House and Senate intelligence committees were having breakfast with the head of the Pakistani intelligence service.”

Oh, to have been a fly on the wall during that negotiation.

After the CIA-backed coup against Castro collapsed at the Bay of Pigs, President Kennedy fired CIA chief Allen Dulles. That same year another young Ivy League graduate entered the high-stakes espionage game being played out between the Florida Keys and the coast of Cuba...

Porter Goss, product of a patrician Connecticut upbringing, graduating from an elite preparatory school and Yale University. This is probably all just coincidence.

But then again... maybe its not.

“Man in a trench coat, Badge out, laid off,

Says he's got a bad cough… Wants to get paid off.

The pump don't work, 'Cause the Vandals took the handles”

:ph34r:

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  • 6 months later...

MADCOWPROP, a cool website, has posted this story on Porter Goss:

"Look out kid, They keep it all hid.”

                      Bob Dylan “Subterranean Homesick Blues”

Aug 24 2004-Venice,FL. 

by Daniel Hopsicker 

THE MAN PICKED by President George W Bush to head America’s Central Intelligence Agency is even more of an intelligence insider than has so far been revealed...

Although membership in a secret society would seem to  compromise a bit anyone being considered to lead an Agency which is itself a secret society, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Republican Porter J Goss of Sanibel Island Florida is a member of the secret society “Book & Snake” at Yale. 

President George W Bush's nominee to head the nation's flagship intelligence agency also appears to be visible in a photograph taken in 1963 in a Mexico City nightclub of members of  the CIA’s secret assassination squad known as “Operation Forty."

The twin discoveries come as news reports indicate that Democrats have decided not to make a serious issue of Goss’s appointment. The top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee went so far as to warn fellow Democrats Sunday against trying to block the nomination.

“Democrats should ask tough questions of Goss at Senate confirmation hearings next month, but my view is this is the wrong fight," Rep. Jane Harman, D-CA., said on NBC's "Meet the Press."

Heavy on the Secret Sauce

Could the skittishness about scrutinizing Goss be due to a secret past that would have difficulty passing closer scrutiny?

No questions have yet been raised about the propriety of confirming as CIA Director someone who may have belonged to an assassination squad which was reportedly a joint collaboration between the CIA and the Mob.

But questions have already been asked about the influence of secret societies on America’s supposedly democratic institutions, especially since both major Presidential candidates belong to a secret society, too: "Skull & Bones."

Because no matter which candidate wins the Presidential election this November, it will be safe to exchange a discreet secret handshake in national security meetings in America for  years to come.

We first learned that Porter  Goss owned multiple decoder rings from Kris Millegan, scholar of secret societies and editor of the recent “Fleshing Out Skull & Bones” (Trine Day 2003). 

Millegan unearthed a document listing “Book & Snake’s Class of 1960 roster. On the list, which also names deceased Secretary of Defense Les Aspin, is the name “Porter Johnston Goss.’ 

News that America's new Top Spook is a previously-undisclosed member of a secret society who will be chatting in the Oval Office with a boss who is also a member of a secret society raises a question of undue influence... 

Or, at the very least, of piling on.

If being able to sing several verses of “The Whiffenpoof Song” is a prerequisite for a top job in American national security, the Founding Fathers should have enshrined it in the Constitution. 

Because if it is not, the question is: what gives?

 

More Secrets in the Secret Sauce

The notion that a young Porter Goss is visible in a photograph taken in a Mexico City nightclub on January 21 1963 was first broached to us in a letter from someone who noticed what he felt was a more than passing resemblance…

“I saw a photo of Porter Goss taken in the 1970’s after he was elected to the Sanibel City Council and he looks virtually identical to the Mexico City Operation Forty person!” the letter asserted.

We paid little heed, however, until a profile of the CIA nominee in the New York Times ran a picture of Goss taken in 1984. Even separated by two decades from the time the Mexico City picture was taken, we found the resemblance uncanny.

If  Goss is in the picture, it dovetails nicely with what is known of his CIA career. But it would be a 40-year old 'mistake' come back to haunt him. Because, we learned, there weren’t supposed to have been any pictures…

According to numerous news accounts, the CIA recruited Goss during his junior year at Yale, where he completed his bachelor's degree in ancient Greek in 1960.  "During his junior year, he met a CIA recruiter through his ROTC commanders,” reported the September 24, 2002 Orlando Sentinel, in a story headlined “TERRORISM FIGHT KEEPS REP. GOSS IN POLITICAL FRAY.” 

“It is true I was in CIA from approximately the late 50's to approximately the early 70's,” Goss told recent antagonist Michael Moore. 

"Guido, meet the General. General, meet Guido."

The Mexico City nightclub photo reveals a mixed group of apparent Cuban exiles, Italian wise guys, and square-jawed military intelligence types. It was discovered among keepsakes kept in the safe of the widow of CIA pilot and drug smuggler Barry Seal (third from left). It appears on the cover of “Barry & ‘the boys:’ The CIA, the Mob & America’s Secret History” (MadCow Press, Eugene OR. 2001). 

Goss appears second on the left. He is seated between notorious CIA pilot and drug smuggler Barry Seal (third left) and the equally-notorious CIA assassin Felix Rodriguez (front left), a Cuban vice cop under the corrupt Mob-run Batista regime who later became an Iran Contra operative and a confidant of the first George Bush. 

The only one of the spook celebrants displaying any hint of tradecraft (seated on the other side of the table covering his face with his sport coat) is Frank Sturgis, most famous as one of the Watergate burglars. 

Beside him sits (front right) William Seymour, New Orleans representative of the Double-Chek Corporation, a CIA front used to recruit pilots (like Seal), and a man who many Kennedy assassination researchers believe impersonated Lee Harvey Oswald on several occasions when the lone nut gunman was out of the country and so unable to impersonate himself. 

As we saw it, the photo was in a yellowed frame, the kind used by nightclub photographers to create instant keepsakes. Seal’s widow Debbie Seal kept it in her safe, where it was overlooked by a 7-man team from the State Department which arrived at her house in 1995 to comb through her records. 

It bears the name of a nightclub in Mexico City, and is stamped January 22, 1963, which, if you’re counting,  was exactly ten months to the day before the Kennedy assassination. 

Barry Seal was then a young-looking 24-year old. Porter Goss was the same age.

"You don't have the negative too do you?"

The sensitive nature of this picture was confirmed to us by a person who had known and worked with Seal since 1964, an individual who had obviously been close with the Louisiana native, the basis for the hit song in the 'mid-60's by buddy Johnny Rivers, called  "Secret Agent Man.”

Seal’s will had named this man executor of his estate.  And his reaction to seeing the picture was instantaneous and shocked. “Where did you get that?” he demanded. “I didn’t know there were any…Where did this picture come from? ”

Seated with Seal in that nightclub in Mexico City in 1963 are men whose lives and careers comprise a large part of America’s recent secret history, we learned. Arrayed around the table were members of the CIA’s much-whispered about assassination squad, Operation Forty, first helmed by then-Vice President Richard Nixon. 

Barry Seal was one of them. Perhaps so was Porter Goss. 

There are many intriguing connections hinted at by Goss’s presence in the photo: at the time it was taken the CIA's covert action chief in Mexico City was David Atlee Phillips, AKA Maurice Bishop, who reportedly met with Oswald in Dallas before the assassination. 

Other connections: in the well-received “Deadly Secrets,”  authors Warren Hinkle and William Turner name Rafael 'Chi Chi' Quintero, Lois Posada Carriles, Felix Rodriguez and Frank Sturgis as members of Operation Forty, under the overall control of E. Howard  Hunt. 

Sturgis, a member of the team that broke into Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex in 1972, later admitted to having been part of Operation Forty. 

More famous names: Thomas Clines, the notorious Edwin Wilson and "Blond Ghost" Ted Shackley, Mr. Spook himself… all involved with Operation Forty, as was Barry Seal.

“Yeah, Barry was Op Forty,” Gerald Hemming confirmed to us. “He flew in killer teams inside the island (Cuba) before the invasion to take out Fidel.”

CIA Colonel William Bishop showed author Dick Russell a series of photographs of "Latin-looking individuals. On the backs of the pictures were the words "Special talent 1960-65, Ice pick man ... Butcher... Sniper and demo [demolition] expert ... Propaganda ... Knife man... Pilot and navigator ... Mutilator."

“Bishop said, ‘We weren't playing a nice game.’”

"It Depends on Your Definition of ‘Is’”

When nephew Chuck Giancana wrote about Mob Boss Sam Giancana’s strategic move to Mexico in early 1963, he too touched on Operation Forty. "It was to be an all-out, no-holds-barred Latin American push. Mooney (Giancana) settled into a lavish Mexico City apartment and went right to work, drawing on the expertise and mammoth resources of the recently-formed CIA team of assassins and operatives specifically trained for Latin American clandestine operations. CIA insiders jokingly dubbed the team the White Hand, an allusion to the Mafia killer progenitors the Black Hand."

“Rep. Porter J. Goss has disclosed precious few details of his CIA employment from roughly 1960 to 1971,” reported a profile in the Associated Press. Reuters called him a “mystery man,” and said he had been “close-mouthed about his past.” 

“He worked in Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Mexico-tumultuous countries during that decade of the Cold War,” Reuters reported. 

During a 2002 interview with The Washington Post, Goss joked that he performed photo interpretation and "small-boat handling," which led to "some very interesting moments in the Florida Straits." 

He acknowledged he had recruited and run foreign agents and said he would be uncomfortable traveling to Cuba but wouldn't say more. 

America’s vaunted free press shows no inclination to press him on the matter. And when a citizen becomes a little too inquisitive, disinformation appears to be the order of the day: In a Metro section Q&A in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (Aug 20 2004) a reader asks:

“I know both President Bush and Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) were members of Skull and Bones, the secret society at Yale University, when they were students.”

“Bush's nominee for CIA director, Rep. Porter Goss (R-FL.), also is a Yale graduate. Was he, too, a member of Skull and Bones?” 

“Goss, who graduated from Yale in 1960, had no affiliation with Skull and Bones, said his spokeswoman, Julie Almacy,” the paper’s editors replied. 

"You're not cleared for that information."

Nothing about “Book & Snake." Not even points for a good guess. The party line rings out from everywhere... “With a prep-school education and a Greek major at Yale, Goss passed up the conventional life to be a CIA spook,” reads one typical wire service account. 

Actually, the facts lean heavily towards the proposition that with “a prep school education and a Greek major at Yale,” Goss’s choice to become a CIA spook was an entirely conventional one.

In testimony before Congress on February 9, 2004, Chief Weapons Inspector David Kay noted that "closed orders and secret societies, whether they be religious or governmental, are the groups that have the hardest time reforming themselves in the face of failure without outside input."

When was the last time anyone heard a weapons inspector mention secret societies?

The appointment of Porter Goss reveals that what passes for American civic life may in reality be just an elaborate game of Inside Baseball. For example, Goss found himself paired with fellow Floridian, Democratic Sen. Bob Graham, then the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, leading the joint congressional inquiry into the attacks. 

They share another unique distinction: both men were having breakfast on the morning of September 11th with a man who had reportedly wired $100,000 to Mohamed Atta, said news accounts. "When the news [of the attacks on the World Trade Center] came, the two Florida lawmakers who lead the House and Senate intelligence committees were having breakfast with the head of the Pakistani intelligence service.”

Oh, to have been a fly on the wall during that negotiation. 

After the CIA-backed coup against Castro collapsed at the Bay of Pigs, President Kennedy fired CIA chief Allen Dulles. That same year another young Ivy League graduate entered the high-stakes espionage game being played out between the Florida Keys and the coast of Cuba...

Porter Goss, product of a patrician Connecticut upbringing, graduating from an elite preparatory school and Yale University. This is probably all just coincidence. 

But then again... maybe its not. 

“Man in a trench coat, Badge out, laid off, 

Says he's got a bad cough… Wants to get paid off. 

The pump don't work, 'Cause the Vandals took the handles”

  :)

Read at your own risk. Before perusing this article I will mention that it is from the website of one Lyndon LaRouche, who has more than once been called into question regarding the credibilty of his "information" not to mention his views on geopolitical history, still everything I read seems credible. Note - The only reason I posted this is for the bio information on Porter Goss.

From Executive Intelligence Review

"The Coming Senate Battle:

Open the Porter Goss File

Part 1

by Jeffrey Steinberg,

with Michele Steinberg and Scott Thompson

In his damning book on the Bush-Cheney Administration, Worse Than Watergate, former Nixon White House General Counsel John W. Dean reported that Vice President Dick Cheney has been obsessed for decades with the mid-1970s Church and Pike Committees, whose pioneering work led to the first serious Congressional oversight of the intelligence community. As far as the Vice President is concerned, those investigations, and the Congressional oversight committees that emerged from the process, represented a dark moment, in which the powers of secret government were undermined. As Dean put it: "Cheney has long believed that Congress has no business telling Presidents what to do, particularly in national security matters."

Cheney's refusal to turn over a shred of paper from his White House Energy Task Force; his secret intelligence organization buried in the Pentagon bureaucracy; and his trips to CIA headquarters to stare down analysts who dared to challenge his Iraq WMD Big Lies, all underscore the Veep's obsession with government-by-secret-cabal.

It is no wonder that Cheney's choice as the new Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) is Rep. Porter Goss (R-Fla.). Goss not only presided over a vicious partisan coverup of the Iraq pre-war intelligence fraud—a fraud run out of Cheney's office—through his position as chairman of the House Select Committee on Intelligence. Goss's own career as a 1960s-era Central Intelligence Agency Clandestine Service officer is a throwback to the pre-Church Committee, pre-Watergate days, when the intelligence community, under the Allen Dulles/James Angleton legacy, ran amok.

Playing Politics With National Security

Sources in the U.S. intelligence community and the Congress identify three reasons that Cheney chose Goss for the DCI post, and is now intent on ramming his confirmation through the Senate immediately after Labor Day.

First, the White House is desperate to "plug the leaks" at the CIA. The Agency has been scapegoated by the White House and its Congressional toadies, like Goss and California Republican Duncan Hunter, for the 9/11 attacks and for the failure to find the so-called Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Senior career intelligence officers are furious, according to the sources, at the White House's blame game, and they do not intend to sit by and allow this propaganda scam to go unchallenged. The fact that evidence points to Cheney as the culprit behind the July 2003 leaking of the identity of CIA "non-official cover" officer Valerie Plame to columnist Robert Novak, only deepens the intelligence community's fury at the Bush White House. And Goss's personal role in attempting to prevent an independent counsel probe into the Plame leak just adds to the volatility of the issue.

The spy community knows that evidence easily accessible in the public domain reveals that the President, the Vice President, and the Attorney General repeatedly ignored CIA and FBI warnings about an imminent terrorist attack on U.S. soil in the Spring-Summer 2001, including the now-famous Aug. 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing item, talking about al-Qaeda hijacking plots and surveillance of targets in Washington and New York. Likewise, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's recent report documented that the majority of intelligence community analysts disputed the Iraq WMD threat; and former DCI George Tenet told an audience at Georgetown University earlier this year that Iraq "never posed an imminent threat" to the United States—and he told Bush and Cheney that on repeated occasions.

When the CIA General Counsel rushed through approval of a book, Imperial Hubris, by a senior Agency counterterrorism analyst, writing anonymously, which tore into the Administration's failed Iraq and Afghanistan policies, Cheney and company moved to pre-empt further damaging material from surfacing from the Agency—by naming Goss. Goss's first mission will be to plug the leaks—at least through November.

Second, the Bush-Cheney campaign is growing worried that the President could lose the must-win state of Florida in November, and the Goss nomination is aimed at bolstering enthusiasm among the Cuban-American right-wing community in Miami for a second Bush-Cheney term. Goss is the darling of the southern Florida right wing, and has been, dating back to his CIA days from 1961-71, when he participated in the efforts to assassinate or overthrow Fidel Castro in Havana.

Third, and most important for Cheney, Goss is the personification of the rogue spook, serving at the pleasure of the President, and behind the back of the Congress and the American people. In Cheney's warped mind, Goss is going to turn the clock back to the bad-old-days before Watergate and intelligence oversight.

JM/WAVE and Mongoose

In 1975, the Church Committee investigating the activities of the U.S. intelligence community issued its final report. Among the revelations contained in the multi-volume document were the first unclassified accounts of the CIA's program to assassinate Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. "United States government personnel plotted to kill Castro from 1960 to 1965," the report stated. "American underworld figures and Cubans hostile to Castro were used in these plots, and were provided encouragement and material support by the United States."

Those anti-Castro operations were run out of a large Miami CIA station, under the code name JM/WAVE. At the height of JM/WAVE, the station employed over 200 CIA officers, and ran a network of over 2,200 Cuban exiles. It maintained an armada of boats, for raids on Cuba, and a small fleet of aircraft for other missions. One sub-feature of the anti-Castro efforts, Operation Mongoose, involved assassination plots against the Cuban leader.

Porter Goss was a young CIA officer assigned to JM/WAVE. Goss had, by his own accounts, been recruited to the CIA while in his third year at Yale University. His two years of military service were, in all likelihood, actually CIA assignments. In 1961, Goss was officially brought into the CIA and sent to JM/WAVE. He later would continue to participate in the anti-Castro operations, based out of CIA stations in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico. Later, Goss was sent to London and then Paris, where he was involved in the infiltration of labor organizations, until he developed a near-fatal infection and was forced, officially, to retire from the spy world.

In his role in JM/WAVE, Goss served with some of the CIA's most hardened Cold Warriors, including Miami Station Chief Theodore G. Shackley, later a central figure in the Iran/Contra debacle; Felix Rodriguez, another leading Iran-Contra player; and Frank Sturgis, later of Watergate break-in infamy.

Indeed, from the Bay of Pigs and the Operation Mongoose Castro assassination plots of the 1960s, to the Watergate Plumbers Unit of the 1970s, to the Iran-Contra narco-financed insurgency of the 1980s, this circle of right-wing CIA operators and closely allied Cuban exiles, has represented an ugly stain on the American political landscape. Is this what Porter Goss brings to the table?

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence cannot avoid the details of Goss's CIA career, in deliberating on his nomination."

Part 2

by Michele Steinberg

On Aug. 3, in a strategic study of intelligence reform, released by LaRouche PAC, former Democratic presidential primary candidate Lyndon LaRouche, wrote, "The fact that there are some rather large loopholes in the present organization of the U.S.A.'s intelligence-security-system, is no excuse for the current tendency to plunge, stupidly and recklessly, into rushed efforts to create an intelligence "czar." Idiot! Get your fat foot off that gas pedal! There is no need to rush into surrendering the powers of government to some alleged superman. The U.S. does not need a Heinrich Himmler."

"In fact," LaRouche continued, "our nation does not have any need for the re-election of that pathetic George W. Bush who proposes that, he, now, shall create the Great Golem of national security, the man of mud, to save us all.... Better leave the decisions about intelligence reorganization to the leadership of a new President, until a new day, come January 2005, after the completed work of the "9/11 Commission" has dealt with those most crucial issues not yet touched upon by its presently uncompleted investigation."

Yet, on Aug. 27, President George W. Bush floored the gas pedal and signed four executive orders governing the CIA and national intelligence collection, which vastly increase the power of the Director of the CIA, creating in effect, an interim National Director of Intelligence—who will be his nominee for CIA Director, Rep. Porter Goss (R-Fla.), the former head of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI). Goss has functioned for the past three years as a hit-man for Dick Cheney, in protecting the neo-conservative cabal that runs between the Office of the Vice President and the Pentagon, where it is headed by Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Doug Feith.

These new powers make it imperative to block the confirmation of Goss as CIA director.

Under the new Bush Executive Orders, Goss would be in charge not only of the CIA, but also of intelligence allocations of the Defense Department's major agencies, including the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the massive National Security Agency, making him the equivalent of the "intelligence czar." Not only are Washington critics of the Iraq war wary that Goss would continue to mold intelligence to the policy wishes of warmonger Cheney, but they consider Goss's appointment to the position of "national director of intelligence" to be highly dangerous. As the record shows, not only has Goss gone along with Cheney's imperial war plans, he has been an accomplice of the Cheney networks that are responsible for the worst intelligence abuses since the Iran-Contra scandals that forced then-President Ronald Reagan to "clean house," at the National Security Council, and which led to the indictments of NSC chief, John Poindexter, his deputy Robert McFarlane, then-State Dept. Assistant Secretary Elliot Abrams, NSC staffer Oliver North, former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense General Dick Secord (Ret.), and many others. Iran-Contra was the worst set of offenses since Watergate, but President Ronald Reagan, unlike Richard Nixon, made a show of cleaning house. This time around, says John Dean, the former White House counsel who was inside Nixon's Watergate debacle, the Administration abuses that started the Iraq war are worse than Watergate.

Could Goss Be Confirmed?

Hearings are slated to begin on Sept. 8, according to Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kansas), head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and so far, the Democratic leadership of the House and Senate is headed towards giving Porter Goss a "free pass." It would be as grave an error, and threat to civil liberties of Americans, for Democrats to confirm Goss, as was the confirmation of John Ashcroft in January 2001, when enough votes existed to block the nomination through a filibuster.

There is serious opposition to the Goss nomination. Sen. John D. Rockefeller III, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, is opposed to the nomination—for good reason. Rockefeller said in a July 14 article in the popular Washington journal The Hill, that, "We need a director that is ... unquestionably independent.... [A]n individual with unimpeachable non-partisan national security credentials and the stature to bring about a much needed reform of our intelligence agencies." Former CIA Director, George Tenet, has said that any attempt to "rewire" the intelligence community in the aftermath of the report of the 9/11 Commission which found that there were many warnings—before Sept. 11—about a threatened attack by Osama Bin Laden, would only cause more harm to the counter-terrorism effort. And, Sen. Roberts himself, who is now in a mad rush to not only confirm Goss, but to introduce legislation that would rip apart the CIA—the only intelligence collection agency that actually consistently opposed the Cheney cabal's "evidence" that Iraq was an imminent threat—had said, in a July 14 interview with The Hill, that he agreed with Rockefeller that "we ought to be very deliberate and very careful."

With more than a half-dozen still incomplete investigations into the misuse of intelligence, the leaking of secrets, and the abuse of power by the Administration in the run-up to the Iraq war, and federal grand juries looking into the leaking of secret information to Iran and to Israel, and another set of grand juries looking into illegal profiteering by Dick Cheney's Halliburton company, and its subsidiary, KBR, this is no time to sweep Porter Goss's complicity in the Cheney coup d'etat, under the rug.

Unfit to Serve

Appointing Porter Goss as CIA director is bad enough, but allowing him to become the interim "intelligence czar" as well, is an even greater threat to national security of the United States. Most of the intelligence abuses by the CIA and intelligence community, identified by the 9/11 Commission investigation occurred during Goss's watch as Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. But not only was Goss an ineffective and dishonest watchdog, he also has been an accomplice in the Cheney-Pentagon cabal's crimes. These include: using deception to terrify the American population and Congress about a danger from Iraq's nonexistent weapons of mass-destruction; using Pentagon cubby-holes to set up units that would fabricate through "re-analysis," an accusation that Iraq and Saddam Hussein were behind the 9/11 irregular warfare attacks; using the Pentagon to launch illegal covert operations to destabilize, and begin undeclared U.S. wars against, Syria and Iran; and the latest scandal being investigated—the unauthorized distribution of a top-secret policy discussion paper to agents of Israel.

There is no question that Goss is unfit to serve, and the damage he has done to the intelligence community of the United States goes way back—at least 8 years—even before Goss became Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.

One of the first areas that should be explored about Goss is his cozy relationship to Newt Gingrich's powerful political action committee, GOPAC, and whether Goss blocked a broad inquiry into Gingrich's financial affairs.

In 1996, the Sarasota (Fla.) Herald-Tribune, Goss's "hometown" newspaper, reported that it was widely believed that Goss had a "conflict of interest" when he became head of the House Ethics Subcommittee, investigating Gingrich's misuse of tax exempt funds. GOPAC, the multi-million dollar organization that was at the center of Gingrich's fascist policy machine, was one of the major subjects of the investigation, and Goss was a GOPAC crony. The Sarasota newspaper reported that in 1994, Goss, a Connecticut "blueblood," had in fact contributed the maximum amount allowed—$5,000, and that Goss had deep family ties to GOPAC's nominal founder, "Pete" DuPont, a Gingrich co-thinker who had run for the Republican Presidential nomination in 1992. DuPont's parents are Porter Goss's godparents, and "Pete's" sister, Michelle DuPont, is married to Porter's brother.

When calls went out for Goss to remove himself from the Gingrich investigation, he adamantly refused, insisting that his involvement with Gingrich and GOPAC in no way compromised his ability to investigate Newt. Goss also insisted that his ties to GOPAC did not meet the "severe" Congressional test of a true conflict of interest. But the Congressional Accountability Project, a watchdog organization, strongly disagreed; its director, Gary Ruskin, warned that Goss's control over the committee, its staff, and his "power over questioning" would undermine "any confidence" the public could have in the investigation. Gingrich survived the potentially fatal investigation, after the committee chief investigator rejected a petition by then-Congressman David Bonior (D-Mich.) to broaden the investigation into all of GOPAC's activities.

Following Newt's unsurprising survival, and in the midst of the Ethics Subcommittee investigation, Gingrich awarded Goss with a high honor: He appointed him chairman of the powerful House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

Goss's next claim to fame was a vicious attack, in 1996, on Sen. John Kerry's Senate investigation of the involvement in narcotics trafficking of the Nicaragua rebel force, known as the "Contras." The charges that Kerry had investigated, later resurfaced along with new evidence in 1996, after a series of articles in the San Jose Mercury exposed the fact that convicted California crack cocaine-traffickers had been leaders in the Nicaraguan rebel group, the FDN, and part of Ollie North's and the NSC's secret Contra support operations.

Appearing on a CNN talk show hosted by Jesse Jackson, Goss attacked Senator Kerry, and President Bill Clinton, with a vengeance, using two techniques that have become his hallmark: First, he lies that no evidence exists, when it clearly does, and second, he denounces the charges as "partisan," and "politically motivated" electioneering.

The transcript of the Sept. 30, 1996 CNN show, "Both Sides," has Goss, backed up by Tucker Carlson, the neo-con clown who writes for the Weekly Standard, jumping down the throat of Prof. John Newman, an historian from the University of Maryland, over the Kerry Committee's findings:

Goss: ...Senator John Kerry in the mid '80s conducted quite an expensive investigation and came up with absolutely no evidence. And despite repeated attempts before then and since then, nobody has come up with any hard facts....

Carlson: ...My point is that no evidence has ever arisen that shows the CIA condoned drug dealing of any kind.

Newman: That's not true. And furthermore, Senator Claiborne Pell and Senator Lugar, who asked for information from the CIA and from the Justice Dept., were denied that information. That's in the record. You can read it for yourself. Don't trust me. Get the Kerry report and find out for yourself how they were stonewalled....

Goss: You don't have the facts. That's your problem.

Newman: I'm not going to prejudge—I have lots of facts.

Goss: You have innuendo. You have supposition. You are trying to stretch something that doesn't quite stretch. I would suggest that you look to why the motive and the timing of this now. There are many who say that this is happening because the drug problem in this country is bad. It has gotten worse under the Clinton Administration. And this is just a diversion to take attention away from the failure of the Clinton Administration in the war on drugs.

Prof. Newman was right about the Kerry report, "Drugs, Law Enforcement, and Foreign Policy," filed in December 1988, and Goss was dead wrong. The evidence of drug trafficking by Contra members, guerrillas, and pilots is all over the Kerry report's several volumes. Two excerpts from the final report suffice:

On July 24, 1986, the State Dept. issued a report to Congress concerning allegations in the press about drug-running by the Contra resistance. The State Dept. said, "...the available evidence points to involvement with drug traffickers by a limited number of persons having various kinds of affiliations with, or political sympathies for, the resistance groups....

"A year later, in August 1987, the CIA's Central American Task Force Chief became the first U.S. official to revise that assessment to suggest instead that the links between the Contras ... to narcotics trafficking was in fact far broader than that acknowledged by the State Dept....

"Appearing before the Iran-Contra Committees, the CIA Central American Task Force chief testified: 'With respect to [drug trafficking by] the Resistance Forces ... it is not a couple of people. It is a lot of people.'

"The CIA's Chief of the Central American Task Force went on to say: 'We knew that everybody around Pastora [the leading Contra figure] was involved in cocaine.... His staff and friends [redacted] they were drug smugglers or involved in drug smuggling.' " (pp. 37-38).

Another section of the report says: "As DEA officials testified last July before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Lt. Col. Oliver North suggested to the DEA in June, 1985 that $1.5 million in drug money ... be provided to the Contras." The suggestion was rejected by the DEA (p. 41).

Goss's denial of such a clear public record is mind-boggling, but his "deny and attack" mode has made him a perfect extension of the neo-conservatives' conspiracy to defraud Congress and the American people.

Porter Flip-Flops

While Goss was out to prevent an investigation of the Ollie North-Contra drug running in 1996, the following year, in 1997, Goss took the exactly opposite position, opening a bizarre national security investigation into White House mishandling of classified material. Goss claimed that the Democratic National Committee's breaking of contact with Grigory Loutchansky, a wealthy, publicly identified Russian national with reputed organized crime connections, was a case where classified information was misused. The DNC had disinvited Loutchansky from a fundraising event, and Goss demanded to know if secrets from the "intelligence community," or the "U.S. Secret Service" had been used to tip the DNC off about Loutchansky's background.

"If this disclosure actually took place, it constitutes a felony," Goss railed. "There has been a pattern of inattention to what I call access to classified information ... throughout this Administration since Day One," adding that his experience as a CIA operative made him "sensitive" to the consequences of mishandling secret intelligence data.

Goss explained, "an associate of mine was blown up in a car as a result of an indiscreet comment in Washington."

This might be a commendable concern for a candidate to head the intelligence services of the United States, except that in Goss's case, it is completely phony. Compare Goss's zeal against Clinton White House leaks to the protection racket he ran for Dick Cheney in the leak of the identity of Valerie Plame, an agent of the CIA's clandestine services.

First, Goss denounced the publicity around the Plame leak as more "partisan politics" than a "worry about national security." He went on to tell the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, in an Oct. 3, 2003 story, that he would only allow a House Committee investigation of a "serious allegation," which he said must be "a willful—and I emphasize willful, inadvertent is something else—willful disclosure [of classified information], and I haven't seen any evidence yet." Returning to his characteristic hatred of Clinton, Goss added, "Somebody shows me a blue dress and some DNA, [and] I'll have an investigation."

The truth is that Goss blocked any public investigation of the Plame leak, as he has blocked any investigation of the Abu Ghraib torture scandals in Iraq, and the less publicized torture and killings of prisoners in Afghanistan by the U.S. military. He also blocked legislation that would have authorized an investigation into "U.S. dealings with Iraqi leader Ahmed Chalabi."

Cheney's 'Cheney'

Like Dick Cheney, Goss is highly secretive, and crudely relishes political sadism. That is why he has been chosen by Cheney and Bush to be the lead attack dog against Democratic Presidential candidate John Kerry on matters of intelligence. On March 10, Goss co-authored an op-ed, attacking Kerry for "leading the way to make deep and devastating cuts" in the intelligence budget after the end of the Soviet Union. On June 1, Goss was asked by the Bush-Cheney campaign to attack Kerry's foreign policy speeches, which he did for the campaign's website.

How low would Goss grovel to get the CIA nomination? On June 23, vigorously campaigning to be the new CIA chief after Tenet's resignation, Pinocchio Goss was at it again, attacking Kerry on the House floor, by clownishly holding up a big sign with a quote from Kerry that questioned the growth of the intelligence apparatus after the end of the Cold War. "That was in May of 1997 from the record. I got books full of that stuff," Goss said. "There is no doubt where the record is. The Democratic Party did not support the intelligence community."

Another fib by omission: Goss doesn't mention his own 1995 proposal to cut a full 20% of the CIA and intelligence community allocations over the course of 5 years, at 4% per year. Goss's devastating cuts, fortunately, were never passed.

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, speaking about intelligence work, said that the truth must be surrounded "by a bodyguard of lies." Goss's profile is that his lies are directed at the American people.

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  • 7 months later...
Rumor here: may be caught up in the hooker scandal:http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/
From

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060505/ap_on_..._house_shake_up

By JENNIFER LOVEN, Associated Press Writer 2 minutes ago

WASHINGTON -

CIA Director Porter Goss resigned unexpectedly Friday, leaving behind a spy agency still struggling to recover from the scars of intelligence failures before America's worst terrorist attack and faulty information that formed the U.S. rationale for invading Iraq.

It was the latest move in a second-term shake-up of President Bush’s Team.

Making the announcement from the Oval Office, Bush called Goss' tenure one of transition.

"He has led ably," Bush said, Goss at his side. "He has a five-year plan to increase the analysts and operatives."

The president did not name a successor.

The former congressman from Florida, head of the House Intelligence Committee and CIA agent had been at the helm of the agency only since September 2004.

He came under fire almost immediately, in part because he brought with him several top aides from Congress who were considered highly political for the CIA.

He had particularly poor relations with segments of the agency's powerful clandestine service. In a bleak assessment, California Rep. Jane Harman, the Intelligence Committee's top Democrat, recently said, "The CIA is in a free fall," noting that employees with a combined 300 years of experience have left or been pushed out.

The realignment of Bush's team amid the president's sagging poll standings started with the resignation of Andrew Card as chief of staff and his replacement by Joshua Bolten, who had been the budget director.

There has been rampant speculation that Treasury Secretary John Snow would be leaving.

Here's a picture of him with his friends:

Porter Goss and Operation 40

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Bush's decision to appoint Porter Goss as director of the CIA in 2004 is very interesting. Goss joined the CIA in 1962 and over the next few years was based at the JM/WAVE, the CIA station in Miami where he worked with people such as Ted Shackley, David Sanchez Morales, Tom Clines, David Phillips, William Harvey and Tracy Barnes. Goss is probably the last surviving officer based at JM/WAVE in 1963. Is this a coincidence or did George Walker Bush ask his son to make this appointment?

Good article by Walter Shapiro in Salon Magazine on Porter Goss:

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/05/06/goss/

There is a story in the UK that might be linked to Goss going. Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, lost his job yesterday. Rumour has it that Straw was sacked by Blair because he opposed military action in Iran. Maybe Goss took a similar line and that action is imminent.

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There is a story in the UK that might be linked to Goss going. Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, lost his job yesterday. Rumour has it that Straw was sacked by Blair because he opposed military action in Iran. Maybe Goss took a similar line and that action is imminent.

I doubt that Goss would ever take any line against military action anywhere. Tim Carroll posted yesterday on the Lancer forum the rumor that Goss may be involved in the "poker" (no pun intended) parties organized by US defense contractors/lobbyists in the "Duke" Cunningham scandal investigation, which allegedly involved supplying female entertainment for poor lonely congressmen.

Yes, I am aware of Goss’s problems. As Walter Shapiro points out in Salon Magazine:

“NBC News reported Thursday night that the CIA is investigating whether a top agency official, Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, improperly steered a $2.4 million contract to his close college friend Brent Wilkes, a defense contractor implicated in the Cunningham case. Wilkes reportedly supplied prostitutes to Cunningham at poker parties that Foggo also attended, though the CIA official denies seeing the female entertainment."

"There is no obvious connection between Goss and Cunningham, aside from their having served together in the House for 13 years. But the real mystery is how Foggo became the CIA's executive director, the official in charge of day-to-day operations at the entire agency: He was a midlevel field officer with a procurement background when Goss appointed him in 2004. A CIA spokeswoman, who did not want her name used, said Thursday that the two men met when Foggo testified before the House Intelligence Committee, which Goss chaired from 1997 until 2004, when Bush made him the CIA director. No date was provided for Foggo's testimony before Goss' committee.”

It seems that Goss is following in the example of his bosses, Ted Shackley and Tom Clines at JMWAVE. This is something that has been going on in the CIA since the late 1940s. It started in Taiwan with Paul Heliwell (another person at JMWAVE in 1963).

You are probably right that it has nothing to do with Iran. However, if Bush does intend to bomb Iran, he will need the full support of the CIA.

Blair is in serious trouble in the UK. There are moves within the Labour Party to oust him within the next couple of months. The only thing that would stop this happening is if the UK is involved in a serious international crisis. Jack Straw had made it clear that he would resign if Iran was bombed. While Straw was foreign secretary, Blair would have found it difficult to support Bush. The situation is now very different. If Bush bombs Iran it will probably lead to a war in the Middle East. With troops in Iraq, there would be no way that the UK could withdraw from the region. At the same time, it would be difficult to remove Blair during the conflict.

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A problem with moves against Iran is where in the hell does our President figure he's going to get the troops?

You don't need troops to bomb people. Just ask Bill Clinton and his NATO buddies. And anyway, since Bush didn't bother with an exit strategy in Iraq, why he should bother with an entry strategy in Iran? When you're commander in chief, you can just tell the military to attack. Perhaps Bush will first go on national TV and give the Iranians 48 hours to get out of their country.

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Goss gutted the agency, decimated the top ranks, antagonized the leadership and fired

a top official as a scapegoat in the leak case.

Now he is out.

The former head of NSA is in...

................................................................. why do I hear a clicking on my phone?

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