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Porter Johnston Goss (born November 26 1938 ) is an American Politician and the current Director of the Central Intelligence Agency . A CIA operative in Latin America during the Cold War , he served as a Republican member of the U.S. House Of Representatives from 1989 until he took up his post at the agency ¹ . He is believed to be a member of the Book And Snake ( 1960 ), a secret society at Yale University . Goss represented the 14th Congressional District Of Florida , which includes Lee County , Fort Myers , Naples , and part of Port Charlotte . He served for a time as the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee . Goss was a co-sponsor of the controversial USA PATRIOT Act and was a co-chair of the Joint 9/11 Intelligence Inquiry . BIOGRAPHY AND CIA CAREER Goss was born in 1938 in Waterbury , Connecticut . He attended Camp Timanous in Raymond, Maine and was educated at Fessenden , Hotchkiss and Yale University , where he majored in ancient Greek . (Goss also speaks Spanish and French ). In his junior year at Yale, Goss was recruited by the CIA; immediately after graduating in 1960 , he began serving in both the Army and the CIA in Intelligence operations. Goss spent much of the 1960s — roughly from 1960 until 1971 — working for the Directorate of Operations, the clandestine services of the CIA. There he first worked in Latin America and the Caribbean and later in Europe . The details are not known due to the classified nature of the CIA, but Goss has said that he had worked in Haiti , Santo Domingo , and Mexico . Goss, who has said that he has recruited and trained foreign agents, worked in Miami for much of the time. It is speculated that there he took part in the recruitment of Cuban exiles and immigrants for the failed Bay Of Pigs Invasion of Cuba in 1961 , which was crushed by Fidel Castro . Goss was also involved in the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 , telling the '' Washington Post '' in 2002 that he had done some "small-boat handling" and had "some very interesting moments in the Florida Straits ." Towards the end of his career Goss was transferred to Europe. There his career as an officer ended in 1970, when he collapsed in his London hotel room because of a blood infection in his heart and kidneys. Goss says he does not know what happened, but says that he was not poisoned. Some sources now say that Goss suffered a Staph infection. In any case, Goss's health was severely damaged in the incident, and he retired from the CIA. Mr. Goss is known to spend weekends on the exclusive summer colony of Fishers Island , off of New London, Ct. BUSINESS AND POLITICAL CAREER Goss later went into business with two fellow ex-CIA members, founding the ''Island Reporter'' newspaper. Goss also made a fortune in the Florida Real Estate market. He began his political career in 1974 , when he was elected to the Sanibel City Council and was elected mayor by the council. In 1983 , Bob Graham , then Florida Governor , appointed Goss to the Lee County Board of Commissioners. In 1988 Goss ran for Congress in what was then the 13th Congressional District of Florida, encompassing Lee, Charlotte, and Sarasota counties. The seat was vacated by Connie Mack III when Mack ran successfully for the U. S. Senate. In the primaries Goss's main opponent was Louis A. "Skip" Bafalis, a former holder of that congressional seat, which Bafalis had previously relinquished during an unsuccessful campaign for the Florida governorship. Due to his name recognition, Bafalis was the favorite to win the race, however, he only garnered 29% of the vote in the primary to Goss's 38%, largely due to the fact that Goss's campaign was much better financed. Goss went on to defeat Bafalis handily in the run-off election. In the general election, Goss faced the former first president of Common Cause , Jack T. Conway. Goss had no trouble winning the general election in the heavily Republican district, and did not have any significant opposition in his seven subsequent elections. While in the House, Goss served as Chair of the House Intelligence Committee since from 1997 until 2005 and the Vice-Chairman of the House Rules Committee . He also helped establish and served on the Homeland Security Committee. Most of his major legislation has been intelligence authorization bills, with some local constituent-services bills. He sponsored a cost-of-living adjustments (unpassed), The Public Interest Declassification Act of 1999[http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c106:H.R.3152: (unpassed), and the USA PATRIOT Act. Goss has a consistently Right-wing voting record, with the exception of his views towards the environment — Goss supported the Kyoto Protocol and strengthening the Environmental Protection Agency : :"What we really loved him for was his stand on the environment," friend Starr Thomas of Sanibel said. "We moved here from Miami, and we didn't want to see Sanibel go that way."[http://www.news-press.com/news/local_state/040811gosslocal.html] Goss ran unopposed in the 2002 general election. He has never received less than 70 percent of the vote in his district in any of the elections he has contested since 1988 . As a congressman, Goss defended the CIA and supported strong budget increases — some of Goss's critics, even in the Republican party, see him as a believer in the idea that "intel problems can be solved by throwing money and personnel at them." However, in mid-2004, Goss's public statements changed sharply, saying that the CIA is on its way to becoming "a complete waste of money." Accordinging to a September 13, 2004 article in Roll Call (a twice weekly newspaper providing an insider perspective on happenings in Congress), Goss had a net worth of $16.1 million, including at least $500,000 in undeveloped real estate on Fishers Island, N.Y. . SEPTEMBER 11 AND JOINT INQUIRY In August 2001 Goss, Senator on August 28, 2001, Zaeef assured the US delegation that the Taliban would never allow bin Laden to use Afghanistan to launch attacks on the US or any other country. On the morning of September 11, Goss, Graham, Kyl and members of the House Intelligence Committee were having breakfast with General , a joint inquiry of the two intelligence committees, led by Graham and Goss. Goss and Graham made it clear that their goal was not to identify specific wrongdoing: Graham said the inquiry would not play "the blame game about what went wrong from an intelligence perspective,", and Goss said, "This is not a who-shall-we-hang type of investigation. It is about where are the gaps in America's defense and what do we do about it type of investigation." {Link without Title} The '' Washington Post '' reported statements made by Goss of May 17, 2002. Goss said he was looking for "solutions, not Scapegoat s." He called the uproar over the U.S. White House Briefing On Terror Threats Of August 6, 2001 "a lot of nonsense." He also said, "None of this is news, but it's all part of the finger-pointing. It's foolishness." The ''Post'' also reported that Goss refused to blame an "intelligence failure" for September 11, preferring to praise the agency's "fine work."(''Washington Post'', May 18, 2002, "A Cloak But No Dagger; An Ex-Spy Says He Seeks Solutions, Not Scapegoats for 9/11") The inquiry's final report was released in December 2002 and focused entirely on the CIA and FBI 's activities, including no information on the White House's activities. Ray McGovern , a 27-year veteran of the CIA and a frequent commentator on intelligence issues, believed the report showed that Goss gave "clear priority to providing political protection for the president" when conducting the inquiry. EVENTS FOLLOWING INQUIRY REPORT The ''Herald Tribune'' reported his take on the scandal). Goss said he has no evidence that the controversy is more than a product of "wild and unsubstantiated allegations, which are being obviously piled on by partisan politics during an election year." Valerie Plame Wilson was reported by the press to be resigning or taking early retirement from the CIA on December 9, 2005. As MSNBC and CNN[http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/06/24/cia.goss/ reported, in June 2004 Goss's demeanor became markedly more partisan — attacking Sen. John Kerry ( D - Mass. ), the Democratic presidential nominee, for a 1977 quote arguing for intelligence budget cuts and calling Kerry's proposals on nuclear security "dangerously naive." At the same time, in a sharp turn from his earlier statements defending the CIA, Goss said the agency has "been ignoring its core mission activities" and the clandestine service is on its way to being "a stilted bureaucracy incapable of even the slightest bit of success." He called the CIA's human intelligence gathering apparatus "dysfunctional" and averse to change, and charged that its intelligence analysts were timid and lacked proper focus. Tenet called the attacks "ill-informed" and "absurd." Goss also used House rules to keep Democrats from attaching their amendments to the intelligence appropriations bill. CIA DIRECTOR Following the June 3 , 2004 resignation of CIA director George Tenet , Goss was nominated to become the new director on August 10 by President George W. Bush . The appointment was challenged by some prominent Democrats , including former Vice President Al Gore , Sen. Robert Byrd (D- WV ). Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D- WV ), vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, expressed concerns that Goss was too politically partisan, given his public remarks against Democrats while serving as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. Another Democratic member of the committee, Ron Wyden (D- OR ), expressed concerns that given Goss's history within and ties to the CIA, he would be too disinclined to push for institutional change. In an interview on March 3 , 2004 Goss described himself as 'Not qualified' for a job within the CIA, although he was referring to a position as a case officer. (See below) The U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee endorsed his nomination by a 12-4 vote on September 20 , 2004 , and on September 22 he was confirmed by the Senate in a 77-17 vote. Opposition to his nomination came entirely from Democrats ; the Republican senators unanimously backed him, along with many prominent Democrats, including the two Democratic senators from Florida, Bob Graham and Bill Nelson , and the former Senate Minority Leader, Tom Daschle . Plans to improve CIA Rowan Scarborough of '' The Washington Times '' reported: :"Mr. Goss, who chaired the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, publicly has criticized the CIA for a lackluster operations branch that has failed to recruit agents who can penetrate Islamist groups. Critics say Mr. Goss needs to change the culture at Langley." {Link without Title} NOTES ¹ Article I, Section 6 of the Constitution stipulates that no member serving in the legislative branch of the government (that is, in the House or Senate) may serve in a civil service concurrently: Goss had to resign his House seat in order to assume office as the Director. EXTERNAL LINKS
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