One-Liner of the Day:Conquering the CIA

The New York Times (link) this morning documents the difficulties encountered by Porter Goss when he tried to control of the CIA’s “operations wing.” The Times recounts how Goss discovered “that operatives who were trained to destabilize foreign governments could sometimes put those same skills to work inside the agency.” And then:

In a striking metaphor for Mr. Goss’s powerlessness, as officers of the Directorate of Operations, or D.O., ignored his instructions and shunned his staff, he later told a colleague that “when he pulled a lever to make something happen in the D.O., it wasn’t just that nothing happened,” the colleague recalled. “It was that the lever came off in his hands.”