Whoops A Daisy - Goss's Gaffe

A verbal gaffe by Porter Goss led to the exposure of the CIA's post 9/11 secret rendition program, according to the British journalist who broke the story.

An unsolicited remark from Porter Goss, then chairman House Intelligence Committee, led a British journalist to unravel many of the details of the CIA's controversial "extraordinary rendition" program, according to a new book. The disclosure of this highly sensitive operation later prompted a major leak investigation that roiled the agency.

The surprising role of Goss, who later became director of the CIA, in setting London-based reporter Stephen Grey on the trail of the rendition program is revealed in "Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program," to be published this week by St. Martin's Press. ...

(I)n an ironic twist, Grey reports that his initial tip-off to what the CIA was doing came during a Dec. 14, 2001, interview he had with Florida Congressman Goss on Capitol Hill about the war on terror. At the time, Grey, a veteran reporter who wrote for The Sunday Times of London, asked the House Intelligence Committee chairman about the prospect that Osama bin Laden might be captured and turned over to the U.S. government. ...

"Well, there is a polite way to take people out of action and bring them to some type of justice," Goss then says. "It's generally referred to as a rendition." ...

Grey writes that it was this offhand comment by Goss that alerted him to the existence of the highly classified CIA program of "snatches and imprisonment that operates outside normal rules."

"It gave me the germ of the idea," Grey said in an interview. "This is where I heard about it. He set me on the trail." ...

To be sure, Goss made no explicit reference to the details of extraordinary rendition in his comments to the British journalist and even the little he did say involved talk about rendering suspects in order to "bring them to some type of justice." Still, the disclosure that Goss may have played any role at all in the disclosure of the CIA's secret programs may well be pounced on by critics, given his fierce condemnation of any leaks at all when he was CIA director.

In Senate testimony last February, before he resigned as director, Goss said leaks had caused "severe damage" to the agency's operations and called for full-fledged grand-jury investigations to find the leakers. "It is my aim, and it is my hope, that we will witness a grand-jury investigation with reporters present being asked to reveal who is leaking this information. I believe the safety of this nation and the people of this country deserves nothing less." ...

As part of an internal CIA probe into leaks about the CIA's secret prison program, one senior officer, Mary O. McCarthy, was fired last April after agency officials said she acknowledged "unauthorized contacts with the media and discussion of classified information." McCarthy's lawyer, Ty Cobb, later denied she had been the source of the leak and no criminal charges have been filed against her. ...

Grey played a key role in assisting European governments and many Western journalists to discover the CIA's role in these and other renditions through his investigative efforts. What Grey did was to take scraps of information about planes linked to the disappearances of Islamic militants around the world and vigorously trace the aircrafts' origins. Local journalists in Sweden, for example, acquired the tail number of a plane believed to have been involved in the mysterious abduction of an Islamic militant in Stockholm in early December 2001. (Ironically this occurred only a few days after Grey interviewed Goss.)