Military Intelligence

Military Intelligence: A True Oxymoron if not a Dangerous Blend
By Norton Nowlin

For some reason, the average American citizen is awed by the presence of high government officials, especially those reputed by executive department sources and the media to have been privy to state secrets as spies or intelligence agents. They are said to have such honest eyes and believable faces. I suppose that modern movies, which portray exaggerated and propagandized renditions of fictional federal intelligence operations and the heroic paramilitary agents who go about saving the world from disaster, are responsible in large part for the public’s favorable impression of professional spies. Porter Goss is one of those individuals about whom a curriculum vitae has been officially written and circulated by highly talented government propagandists who have recently regaled the impressionable U.S hoi polloi with stories about Goss’s forty-year service with the federal government. Little, however, is actually known about the real Porter Goss, and other people like him, who have done the clandestine bidding of the Central Intelligence Agency, the federal spy corps with the annual three billion dollar budget.

All we actually know about Goss is that he graduated from Yale in 1960, joined the U.S. Army, and was later recruited into the CIA in 1962. After that point, Mr. Goss became a shadowy professional prevaricator, in the ambiguous name of national security, and assumed a trail of pseudonyms and aliases which accompanied him on his exploits in espionage throughout the world. What Mr. Goss officially did as a CIA operative has been classified regardless of whether or not the particular operation was, or was not, sanctioned by Congress. If the covert operations were properly sanctioned by the House and Senate oversight committees, they, in most cases, were correctly classified as top-secret. If the operations weren’t sanctioned, and were illegal rogue activities (which in many cases they was), they was conveniently classified in order to obfuscate the devastating truth.

One of the more curious aspects of Porter Goss’ federal career was his continued under-cover employment with the CIA clandestine services during the time he was supposedly a newspaper publisher and a Florida congressman. Official sources say Goss retired from the CIA in 1970 due to health matters, but other much more reliable sources report that he didn’t actually retire, but assumed cover as an ex-CIA member when he began publishing a Florida newspaper, The Island Reporter, with two other former agents.