New CIA Take: Was Goss Inept or Sabotaged?

The story is etched in Washington political history: After George Tenet, the internally popular and second-longest-serving CIA director ever, quit his post in 2004, his replacement, former Rep. Porter Goss, practically destroyed Langley with his partisan bumbling. Two years into the job, he was dumped for failing to reform the agency. But a new book provided to Whispers offers an alternate version of history. Republican Goss, who arrived with blunt and public plans to shake up the troubled agency, was sabotaged by an odd combination: a largely liberal in-house cabal that discredited him to the Washington press corps, while John Negroponte, the nation's first national intelligence director, staged a power grab by undermining his former Yale frat brother.

In Sabotage: America's Enemies Within the CIA, Rowan Scarborough, a veteran national security reporter at the Washington Examiner, provides what is bound to be a controversial view of the nation's spy agency. He reports that CIA leakers painted Goss's team as green partisans, eventually prompting the new director and his aides to whisper, fearful they were being spied on. It got worse: Scarborough pens that Negroponte raided the CIA to staff his own counterterrorism group. After his ouster, Goss told friends, "Negroponte stabbed me in the back."