Porter Goss "Just One of Those Mysteries..."

Porter Goss is late, he's late, he's late for an important date...


Porter Goss, one of the last of the Dulles era CIA generation, stepped down abruptly last Friday. A native of Waterbury Connecticut, Goss went on to Yale where he majored in the study of Ancient Greek. Goss is generally accepted to have been a leading member of The Book and the Snake Society, a secret society as old as Skull and Bones but "more progressive". Also, members during his Book and Snake tenure were "Uncle Bucky" Bush and Intel big-wig John Negropante. In his junior year at Yale he was recruited by the CIA.

The Book and the Snake Society picture including "Uncle Bucky" Bush, Porter Goss and John Negropante.A close-up of "Uncle Bucky" Bush and Porter Goss from the same picture

For the next 15 years he would work for the Directorate of Operations, primarily in the Carribean and Latin America. On 4th March, 1960, La Coubre, a ship flying a Belgian flag, exploded in Havana Bay. It was loaded with arms and ammunition for Castro. The explosion killed 75 people and over 200 were injured. Fabian Escalante, a G-2 agent at the State Department would later claim this was the first action of a new CIA task force called "Operation 40." 40 stood for 40 agents (although it was quickly expanded to 70) and began as a Latin American sabotage and infiltration team, but quickly evolved into an elite assasination squad based out of Mexico City. Perhaps their most famous exploit was nearly exposed by the House Subcommittee on Assassinations in 1976, when Antonio Vesciana, leader of the exile terrorist group Alpha 66, claimed to have recieved $253,000 from an agent called Maurice Bishop (speculated to be intelligence super-move David Atlee Phillips, who would go on to achieve the unheard of intelligence clearence of GS 18, and headed the task force that likely presided over the excecution of Chilean Socialist President Salvador Allende) to enact a hit on Castro himself. Phillips was also an interesting character leaving behind an unpublished "novel" manuscript about a CIA officer in Mexico City in which he writes...
"I was one of those officers who handled Lee Harvey Oswald... We gave him the mission of killing Fidel Castro in Cuba... I don't know why he killed Kennedy. But I do know he used precisely the plan we had devised against Castro. Thus the CIA did not anticipate the president's assassination, but it was responsible for it. I share that guilt."
Regardless, Goss was a key agent in Operation 40, likely had a hand in the planning and excecution of The Bay of Pigs (in 2002, he told the Washington Post that he had done some "small boat handling" off Florida and had some "very interesting moments in the Florida straights.") Abruptly transfered to Europe, Goss collapsed with blood poisoning in his mod London hotel in 1970. Spun as a staph infection, much speculation has swirled as to what might have caused Goss to run afoul of Nixon and GHWB. The "infection" effectively ended Goss' active carreer. After "leaving the agency" (haha), Goss went on to make an easy fortune in Florida real estate and gradaully ascend the ranks in Washington. Clearly back on the team for the big win, Goss and Florida Senator Bob Graham had a cordial brekfast with General Mahmoud Ahmad, the head of Pakistan's ISI intelligence service on the morning of September 11th 2001. The ISI had up to that time effectively created the Taliban as a military-political entity and sheltered Al CIA-duh. In the severe news blackout that followed it took a French paper to report on the sketchy Islamabad brunch. Goss and Graham later became co-chairs of the Joint Inquiry into Intelligence failures on 911. This after, Goss angrily dismissed calls for an inquiry weeks after the event. They didn't turn up that much, so probably his initial inclination was right. The new spin on Goss' resignation is that his connection to disgraced agent Dusty Foggo and his alleged pimping for Congressmen at the Watergate Hotel (really, it's just a nice hotel...it's hard to get a good room in Washington) has un-manned him. Evidently, Foggo's bashes included lavish whores and booze for big contributors to Bush's 2004 re-election campaign, nicknamed The Pioneers. Well, maybe that's it. But if we think that these "parties" are just a bunch of Elks at a stag party drinking natty lite and waiting for the strippers to show up we are sadly naive, I fear. Think about that NPR show we all heard a few years ago. If you really want to plan a really illegal party you really have to go with the Agency that trades in the best drugs, sex slaves and discreet locales. As to the ultimate cause of Goss' sidelining it'll have to remain "just one of those mysteries."

Below, Operation 40 members pictured at a swank Mexico City nighclub in 1963. Goss 2nd from left, looking away.