CIA nominee Goss vows nonpartisanship

By Dana Priest
The Washington Post

Porter Goss backs off comments linking Iraq, 9/11.

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"I believe that the message is out ... that nice spies is not the formula right now, that risk will be rewarded. But I don't believe there's a full confidence in those words yet" among CIA officers, Rep. Porter Goss, R-Fla., told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in a hearing on his nomination to replace George Tenet.

"What will I do? I will try and put confidence behind those words. ... I will give them the chance to make the mistakes out there," Goss said. "I will give them more leash. ... I'll probably be up here explaining to you, hopefully in closed session, about why something went wrong."

Goss, a former CIA case officer who until recently headed the House Intelligence Committee, predicted it would take the CIA longer than the five years Tenet had promised to rebuild the agency's human intelligence capabilities.

"On a scale of 10, we're about a three in terms of build-back," he said. "In my estimation, five years is not enough. The great bulk of what we need is more than five years out there."

Although the panel's questioning was sometimes pointed, congressional sources in both parties predicted Goss will be confirmed, partly because of his experience and partly because Democrats do not want to be viewed by voters as obstructing counterterrorism operations by delaying the appointment of an intelligence director.

If confirmed, Goss would take leadership of the CIA in a period of unprecedented change prompted by the U.S. intelligence community's failure to deter the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and by its dramatic miscalculation that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

While the CIA, the FBI and other agencies are trying to adjust their training and operations to thwart threats from decentralized Islamic terrorist groups, Congress and the public are demanding significant changes in the way the intelligence agencies are organized.

Goss was nominated to be director of central intelligence, the person who runs the CIA and oversees 14 other U.S. intelligence agencies at the Pentagon and elsewhere. The White House has not made clear whether Bush would name him to a new position, national-intelligence director, if Congress creates it. The Sept. 11 commission proposed establishing that position to give one official more direct control over all 15 intelligence agencies.

The House Intelligence Committee, under Goss, completed fewer major investigations of the CIA's performance than its counterpart panel in the Senate.

Goss' committee did not investigate the abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad or the faulty prewar intelligence analysis of Iraq. But Goss was an aggressive member of the joint panel that in 2002 investigated the Sept. 11 attacks, and he is credited by many on the panel as having persuaded the CIA to declassify more of the 700-plus page report than it wanted.
 
Yesterday, he won praise from one of the administration's fiercest intelligence critics, Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., who co-chaired the joint inquiry on the attacks.

"I believe Porter Goss is an exceptional human being and will be an exceptional head of our intelligence community," Graham said.

Much of the confirmation hearing was taken up by Democratic efforts to highlight Goss' attacks on presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry and the Democratic Party.

"I have a commitment to nonpartisanship," Goss said, although he conceded that, "at times, perhaps, I engaged in debate with a little too much vigor or enthusiasm."

In more than five hours of questioning, Goss recanted some of his partisan attacks against the Democrats and said at one point, "I believe the Democratic Party does strongly support the intelligence community [and has] for a number of years."

Goss also backed off statements he made before the Iraq war that Iraq was linked to the Sept. 11 attacks, claims that were never put forward by the intelligence community. The assertions echoed those by Vice President Cheney and other top administration officials as they pushed their case for war in Iraq.

He said at the time he believed Iraq was part of the war on terrorism. "In hindsight, our interpretation of the evidence has changed," he said yesterday.