In Your Face at the CIA

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What's most unsettling about the resignations is that they seem to have grown out of petty disagreements that could easily have been avoided. The first began with a tempest over a longtime Goss aide, Michael Kostiw, whom Goss intended to name as the agency's executive director, but who lost the job after it was revealed he had left the CIA 20 years earlier when he was arrested for allegedly shoplifting a pound of bacon. (The charges were dropped after he agreed to resign.) Although CIA insiders argue that reporters could have been tipped off by a CIA alumnus who remembered Kostiw's undistinguished departure, Goss aides feared that officials in the agency leaked the bacon caper to the press to embarrass Goss upon his arrival at Langley, former officials say.

Then, on Nov. 5, Kappes and his deputy, Sulick, complained in a meeting with Goss and Patrick Murray, Goss's chief of staff, about Murray's pointed critique of a Sulick memo laying out a proposed D.O. outreach program for members of Congress. Twice in that session, Sulick tossed pieces of paper at Murray. After Goss left for another meeting, Sulick, who is in his 50s and is a Vietnam vet, told Murray, who is 40, that he wasn't going to be treated like some "f___ing Democratic Hill puke," says a CIA source. Disturbed by the episode, Murray asked Kappes a few days later to reassign Sulick. Kappes refused, and the two took their dispute to Goss, who told both men to work things out. The matter festered over a weekend, and when Kappes came to work on Monday, he told Goss he and Sulick would be resigning. Goss tried to persuade Kappes to stay on, says a CIA source, but both men quit anyway. Sulick could not be reached for response. Kappes declined to comment.

The impact of those departures was just crashing over Washington's sizable spook community when Goss sent an e-mail to the staff listing what he called "the rules of the road." Wrote Goss: "We support the Administration and its policies in our work. As Agency employees we do not identify with, support or champion opposition to the Administration or its policies. We provide the intelligence as we see it — and let the facts alone speak to the policymaker." The email was probably more clumsy than insidious, but when coupled with the departures of two senior officials, many CIA insiders saw it as a loyalty test, a warning by Goss to tailor the intelligence to fit the policies or risk decapitation. "A number of people at the agency view the changes Goss is putting in place as an attempt to bring them to heel rather than an effort to make reforms everyone agrees are necessary," says Whitley Bruner, a former D.O. officer who worked in the Middle East.