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Director puts leadership
of transformed CIA
in place

WASHINGTON » Monday is day one of a new era at the Central Intelligence Agency, as Director Porter Goss, on the job for four months, finally gets his leadership team in place.

The time since Goss' swearing-in has proved rocky for an agency still reeling from its failure to warn of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and its flawed prewar intelligence on Iraq's weapons.

More than a dozen senior officials have left since Goss arrived. The messy details of some internal battles have seeped into the news.

Critics have complained that Goss, a former Republican congressman who served as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, politicized the agency by hiring GOP aides.

Goss' allies say wholesale changes were essential after the intelligence failures of 9/11 and Iraq.

"You couldn't expect anybody to have the same leadership in place and improve the operation of the agency," said Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Among the new hires, Goss is making 30-year CIA veteran John Kringen the head of the Directorate of Intelligence, the agency's analysis division. That move today means Goss will have in place all the division chiefs he has chosen.

Goss, a CIA operative in the 1960s, got a mandate from President Bush and Congress to tackle tough intelligence changes. Eyes are on where he takes the agency.

The CIA director has said he intends to improve the risky work of using people to steal secrets -- human-intelligence gathering -- and bolster language capabilities.

He wants to improve the quality of intelligence analysis reports and hopes to change a culture that he considers averse to risk.

A counterterrorism official said Goss is collapsing layers of bureaucracy so that operatives in the field are closer to the decision-makers at CIA headquarters. "Changing a risk-averse culture doesn't take a lot of money. It takes a change in senior management," said the official.

Case to play budget role

Congressman Ed Case has been appointed to the House Budget Committee, which begins hearings next week on President Bush's latest budget proposal to Congress, his office said Friday.

The committee will play a key role in overseeing the $2.3 trillion annual federal budget and producing the annual budget resolution that guides federal spending.

"The Budget Committee appointment was my first choice, because I believe that the federal deficit and debt are our primary challenges, and I wanted to have a direct impact on this issue," Case said.

The Budget Committee starts work today with its submission to Congress of the president's budget for fiscal 2006.

Case was also reappointed to the House Agriculture Committee and Small Business Committee.