Welcome Turmoil

Investor's Business Daily

Porter Goss' first few weeks on the job as CIA chief have made a lot of people angry — including his former colleagues in Congress and the agency's top bureaucrats. He must be doing something right.

And of course, he is doing something right, something that needed to be done not just years, but decades, ago: He's beginning the task of reforming the Central Intelligence Agency

It won't be easy. The CIA is a glamour agency, its exploits the stuff of legend. But it's largely unaccountable. It doesn't even disclose how much it spends (best guess: $25 billion), let alone how it spends its funds. The attitude seems to be: We could tell you, but then we'd have to kill you.

Since 9-11, however, CIA reform is no longer one of those things that just gets talked about. It's become a necessity.

We won't go into ancient history — the botched Bay of Pigs invasion, the overestimation of Soviet economic and military strength, the near total failure to see the possibility of communism's collapse. But the record over the last 16 years has, by any standard, been a disaster. And as the war on terror has unfolded, institutional weaknesses have become manifest.

The CIA failed to foresee the bold attack that took down the World Trade Center towers — though radical Islamists launched a similar attack just eight years before.

It also misinterpreted Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction programs. Yes, it correctly saw he had the intent and means to build WMD — and thus posed a mortal danger. But it missed the fact that Saddam had put his WMD program on hold in the mid-1990s.

That failure, which led the U.S. to tell the U.N. Saddam had ongoing WMD programs and stockpiles of weapons, hurt our credibility, made the war harder to win and cost us diplomatic support.

All in all, quite a mess. But sadly, like most bureaucracies under siege, the CIA is reluctant to change. Its top bureaucrats, used to spending money as they want, on what they want, are digging in their heels. So are their supporters on Capitol Hill.

Enter Goss, the no-nonsense former Florida congressman and a longtime member of the House Intelligence Committee. He's also something else: a former spy, with actual insight.

He arrived with a tough agenda and a mandate to change things. In response, a number of top CIA officials have resigned, bridling under the brash managerial team that Goss brought with him from Congress.

Given the CIA's recent poor record, you'd think Goss would have the complete support of Washington. You'd be wrong. The political sniping has already begun.

"The agency seems in free fall in Washington, and that is a very, very bad omen in the middle of a war," said Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., and the ranking Democrat on Goss' old committee.

Sorry, we don't agree. We think the turmoil, if that's what you can call bureaucratic disgruntlement, is a sign that positive developments are under way. We're more in tune with Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who calls the CIA "dysfunctional" and "in some ways a rogue agency."

Change isn't always pleasant, but sometimes it's badly needed. That's the case with the Central Intelligence Agency. Report after report has said it needs revamping. Well, the job has begun.