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House Intel Chairman Hoekstra: CIA Leaks 'Politically Driven' Kenneth R. Timmerman, NewsMax.com WASHINGTON -- The chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich, told NewsMax that he believes the recent leaks over the CIA's secret prisons and the NSA's terrorist surveillance program were "politically driven," and that the leakers "ought to be prosecuted."
"What we are seeing is a systematic breakdown in the intelligence community when it comes to leaking highly classified intelligence information," he stated.
If intelligence officers have concerns about a particular program, they have various legal avenues to make those concerns known, he said.
"First, there's an inspector general," he noted. "Then there's a House intelligence committee, and a Senate intelligence committee. If you have questions about the legality of some program or some action, that's where you go to make sure what's being done is legal and within the law."
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An Intelligence officer who goes to the press with grievances and leaks classified information is "no better than a common thief," he said.
"Nobody's given you the authorization to determine what information should be made freely available to the public. Nobody's given you the authorization to determine what should or should not be classified, or to make those decisions for the American people," Hoekstra said.
Hoekstra applauded former CIA Director Porter Goss for having identified a CIA official for making unauthorized disclosures of highly classified intelligence information to the media.
The Deputy CIA inspector general, Mary McCarthy, who was fired on April 21, 2006, 10 days short of retirement, was identified in the media as having leaked information on the CIA secret prisons to Washington Post reporter Dana Priest.
McCarthy denied through her lawyer ever meeting with Priest, but has acknowledged she was fired before her retirement.
For Hoekstra, McCarthy's firing was symbolic, and went way beyond whatever specific offense she may or may not have committed.
"Mary McCarthy clearly represented the entrenched bureaucracy at CIA," he said. "She wasn't the only one, not by a long shot."
Goss Firing 'Outrageous' Ironically, it was Porter Goss who paid the ultimate price for the crackdown on leakers within the CIA, Hoekstra said.
"Porter clearly started off at CIA knowing that the intelligence community needed to be shaken up. He was breaking the china and he was getting results" when he was summarily fired by the president.
Media reports have suggested that Goss was fired at the urging of the newly appointed director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte.
"Here is someone who went in when you asked him, knowing it was going to be hard, and then you cut him off at the knees," Hoekstra said.
"The way he was fired was outrageous."
Media reports have focused on disputes surrounding staff members Goss brought to the CIA from Congress, where he preceded Hoekstra as chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
Negative media reports referred to them as the "Goslings," and claimed they had alienated long-serving professionals by demanding the firing of the deputy director of operations, Michael Sulick, for insubordination.
"This was not about staff, but about getting results. And Porter was getting results," Hoekstra said. "He had plans to increase HUMINT [human intelligence] by 50 percent."
The "entrenched bureaucracy pushed back" against Goss's efforts to reform the CIA, and especially, to change its risk-adverse culture, Hoekstra said.
Sulick's boss at the time of his firing in October 2004, operations chief Stephen Kappes, offered his own resignation to protest Sulick's firing. Intelligence insiders said he never expected Goss to accept his resignation.
Now Kappes has been named by National Director of Intelligence John Negroponte and newly-confirmed CIA Director Gen. Stephen Hayden as their nominee for the number two spot at CIA.
"The Kappes appointment - which is not yet official, as far as I know - was a huge win for the CIA bureaucracy," Hoekstra said. "They felt they were bringing back one of their own, after they had purged the system of the foreign object in the blood - purged the intelligence community of the infection that was caused by the agent of change, who was Porter Goss."
The Kappes appointment, Hoekstra said, was "back to the future. This is a vindication of all those people who didn't want change" at the CIA. "This will only embolden the entrenched bureaucracy. The very person Porter Goss saw as the primary obstacle to change is now in charge."
Hoekstra, a former vice president of a Fortune 500 company, compared the unwillingness of intelligence community managers to change after the end of the Cold War to old-time business managers who refused to move up to just-in-time inventory.
"There's always someone who's going to tell you, it can't work. The truck is going to break down, something's going to happen. There are people who fight change like crazy," Hoekstra said.
"It's the same thing in the intelligence community as they've tried to adapt to the new challenges we face from al-Qaida, China, and Iran. Porter said we need a new paradigm for HUMINT, new capability, new staff who do new things."
Changing the intelligence community wasn't going to be easy, even under Goss.
Hoekstra stated that he has "real concerns" with the direction things are taking under John Negroponte.
"I'm concerned about the direction the [office of the Director of National Intelligence] is taking."
Hoekstra warned that under Negroponte's direction, the ODNI staff has swelled to more than twice the size initially foreseen in the authorizing legislation, and risked becoming a new layer of bureaucracy superimposed over existing agencies, rather than a catalyst for change.
"The real question is this: Are we getting the intelligence community that we need, or not? I have real concerns about that," Hoekstra said.
Editor's note:
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