According to the
Financial Times, it's not only current CIA agents who are being targeted by Porter Goss, but former CIA agents are being threatened with having their pensions taken away from them if they have "unauthorized" conversations with the media.
A former official said the CIA recently warned several retired employees who have consulting contracts with the agency that they could lose their pensions by talking to reporters without permission. He added that while the threats might be legally "hollow," they were having a chilling effect on former employees.
According to this article, Larry Johnson, who has been talking to Keith Olberman (via six degrees of aaron) a lot lately, and has been a media commentator for the last several years, has received one of these letters.
Mr Johnson - who has criticised the White House for not aggressively investigating the outing of Valerie Plame, a former covert operative, said it was the first such letter he had received despite regularly commenting in the media on intelligence matters since his retirement in 1989. He said other former employees also received letters.
He said the CIA was also "very forceful" in intimidating a retired official who maintains ties to the agency after he signed a letter criticising the administration over the Plame leak.
Steve Clemons of The Washington Note says Porter Goss is threatening to become the Dr Strangelove of National Intelligence and the CIA with this and other draconian measures to try to stop politically damaging information from getting to the press, and for his McCarthy-style (hat tip: vyan) purges of politically undesirable CIA employees.
How much more of this is happening that we don't know about, and how many whistleblowers will never be heard from in this "police state" gone far too far, as Steve Clemons says.