In Your Face at the CIA

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The backbiting got more vicious in the final days of the presidential campaign, when the Bush camp began to mutter that the CIA was trying to undermine the President's re-election. The evidence was circumstantial at best. But many Republicans nonetheless came to believe the agency was rooting for Senator John Kerry when it cleared for publication a book, Imperial Hubris, written anonymously by Michael Scheuer, a CIA analyst and former chief of the bin Laden unit, that accused the Administration of botching the war on terrorism. Members of Tenet's staff didn't think much of Scheuer — they regarded him as a zealot who couldn't see the whole picture — but they were in a bind. CIA rules allow an officer to publish a book if he is not disclosing classified information. Since Scheuer's book included nothing sensitive, the agency couldn't halt publication. "The rules don't say you can't write dumb stuff," a former officer who worked on the case tells TIME.

Imperial Hubris hit stores in July, and that was enough for some in the Bush campaign to conclude that the agency was trying to undermine the President. Not everyone in the White House was bothered by the book, but those who were included Vice President Dick Cheney, who had tangled with the CIA endlessly over Iraq and had long grown impatient with the agency's rigid devotion to rules. "What the White House has decided, particularly Cheney," a campaign veteran told TIME, "is that the agency has been leaking on us for a year. So we don't have much to lose by cutting them loose."

Goss, meanwhile, had been quietly planning his own housecleaning for a while. He had a mandate from Bush to make the CIA more aggressive and less risk averse in general, but he had special plans for the agency's storied clandestine services branch, the supersecret Directorate of Operations (D.O.), which runs covert spies and schemes all over the world. Last June, while Goss was chairman, the House Intelligence Committee wrote a report that said the D.O. was in danger of becoming "nothing more than a stilted bureaucracy incapable of even the slightest bit of success. The nimble, flexible, core mission-oriented enterprise that D.O. once was is becoming just a fleeting memory."

Within days of Goss's arrival, a number of top CIA officials began to contemplate retirement, including acting Director John McLaughlin and Executive Director A.B. Krongard. Then, last week, came the abrupt departures of D.O. chief Stephen Kappes and his deputy, Michael Sulick, two pragmatic and tough-minded officers who were regarded almost universally as mission oriented, apolitical and aggressive — exactly the traits Goss was supposedly looking for. Kappes, who had served as station chief in Moscow and the Middle East, was best known at Langley for helping persuade Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi to forswear terrorism and give up his rudimentary WMD program. Kappes, who made multiple trips to Tripoli to seal the deal, was one of the few CIA officers who won high marks from both Republican and Democratic members of the 9/11 commission. Sulick is another former Moscow station chief who, in the words of an ex-spy, "has a New Yorker's quick wit and cynical outlook on life. He'd more likely skewer both sides" than favor one political party over another, the officer says.