An internal war at the CIA

But it isn't as if Goss hasn't implemented changes that also please agency employees. For one thing, he named "Dusty," a pseudonym because he's still under cover, as executive director. And Goss cancelled a pay-for-performance program that was almost universally disliked by employees.

Still, many of Goss's moves, especially those involving the staff he brought with him, rankle intelligence officials. Goss's first choice for the agency's third-highest position of executive director, for instance, was Michael Kostiw. Mr. Kostiw withdrew his name for the position after someone - apparently inside the agency - leaked to the press that Kostiw had been asked to leave the agency some 20 years earlier after a shoplifting incident. Moreover, Mr. Murphy is said to be particularly "abrasive and inconsiderate" in dealing with agency officials.

But revamping a mammoth bureaucracy - one that has been pronounced "dysfunctional" by government leaders - is not a simple task.

Mr. Hulnick, now a professor of international relations at Boston University, was an agency case officer when Mr. Turner arrived at the CIA in 1977. He says the situations are similar.

President Carter had charged Turner, director of the CIA from 1977 to 1981, with transforming the agency's poor performance, following exposures, such as torturing a Soviet defector and administering experimental drugs to Americans without their knowledge or consent, by the Church Committee's report and the Nixon-Watergate scandal.

"[Turner] brought staff in with him from the Navy, and didn't listen to our advice," Hulnick says. "We called it the Halloween massacre. He cut about 800 slots overseas. The rumor is of course that people got fired, but only 17 left the agency. Some retired, but most found other jobs in the agency."

Turner says he brought one staffer with him from the Navy, a man who basically managed his office. And that he was acting on the advice of a study that had been performed by the agency for the previous director, George Herbert Walker Bush.

But Turner says the reaction to his cleanup and Goss's are similar. "I came in and tried to clean that up, and [the staffers] came after me," Turner says. "And the leaks in this instance are indications of fierce opposition to anybody who criticizes them."

He goes on to say that it shouldn't be unexpected. The intelligence community has suffered huge blows: the failure to predict the 9/11 attacks, the incorrect estimate about Iraq's possession of mass destruction, and the several committee reports that have censured their performance.

"The leaks and this whole reaction to Goss is irresponsible in the midst of a war," Turner says. "But you've got to expect it - [CIA officers] are experts at disinformation; that is what they do for a living."

Other former CIA officers, like Robert Baer, who was highly critical of the way the agency's human intelligence activities were downgraded in the 1980s and '90s, is happy with what Goss is trying to do.

"He's trying to turn back the clock, reimpose the standards that are necessary to run the intelligence service," Mr. Baer says.

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