Word: woolsey
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...timing caught the White House by surprise, but the resignation was not unwelcome. Woolsey had barely been on speaking terms the past two years with outgoing Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Dennis DeConcini. Earlier this fall, sources told TIME, eight Republican and Democratic Senators on the committee secretly debated going to the White House to ask that Woolsey be fired. "He wasn't pushed," insisted a Clinton aide. But that was only because Clinton had lately been occupied replacing the departing Secretaries of the Treasury and Agriculture, the Democratic Party chairman and several top White House officials. White House aides...
Both the Administration and Congress had high hopes for Woolsey when he took over the CIA in February 1993. On Capitol Hill he was known as "the Republicans' favorite Democrat" because of his conservative views on defense. He was picked for the job not because he was close to Clinton but because of his resume. A former Navy Under Secretary and arms-control negotiator, Woolsey was seen as the perfect man to shake up what had become a bloated intelligence bureaucracy...
...Instead, Woolsey seemed more interested in fiercely defending the status quo. At his first secret hearing with the Senate Intelligence Committee in the spring of 1993, he stunned the Senators by pounding his fist on the table and accusing them of "decimating" the intelligence budget. The Senators, who had been voting for deep cuts in the defense budget, had asked only that spending for intelligence operations at the CIA, the Pentagon and other agencies remain at the previous year's level of about $28 billion. "Woolsey felt like he knew best, and nobody could tell him otherwise," says DeConcini...
...Woolsey's relations with lawmakers may have suffered, oddly enough, because he spent too much time in their face. His own aides complained that as much as five hours of Woolsey's working day would be consumed with telephoning or visiting Congressmen. He became a compulsive micromanager on any legislation dealing with intelligence. When Republican Senator John Warner wrote to Clinton last June urging that an independent commission be asked to examine the agency's future, CIA officials told TIME, Woolsey tried unsuccessfully to retrieve the letter from the White House mailroom so he could talk Warner into rewriting...
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...