Ed Lasky's blog today alerts readers to David Brook's courageous column in the NYT on certain CIA operatives who leaked material to the media to oppose the President's policies on Iraq (Sy Hersh, where are you?).

Dovetailing on this issue, Dana Priest and Walter Pincus in an article in the The Ministry of Truth (aka The Washington Post) report that the Deputy Director of the CIA resigned on Friday after 'confrontations' with Patrick Murray who is Porter Goss' new Chief of Staff at the agency.  The report said,

John E. McLaughlin, a 32—year CIA veteran who was acting director for two months this summer until Goss took over, resigned after warning Goss that his top aide, former Capitol Hill staff member Patrick Murray, was treating senior officials disrespectfully and risked widespread resignations, the officials said.

The article also stated that there were several other clandestine operators and senior operations officials that were threatening to leave, which, according to current and former CIA officials, would throw the beleaguered agency into 'turmoil.'

We should not be alarmed.  This is simply a natural reaction to Goss' initial efforts to start cleaning up an agency that has been politicized (on the side of the left) for decades.  The solution to the CIA's problems, particularly during the conduct of a war, is to quickly bypass the entrenched bureaucracy and place solid operators in leadership positions to get priority missions accomplished.

Herbert E. Meyer, a contributor to AT, describes  how President Reagan's CIA Director, William Casey, had to do the same thing in order to revive a moribund agency that was dropping the ball in fighting the Cold War:

Reach down to them [the subordinate analysts] and make sure their work comes to the surface, and isn't blocked by the bureaucrats who are sitting above them on the org charts. (President Reagan's CIA director, William J. Casey, did this all the time, and it drove the bureaucrats insane.  I remember one senior official who stormed into the director's office and told Bill that he didn't have the right to talk with his subordinates without clearing it first with him.  Bill promised this would never happen again — and it didn't.  By the close of business that evening, the subordinate found himself promoted over the bureaucrat's head.  Word spread through the building quickly and, as I recall, we didn't have that problem any more.)

The WaPo piece simply reflects the weeping and gnashing of teeth of CIA bureaucrats, who for reasons largely related to leftist politics and selfishness, have deliberately undermined our ability to fight the War on Terror.

Doug Hanson    11—13—04