Word: woolsey
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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When the Ames case broke, Woolsey acted like a lawyer defending a client rather than a director intent on cleaning up the worst spy scandal in the agency's history. Woolsey has estimated that Ames compromised more than 100 operations, which led to the death of at least 10 Soviet agents who had been working for the U.S. A CIA inspector general's report last September accused the agency's operations directorate of gross mismanagement for taking so long to uncover Ames. Senior CIA officials privately urged Woolsey to fire or demote some agency officers even before the inspector general...
These lax punishments enraged Congress and devastated morale in the agency. Young case officers had chafed under the CIA's authoritarian bureaucracy and had been privately demanding a housecleaning. Sept. 28, the date Woolsey announced his punishments in the case, was dubbed "Whitewash Wednesday" by the disgruntled spies. After the announcement, the operations directorate opened a secret hotline so case officers could vent their complaints. It was flooded with so many angry calls that embarrassed officials shut it down after 24 hours...
Supporters of Woolsey argue that he inherited many of the CIA's worst problems. Ames' spying did not occur on his watch. Nor did decades of sexual discrimination in the agency, which prompted 100 female case officers to threaten a class-action lawsuit. The CIA recently settled for $410,000 a suit by a senior female officer who charged that she was harassed by its old-boy network after she exposed carousing, wife beating and drunken behavior among male officers in the agency's Jamaica station. During his tenure, Woolsey worked to promote more women into the upper ranks...
...Woolsey made other improvements as well. He forced CIA analysts to write crisper intelligence reports for the White House. He oversaw plans for cutting almost 25% of the CIA's work force of more than 20,000 by the end of the decade, ahead of the schedule the Administration set for the reductions. "Jim Woolsey was a sincere and decent man who had an impossible task," says Angelo Codevilla, an intelligence expert with the Hoover Institution. "He was a much better director than the CIA was an agency...
...little direction. The CIA launched a charm offensive immediately after Clinton was elected, sending its top analysts to Arkansas to brief the new President and letting him know that they were staying in one of Little Rock's cheapest motels. But Clinton has kept his distance from the agency. Woolsey complained that he was cut out of the White House inner circle. "People want the intelligence community to shrink, but at the same time they have more and more things they want it to be on top of," says former CIA director William Webster. In leading the agency into...