The bureaucracy wins.(Central Intelligence Agency's Porter Goss )

WE'RE tempted to conclude that CIA operatives are still capable of deposing leaders--if only the leaders sent to clean up their agency. Porter Goss is out as the head of the CIA, after 18 frustrating months attempting to reform the recalcitrant spy agency that has in recent years been notably effective only in opposing Bush's policies.

Goss had three major problems to fix. First, the CIA's analytical track record is poor. Frequently, it "under-connected the dots" and failed to assess accurately threats to U.S. national security. This is what happened in the first Gulf War, when the CIA's pre-war intelligence underestimated Saddam's WMD programs, and again in the years leading to 9/11. At other times, CIA analysts "over-connected the dots"--overestimating, beginning in the late 1990s, the extent of Saddam's WMD stockpiles.

Second, the agency is inept at its core mission of waging covert operations against America's enemies. Its capabilities had been eroded during repeated political witch hunts, beginning with the Church committee hearings of the 1970s and continuing into the Clinton administration, when several senior CIA operatives were reprimanded for recruiting alleged human-rights violators. These external pressures, combined with the unwillingness or inability of a long line of CIA directors to reward initiative and punish failure, have fostered a risk-averse and dysfunctional bureaucratic culture within the agency's covert-action directorate.

Third, while much of the permanent bureaucracy in Washington tends to lean to the left and resent policy innovations by conservative Republican administrations, this problem is particularly acute at the ...