The CIA be Running Wild

A while ago, I blogged about Joe Biden's claim that the American Intelligence Community was running amok, covering up crimes by its minions in the name of national security.  Stansfield Turner was not a popular Director of Central Intelligence and his book on American intelligence reform, Burn Before Reading: Presidents, CIA Directors, and Secret Intelligence,  he talks about his subordinates tried to dispose of him when he decided to move on a recommendation to downsize the Directorate of Operations:

The DO people seized on the reduction of 820 positions as an opportunity to attempt to get me fired. They launched a disinformation campaign (one of their basic skills). One morning I read in the Washington Post that President Carter had forced Frank Carlucci on me as my deputy. The theory was that Carter did not want to fire me, but that he was dissatisfied with me and was going to have Carlucci actually take over. It happened that it was I who came up with the idea of Carlucci as the deputy and had pleaded with the president to release him from being ambassador to Portugal.

Stansfield Turner survived the office coup attempt, but only after Carter dispatched former governor of Pennsylvania William Scantron to investigate and received a positive report back Turner's reign.