Former CIA director Porter Goss on the challenges of modern espionage
BY TEJAS SATHIAN

He spent sixteen years in the House of Representatives, but before he was a member of Congress, Porter Goss was a covert agent. Goss returned to his clandestine roots in 2004 when he took up the post of CIA director. Now, he is free to share some of his secrets with the HPR.

Harvard Political Review: How will intelligence affect the country’s long-term future and global position? Can the failures of intelligence contribute to a decline of US power?

Porter Goss: Certainly our constitution stipulates that the role of our federal government is our national defense. The best way to enhance our national defense and to keep us all safe is to have good information, particularly good information from overseas. That role is typically called intelligence, and I think it is now an understood fact that it is a good investment to have intelligence. When you have bad intelligence or not enough intelligence, things happen to you like September 11, or not having weapons of mass destruction where we thought there were. Those kinds of issues happen, and the way you resolve that is to go out and build up a stable of what we call human intelligence, of people on a global basis who will keep us informed about matters of importance to our national security.

HPR: What is your perspective on the practicality and value of interagency cooperation?

PG: When I was the director of CIA, I spent a great deal of time trying to make sure that our memoranda of understanding with the FBI and with the Defense Department were accomplished and understood. I know that there are many CIA who felt that the appearance of so many military people in the intelligence hierarchy was a clear signal that we were going back to military control of intelligence. But I think that’s an unnecessary angst.

The role of CIA is very clear, and there will continue to be a civilian role in intelligence, because the protocols and agreements that we’ve signed as a sovereign nation mean that the military role can’t get the job done exclusively overseas. Yet I do think that there will always be some turf fighting and some matters of esprit and pride between members of the military and the other agencies that we have, including the FBI, the NSA, the NRO, the CIA, the Department of Energy, and the Department of Homeland Security.

We now have a National Counter-Terrorism Center where the various agencies are all represented, and that’s a family-force coordination element that seems to be working pretty well. You’ll always have what I will call healthy competition, but it has to be understood that we all complement the one vision, the one goal of sharing intelligence. I think we can have a working efficiency between the agencies that preserves the mission of the agency. I think we’ve made some progress on that, but we’ve still got a long ways to go.

HPR: In your experience, does more oversight mean more problems for the agency’s activities, and would it be better if it came from the Congress or from the court system?

PG: It depends what the issue is. Both have a role to play. When there’s legal activity involved, we have proven that we have what we call a secret court, the FISA court. Programs like that that do work for us very well with good jurists, informed jurists, who take a lot of time to understand the problem. I think we wouldn’t want to give that up and in fact I see a new expanded role, perhaps more of those jurists.

Yet there is a bottleneck on FISA applications, which causes us to lose opportunities and puts our people at risk. There is case after case of that, and it’s frustrating for our people in the field, regardless of whether they’re involved with the FBI, local law enforcement, the military, or the CIA. Bureaucratic inefficiency is not a reasonable excuse. We have created such a bottleneck with the FISA program and it needs to be modernized.

Going back to the oversight of Congress, what you need to have with Congress is knowledgeable oversight. I would say perhaps that we need a reduced and less partisan approach to intelligence than we’ve got on the Hill right now. I would recommend going to a smaller group on the Hill that had a clear understanding of the consequences of what would happen if information that they were briefed on got to the media. I would also try to bring them in more as people who are helping you try and find solutions for very complex and pressing challenges that face our national security these days. The questions about using our technology for surveillance are difficult.

There are technological questions and there are policy questions and they are very valid questions. They do not, it seems to me, need to become partisan fodder before we even start to solve them, because then it makes a solution next to impossible.

HPR: How do you feel the intelligence community plays a role, in contrast to that of the military, in asymmetric warfare, and how can intelligence and military roles supplement and reinforce one another?

PG: I think as we dissect more and more what our target is and how we should approach our target, you will find an even greater operability between our military and intelligence capabilities. We already have it. It’s not something I’m going to be able to talk much about, but I can tell you that when you get out in the field, you’ll see that people get along fine to make it happen. They’re creative, innovative, extraordinarily wonderful Americans taking great risks. One of the things that frustrates me the most is that they seem to be underappreciated all too often because of bureaucratic nonsense in Washington. Sometimes they even become scapegoats.

Nevertheless, they ignore all that stuff and get on with the job. People will often thank the military for the great job they’re doing. But our folks in the intelligence business overseas, and the special operations people, the people you don’t see—they’re doing a great job too, and we never thank them publicly. I think that people would feel more grateful if they knew the extraordinary exploits that are carried. The cynics would say that I’m talking about bad stuff, torture and all that, but I’m not talking about that at all. I’m talking about people taking risks and doing amazing things for our national security to make sure that the interests of the United States of America are protected and enhanced overseas.¨ ]]>