Newsday reports:
"The agency is being purged on instructions from the White House," said a former senior CIA official who maintains close ties to both the agency and to the White House. "Goss was given instructions ... to get rid of those soft leakers and liberal Democrats. The CIA is looked on by the White House as a hotbed of liberals and people who have been obstructing the president's agenda."
One of the first casualties appears to be Stephen R. Kappes, deputy director of clandestine services, the CIA's most powerful division. The Washington Post reported yesterday that Kappes had tendered his resignation after a confrontation with Goss' chief of staff, Patrick Murray, but at the behest of the White House had agreed to delay his decision till tomorrow.
But the former senior CIA official said that the White House "doesn't want Steve Kappes to reconsider his resignation. That might be the spin they put on it, but they want him out." He said the job had already been offered to the former chief of the European Division who retired after a spat with then-CIA Director George Tenet.
Note that the people being purged are not those who are responsible for poor intelligence, bad analysis, or other objective errors. Naturally anyone who leaked information was taking a risk and now they have to face the possibility of paying for that — it would be very difficult to complain about this. The emphasis on purging "liberal Democrats," however, is another matter entirely. Any attempt to remove someone from the CIA simply because they are a liberal Democrat and not because they have performed their job poorly or leaked classified material is a blatant effort to politicize the CIA beyond all appropriate bounds.
Phil Carter comments:
For what it's worth, military history has not been kind to those nations which have seen fit to purge their military or intelligence services in wartime. The best example is Stalin and his generals. Seeking to consolidate power and eliminate the risk of a coup d'etat, Josef Stalin purged the top ranks of the Red Army several times before the start of WWII — and once the war was on, he purged a few more generals that he thought were ineffective. (Purging in Stalin's day was a euphemism for going to sleep with the fishes, not for retiring with a government pension.) Most military historians think this purge had a disastrous effect on the Red Army, for while it may have removed some disloyal generals, it also gutted the ranks of the officer corps and removed a lot of the Red Army's best and brightest. Moreover, the purge instilled a culture of fear that lasted all the way through the 1980s, where few officers in the Red Army were willing to stand up and take the initiative for anything. In the dark days of WWII, Stalin's purge almost cost the Soviets the war. It was only the Russian winter, impossibly long German supply lines, an intractable German logistics situation, and a human wave of Soviet conscripts, that beat back the Nazis.
Today's CIA is not the Red Army of the 1940s. But the analogy should still give us pause. We purge the CIA at our own peril. Removing some of the CIA's top officials may make it less prone to leak; less prone to disagreement with the Bush administration. But it will also make it a much poorer intelligence agency. To be effective, the CIA must tell the boss like it is — not how the boss wants it to be. If CIA officers are worried about being purged, they're not going to do their jobs very well, and they're certainly not going to take risks to get the job done.
Assuming that the reports of purges is at all accurate, we really have to wonder whether the current administration is mature enough to trust with the responsibility and power necessary to fighting the war on terrorism. Removing people who are ineffective or hampering the pursuit of terrorists makes sense, if done carefully (keeping in mind Carter's emphasis on the fact that the CIA isn't exactly rolling around in extra employees who can step in to fill vacant slots). Removing people because their political orientation is wrong, regardless of their skills or behavior, is something else.
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