John Weisman: Direct Action

• On January 19, 2004, Al Jazeera reported in a short tell-story that Moroccan authorities, acting on what was described by Mukhabarat sources as the fruits of a successful interrogation, discovered an Islamist bomb factory in a residential villa on the outskirts of the city of Safi, a hotbed of Islamist activity 250 kilometers southwest of the capital city of Rabat. Six Salafist radicals were killed during the assault. Two Moroccan Special Forces soldiers were wounded.

• At 2:24P.M. on Wednesday, May 26, 2004, the CIA’s congressional liaison was summoned to the HPSCI offices, where he was handed a single page of language that would be included in the Intelligence Authorization Act for fiscal year 2005. The officer was instructed to show it to CIA’s top leadership. The page read as follows:

All is not well in the world of clandestine human intelligence collection (HUMINT). The DCI himself has stated that five more years will be needed to build a viable HUMINT capability. The Committee, in the strongest of possible terms, asserts that the Directorate of Operations (DO) needs fixing. For too long the CIA has been ignoring its core mission activities. There is a dysfunctional denial of any need for corrective action…If the CIA continues to ignore the experience of many of its best, brightest, and most experienced officers, and continues to equate criticism from within and without-especially from the oversight committees-as commentary unworthy even of consideration, no matter how constructive, informed and well-meaning that criticism may be, they do so at their peril. The DO will become nothing more than a stilted bureaucracy incapable of even the slightest bit of success. The nimble, flexible, core-mission oriented enterprise the DO once was, is becoming a fleeting memory. With each day it becomes harder to resurrect. The Committee highlights, with concern, the fact that it took only a year or two in the mid-1990s to decimate the capabilities of the CIA, that we are now in the 8 thyear of rebuild, and still we are 5 years away from being healthy. This is tragic. It should never happen again.

• It has been rumored but not confirmed by CIA sources that shortly after the congressional liaison faxed the page to Langley’s seventh floor, someone in the DCI’s office suite was heard to shout, “I don’t care what you say. That goddamn son of a bitch Tony Wyman wrote that crap.”

• On Wednesday evening, June 2, 2004, George John Tenet called President George W. Bush and informed him he would be resigning as DCI the next morning.

• On Thursday, June 3, 2004, Tenet resigned, effective July 11.

• On Tuesday, August 10, 2004, President George W. Bush nominated Congressman Porter J. Goss of Florida as the new director of central intelligence. Goss would be the second member of Congress to hold the title. Goss was confirmed by the Senate and took office on the twenty-fourth of September, 2004.

John Weisman is a bestselling author and former journalist. His CIA stories have been selected twice for Best American Mystery Stories. Weisman’s Black Ops column appears in Military.com. He lives with his wife and their dogs in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.

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