Since 24 sep this year we have a new CIA chief: Porter J. Goss.
The mini-bio tells us he has “clocked some field time”:
Mr. Goss was a U.S. Army Intelligence officer from 1960 to 1962. He served as a clandestine service officer with the Central Intelligence Agency from 1962 until 1972, when an illness contracted on duty forced him to retire. While in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, he completed assignments in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Europe.
What was that illness? And what were those assignments about? Story material here. My head spins with James Ellroyish speculation-cocktails of JFK’ish power.
Mr. Goss is already in the media with opinions, which put him as a gadget geek more than some gung-ho agent:
Among the champions of the program, officials said, has been Porter J. Goss, the new director of central intelligence[…]. But critics, including Democrats and Republicans on the Senate intelligence committee, have questioned whether any new satellite system could really evade detection by American adversaries and whether its capabilities would improve on those already in existence or in development.
Price of the system: $9.5 billion.
The idea that the disputed program might be a stealth satellite program was proposed in an interview Thursday by John Pike, a satellite expert who heads Globalsecurity.com, a defense and intelligence database. The existence of the first stealth satellite, launched under a program known as Misty, was first reported by Jeffrey T. Richelson in his 2001 book, “The Wizards of Langley: Inside the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology.” Richelson said the first such satellite was launched from the space shuttle Atlantis in March 1990.
Take a look at that GlobalSecurity (capitalization! feh!) website. It looks remarkably un-professional, and does not at all look like the type of source I’d use for… anything. (Centered text? ASCII art way down on the page? A Google search box, in the biggest size and in a contrasting color?) And there was no database access anywhere I could see. Is Mr. Pike hosting that database somewhere else?
OK. Conundrum solved. The website is called dot org, good people at Indystar.com. And its page on Mr. Pike makes him look just like the guy I thought he’d be.