El Gaviero

Old, old news, but it deserves a post: Ex-U.S. ambassador to Bolivia–and persona non-grata in that country–Philip Goldberg was nominated last month for the head position of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the U.S. State Department. Goldberg, if you remember, was caught meeting secretly with members of the Bolivian opposition in Santa Cruz last year, when a Bolivian civil war was nearly in the cards. He’s also been accused of trying to turn the Peace Corps into a spy-recruitment organization. So this appointment isn’t exactly a huge leap for Goldberg, who also appears to have been working hand-in-glove with the CIA during his tenure in Bolivia.
Bolivian president Evo Morales, in an expansive mood (as usual), gave a great quote to the Latin American Herald Tribune:

“Now we see that Goldberg was not a diplomat but an intelligence agent that sought to divide Bolivia, and now President Obama has given him intelligence position,” [Morales] said.

But what, pray tell, is the “Bureau of Intelligence and Research”? The State Department has a rather banal description (read it here). From Wikipedia we glean that it’s one of 16 intelligence agencies in the U.S. Which means that Goldberg is pretty damn spooky!–contrary to his denials of Bolivian spookery last year.
(To give the bureau credit, it was on of the few spy agencies to express skepticism of pre-Iraq invasion intelligence.)