For decades, the CIA director was also in charge of coordinating the activities of other intelligence agencies. But Congress voted in 2004 to strip away that function as part of a sweeping overhaul based on recommendations of the commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks.
Proponents argued that the CIA director needed to focus exclusively on managing the agency. But skeptics, including Tenet, warned that splitting the jobs would create a dangerous bureaucratic distance between the nation's intelligence chief and the organization responsible for carrying out its most sensitive spying operations.
The White House denied Saturday that President Bush had lost faith in Goss. White House spokeswoman Dana Perino told reporters traveling with the president to Oklahoma that Goss had "helped transform the agency to meet the challenging times we're living in." Goss took the helm at the CIA in September 2004, with the ambition of re-energizing the agency.
But Goss' ouster was the clearest indication yet of the level of frustration within the Bush administration over the pace of progress on a range of issues. These issues include redeploying resources in the fight against terrorism and weapons proliferation, and accelerating the flow of information across an often unwieldy constellation of spy agencies.
Goss' resignation came just 19 months into his tenure, and his departure is likely to trigger a major reshuffling of the agency's senior ranks.
The churning has not been limited to the CIA.
At the intelligence arm of the FBI, Maureen Baginski, a top National Security Agency official recruited by FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III in 2003 to develop a new intelligence operation in the bureau, resigned last summer after just two years on the job. Her resignation came after criticisms of the bureau by a special presidential commission on intelligence, and a decision to make the agency more accountable to the director of national intelligence.
Just last month, the chief of the FBI's National Security Branch, which oversees the agency's intelligence-gathering and counter-terrorism operations, announced that he was retiring to take a job in private industry. A 29-year FBI employee, Gary Bald had been in the national security post only nine months. An FBI spokesman said the departure was unrelated to any problems with Negroponte.
