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Porter Goss
Last Updated: July 31, 2008

Goss presided over rampant corruption at the highest levels of U.S. intelligence decision-making, not once but twice:  First as the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, later as CIA Director.

Two years after resigning from the CIA just ahead of an FBI raid on the home of his No. 3 executive, Goss was named chief of a new Congressional ethics agency.

Goss led the House Intelligence Committee at the height of then-Rep. Randall “Duke” Cunningham’s abuse of it. Cunningham used the committee as his personal auction block and bludgeon, selling access to the nation’s most sensitive defense programs to corrupt private contractors.

Appointed CIA Director in 2004, Goss reached into the middle ranks of the agency to promote Kyle “Dusty” Foggo – now indicted in the Cunningham scandal – to Executive Director. Goss may have gotten to know Foggo at parties thrown by defense contractor Brent Wilkes, convicted in 2007 and sentenced to 12 years in prison for bribing Cunningham.

The scandal ultimately landed Cunningham in jail, sentenced to eight years after pleading guilty to bribery and fraud. Foggo is under indictment for disclosing classified secrets to Wilkes.  Meanwhile, Goss may be under investigation. He abruptly resigned from the CIA in May 2006, just days before the FBI raided Foggo’s home and office.

In July 2008, his former colleagues in the House of Representatives named him chairman of the new Office of Congressional Ethics.

Goss served in the CIA for about 10 years, and may have been involved in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. He retired to Florida and in 1988 was elected to Congress as a Republican.

He became chairman of the House Intelligence Committee in 1997. Cunningham joined the committee in 2001, and, according to a later investigation, immediately used earmarks – a method of reserving money in the federal budget for special projects – to fund intelligence programs that would later turn out to be redundant, or useless, and usually designed for contractors who’d bribed him.

A special investigation into Cunningham’s corruption on the Intelligence Committee said relatively little about Goss, and a friend of his told the Los Angeles Times that Goss did not suspect Cunningham of more than being “overly partisan.”

Yet Cunningham’s corruption extended beyond mere earmarking. He bullied the paid staff of the committee to back his projects, and he did the same to employees of the nation’s intelligence agencies, making sure jobs went to the “right” contractors.
The special investigator’s report says that staffers knew that if they did not yield to Cunningham’s demands for Wilkes and others, he would block funding for other, more legitimate, programs in the Intelligence Committee.

No investigation to date has explained how Goss could have missed Cunningham’s corruption. It was so flagrantly obvious to the paid staff of the Intelligence Committee that one of them, writing about a Cunningham project, said in an email, “HOOAH! Another $5 million of taxpayer money wasted.”

Goss may have been distracted – in the wake of the September 11th attacks, he was using the committee for political ends of his own, providing political cover to President George W. Bush.

As committee chairman, Goss led a joint House-Senate inquiry into the events leading up to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, but the report his panel issued remained silent on the role of the White House. He led a party-line vote to defeat an amendment calling for an investigation into U.S. relations with Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi doctor in exile who provided much of the false information leading to the invasion of Iraq.

While chairing the Intelligence Committee, Goss was a regular guest at parties thrown by Wilkes, one of Cunningham’s prime benefactors. Wilkes was convicted of 13 felony charges of bribery, fraud, and money laundering for paying Cunningham more than $1 million in cash and gifts. In return, he received various defense contracts worth more than $100 million. Among the other regulars were many of the central players in the Cunningham scandal: Foggo, Cunningham and Brant Bassett, a former CIA agent and Intelligence Committee staffer friendly with both Foggo and Wilkes and whose name keeps surfacing in these corruption investigations.

In the summer of 2004, Goss led a successful effort to beat back an investigation of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. Two months later, in August 2004, President George W. Bush nominated Goss to be CIA Director,  and Goss continued to bend the nation’s most important intelligence assets to achieve the President’s political ends.

Goss seeded the CIA’s upper echelons with political appointments, driving out experienced career officers. In perhaps his most surprising move, he elevated Kyle “Dusty” Foggo from a mid-level position as a procurement officer to the No. 3 job at the agency. But Foggo quickly came under investigators’ scrutiny when Cunningham admitted to accepting bribes from two defense contractors, one of them Foggo’s best friend, Wilkes.

Goss may have made the decision to promote Goss on the recommendation of Bassett, several officials speculated in a July 2006 article in Vanity Fair. And he gave Bassett a job, too, hiring him as a consultant in the agency’s operations directorate.

(Among Goss’ other political appointees were Patrick Murray, who’d been Goss’ own Chief of Staff while he was in Congress, and Joseph Jakub, who’d been a Congressional staffer for GOP Rep. Dan Burton.)

After Cunningham pleaded guilty in November 2005, investigators soon began to explore the relationship between Wilkes and Foggo. FBI agents raided Foggo’s home and office in May 2006, and also launched an investigation into Bassett. Before Goss promoted him, Foggo had spent much of his career at the CIA awarding contracts to private companies, and prosecutors say he abused his posts to direct contracts to Wilkes.

Foggo was indicted on corruption charges in May 2007, and in that indictment, prosecutors say he used his job as CIA Executive Director to slip classified information to Wilkes and to award him a $132 million contract to “provide commercial cover for CIA air operations.” Wilkes had no experience in air transport. While Wilkes was convicted of bribing Cunningham, he still faces criminal charges for allegedly bribing Foggo.

Goss resigned abruptly in May 2006, just days before the FBI raid on Foggo’s home. At least one published report has hinted that Goss may also be under investigation. Goss has refused to explain why he was resigning.

This did not stop House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) and Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) from naming Goss the chief of a new House ethics arm. Goss will lead the Office of Congressional Ethics as it conducts investigations into complaints against members of Congress and makes recommendations for action to the Ethics Committee.

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Government Officials | 9/11 | Homeland Security | Defense

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