Yesterday, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Inspector General’s office of the Central Intelligence Agency, and other federal investigators executed search warrants on the home and office of Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, who had been appointed as the #3 official at the CIA by Porter Goss, who just last week abruptly “resigned” as CIA Director.
Of course you knew that. It was all over the newspapers, as it well should have been. Foggo was involved with the crooked crew that bribed “Duke” Cunningham with cash and prostitutes, though Foggo’s own criminal culpability remains unproven.
Today, Glenn Reynolds links approvingly to a Steven Hayes essay in the Weekly Standard mourning Goss’s departure and attributing it to a successful campaign by CIA career staff to prevent what Hayes calls “reform.” (Reynolds adds a gratuitous slam at brave and dedicated men and women who risk their lives for our country at a fraction of his income and who can’t defend themselves against his falsehoods by implying that “the CIA” has preferred the protection of its bureaucratic interests to winning the war on terror.)
Hayes recounts an early confrontation between Goss’s “Hill pukes” and senior CIA careerists over the nomination of Foggo, who was chosen as a replacement when Goss’s previous choice turned out to have been bounced from a CIA career job twenty-five years earlier after being caught shoplifting. The confrontation was over threats made by one of the “Hill pukes” against the careerists in case any unfavorable information about Foggo appeared in the press. (Or, as Hayes puts it, “No more leaks.”)
As a result of that confrontation, two of the careerists left the agency. One, Stephen Kappes, is now being brought back to replace Foggo in the Executive Director job: a rather nice bit if irony which Hayes is too angry to notice. But Hayes also doesn’t notice, or want his readers to notice, that the guy Goss chose and his “Hill puke” buddies were trying to protect just had his home and office raided, and that he seems to have been deeply involved with the juiciest sex-and-intelligence scandal since Christine Keeler and John Profumo were an item.
It should be obvious to Hayes, and to Reynolds, that Foggo’s conduct is at least a serious problem for their account of Goss as a “reformer” at the CIA defeated by evil bureaucrats. And it should be obvious to their readers that Hayes and Reynolds, by continuing to push their old story without taking any notice of new facts, are insulting the readers’ intelligence.
The only other way to read Hayes’s story and Reynolds’s link is that Hayes and Reynolds have completely lost touch with consensus reality, or simply rejected it for its well-known liberal bias.
The Ex Dir before Foggo was run out of town by the Gosslings, and was quoted in the 5/9/06 washingtonpost on Kappes return. I don't recall too many of these scandals when he was there.
You might recognize his last name.