Rummy's going to be replaced by Robert Gates, looks like.
Former CIA chief, first one to hold that office after entering the agency in an entry-level job. Career spook.
Was first nominated for the CIA director post in the 80s, but his ties to Iran-Contra made that nomination untenable. They tried again later, and it worked.
In 2005, he turned down an offer to act as national intelligence adviser (intelligence czar), which went to Iran-Contra strongman John Negroponte instead. Stayed on as president of Texas A&M instead.
Here are excerpts from a disturbing profile from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (I pulled it off Nexis) from 2004:
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
September 1, 2004
A not unreasonable failure?And another thing ...
BYLINE: Paine, Christopher
SECTION: No. 5, Vol. 60; Pg. 72; ISSN: 0096-3402
LENGTH: 1696 words
FROM DAY ONE, THE CONSERVATIVE OFFICIALS WHO WERE swept into power at the CIA by the "Reagan revolution" made clear their view that the Directorate of Intelligence's tradition of rigorously objective independent analysis was impeding a deeper understanding of the true nature of the Soviet threat to Western civilization. Determined to make intelligence more responsive to the political-military agenda of the administration, in 1982 Reagan's CIA Director, William Casey, abolished the directorate's existing organizational structure and promoted a relatively young and inexperienced executive assistant, Robert Gates, to fill out a new organizational chart. Gates soon seeded the analytical division with like-minded allies, who came to be known as "Gates Clones."...
There are direct links between this earlier era and the current Iraq intelligence debacle. When the first Bush administration nominated Robert Gates for the directorship in 1991, for the first time ever a number of veteran CIA analysts publicly opposed the appointment, tagging Gates as one of those most responsible for destroying the ethic of rigorous, impartial analysis. Others questioned Gates's nomination on the basis of the misleading testimony he had given on the Iran-contra scandal and his alleged involvement in a covert scheme to funnel support to Saddam Hussein's regime.... While Gates's tenure as director was brief, Tenet proved his bona fides to the Bush national security team, and his favor would be remembered when Bush the Younger carne to town nine years later and elected to keep Tenet on as CIA director. (Tenet reciprocated, and further politicized the agency, renaming the Langley headquarters the "George H. W. Bush Center for Intelligence.") The brief and unsuccessful tenures of Clinton's first two CIA directors, Jim Woolsey and John Deutch, assured that the managerial influence of the Gates Clones at CIA remained intact....
The forces mobilized by the CIA's anti-Soviet Islamic jihad of 1980-1992 had spiraled out of control, gone global, and morphed into a virulent anti-American, anti-Western crusade.
... The Select Committee traced many of the CIA's failings to a "broken corporate culture," which, it now appears, also includes lying to Congress. Tenet appears to have lied, not once, but twice to a congressional committee, telling Sen. Carl Levin on February 13, 2003 that the agency had briefed U.N. inspectors on all 105 "high value and moderate value" weapons sites in Iraq, a claim he reiterated in writing on March 6, 2003. In January 2004, after a year of resistance, the CIA finally declassified the number of sites that had been shared with the inspectors. In doing so, they quietly acknowledged that 21 of 105 sites had not been shared with the United Nations before the war.
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