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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.
Within a few hours of the e-mail, much of the agency's clandestine arm was on war footing, e-mailing friends, dialing up agency veterans and generally lighting fires all over town, hoping some of it would stick to Murray and the rest of Goss's boarding party. If this sounded like insubordination, it was also a game the CIA has perfected over the years. "The CIA's permanent bureaucracy plays hardball," says an intelligence-committee staff member. "They're trained to do that, to undermine and spy on foreign governments, to run agents, and when they turn those talents to politics in Washington, they can be very tough and very formidable."
That behavior only strengthened White House resolve last week to bring the CIA under control. Though Bush endorsed many of the recommendations of the 9/11 commission earlier this year, including the creation of a new Director of National Intelligence with expanded powers and budget authority, it's widely known that the Pentagon resisted the move because the reforms almost certainly would have strengthened the CIA's autonomy at the Pentagon's expense. The paranoia inside the intelligence community can sometimes come unbound: some at the agency believe that Pentagon boss Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney not only oppose the commission's recommendations but also want to carve up the CIA, take away its clandestine arm altogether and move it to the Pentagon. Congress would be unlikely to go along with such a radical move, nor would Bush's father, who ran the CIA briefly in the mid-1970s and whose name hangs over the door at headquarters in Langley and who still closely follows agency matters. Congressional negotiations on the 9/11 commission reforms broke down Saturday, but Republican leaders promised to keep working until adjournment in December.