Sources at odds; turf war, Wilkes fallout cited in CIA chief's exit

The resignation of CIA Director Porter Goss came just a day after the head of the House Intelligence Committee said an independent investigator may review Poway defense contractor Brent Wilkes' relationship with CIA officials.

Sources close to the intelligence community strongly deny that the work of the independent investigator – or recent news coverage of Wilkes' parties with CIA officials – caused Goss to quit.

They say the resignation had more to do with a turf war between Goss and his immediate supervisor, John Negroponte, director of national intelligence.

But some sources said Goss' position as head of the CIA was weakened by the latest bout of negative publicity surrounding Wilkes, whom federal prosecutors have identified as a co-conspirator in the bribery case of former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham.

Reports in The San Diego Union-Tribune and The Wall Street Journal last week revealed that the FBI is probing whether Wilkes hired prostitutes on behalf of legislators who visited his hotel suites in Washington, D.C.

At the time, Wilkes was lobbying for contracts on Capitol Hill.

Through his attorney, Wilkes denied hiring prostitutes. Wilkes' suites at the Watergate and Westin Grand hotels were used for several purposes, including weekly poker games with high-ranking CIA officers such as his longtime friend Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, the third-highest officer in the CIA.
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Goss's ties to the Cunningham/Wilkes investigation have taken precedence in the media's reporting regarding his resignation. The media should also drudge up (pardon the pun) the fact that on the morning of 9/11/01, Porter Goss was having breakfast with General Mahmoud Ahmad of Pakistan.

Ahmad was the Chief of the Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI, who ordered $100,000 deposited into the Florida bank account of one Mohammed Atta. Oddly, George W. Bush personally ordered that Mahmoud not be investigated.

An deeper look at the ISI and 9/11
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It is expected that Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, former head of the NSA, will replace Goss at the CIA. [Hayden's Bio]

Hayden had been intrumental in the Bush administration's illegal wiretapping of American citizens, and in perpetuating what was once known at Total Information Awareness.

From a 12/19/05 press briefing regarding the NSA wiretaps:

Q Can you assure us that all of these intercepts had an international component and that at no time were any of the intercepts purely domestic?

GENERAL HAYDEN: The authorization given to NSA by the President requires that one end of these communications has to be outside the United States. I can assure you, by the physics of the intercept, by how we actually conduct our activities, that one end of these communications are always outside the United States of America.

On April 6, 2006 Alberto Gonzales implies that Hayden was lying:

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales suggested on Thursday for the first time that the president might have the legal authority to order wiretapping without a warrant on communications between Americans that occur exclusively within the United States.

And, on December 20, 2005 the New York Times proves it:

A surveillance program approved by President Bush to conduct eavesdropping without warrants has captured what are purely domestic communications in some cases, despite a requirement by the White House that one end of the intercepted conversations take place on foreign soil, officials say.