Sorting wildcats

If anyone had any doubts that things were going to get a whole lot uglier at the CIA before they started getting better, an article by Knut Royce in Monday's New York Newsday should dispel them:

The White House has ordered the new CIA director, Porter Goss, to purge the agency of officers believed to have been disloyal to President George W. Bush or of leaking damaging information to the media about the conduct of the Iraq war and the hunt for Osama bin Laden, according to knowledgeable sources.

"The agency is being purged on instructions from the White House," said a former senior CIA official who maintains close ties to both the agency and to the White House. "Goss was given instructions ... to get rid of those soft leakers and liberal Democrats. The CIA is looked on by the White House as a hotbed of liberals and people who have been obstructing the president's agenda."

According to Newsday, two of the first heads to roll will be Stephen Kappes, deputy director of clandestine services, and Michael Scheuer, former head of the CIA's bin Laden unit (and author of a pair of Bush-bashing tomes, Through Our Enemies' Eyes: Osama Bin Laden, Radical Islam and the Future of America and Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror). Kappes and Scheuer have been all but openly campaigning on behalf of John Kerry for months now, so their departure will come as a welcome relief to the White House. It also looks like the administration has enlisted Kerry's old pal, John McCain, to help provide covering fire. McCain is quoted in an AFP wire story as saying:   "This kind of shake up is absolutely necessary. This is a dysfunctional agency and in some ways a rogue agency." McCain is clearly in a better position than anyone in the administration to point out the elephant that's been standing in the middle of the room since 9/11.

Moreover, as John Hinderaker of Powerline observes, the Newsday article is the strongest evidence we've seen to date that Porter Goss fully intends to do at Langley  what the Marines have been doing in Fallujah. Expect fierce resistance and heavy casualties on both sides.