Porter Goss - Education and Early CIA Career

Education and Early CIA Career

Goss was born in Waterbury, Connecticut, the son of Virginia Holland (née Johnston) and Richard Wayne Goss, who was an executive of the Scovill Manufacturing Company (a corporation controlled by the Goss family). He attended Camp Timanous in Raymond, Maine and was educated at the Fessenden School. In 1956, he graduated from the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Connecticut.

Goss studied at Yale University, where received his Bachelor of Arts majoring in ancient Greek. (Goss also speaks Spanish and French). At Yale, he was a member of Book and Snake, a secret society at Yale. He was a member of the Psi Upsilon fraternity alongside William H.T. Bush, the uncle of President George W. Bush, and John Negroponte, who served as an ambassador for George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, and as Goss's superior in the post of Director of National Intelligence from 2005 to 2006. Negroponte solicited Goss's assistance, while Goss was Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, to get the position as US ambassador to the United Nations in the first term of the second Bush administration.

In his junior year at Yale, Goss was recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency. He spent much of the 1960s — roughly from 1960 until 1971 — working for the Directorate of Operations, the clandestine services of the CIA. There he first worked in Latin America and the Caribbean and later in Europe. The full details are not known due to the classified nature of the CIA, but Goss has said that he had worked in Haiti, Santo Domingo, and Mexico. A photograph taken in Mexico City in January 1963 shows Goss with his arm around David Sánchez Morales, at a table with Barry Seal and other CIA members of Operation 40, a U.S.-backed right-wing assassination squad.

Goss, who has said that he has recruited and trained foreign agents, worked in Miami for much of the time. Goss was involved in the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, telling the Washington Post in 2002 that he had done some "small-boat handling" and had "some very interesting moments in the Florida Straits."

Towards the end of his career as a CIA officer, Goss was transferred to Europe, where, in 1970, he collapsed in his London hotel room because of a blood infection in his heart and kidneys. Goss says he does not know what happened, but says that he was not poisoned. Some sources now say that Goss suffered a staph infection. In any case, his health was severely affected, and he retired from the CIA.