Accountability and America's Secret Foreign Policy: Keeping a Legislative Eye on the Central Intelligence Agency

ABSTRACT

Intelligence accountability ("oversight") encompasses the supervision of a vast range of secret activities and 15 major agencies. Oversight since 1975 has been robust compared to earlier years; yet it continues to fall short of goals espoused by the Church Committee that year, as well as by subsequent panels advocating intelligence reform. Lawmakers have responded responsibly to intelligence surprises ("fire alarms"), carrying out probes into domestic spying, assassination plots, and other questionable covert actions, counterintelligence vulnerabilities, and major intelligence failures. They have paid less attention, though, to the day-to-day "police-patrolling" that might uncover weaknesses and eliminate the need for emergency firefighting. Individual members in both branches of Congress have displayed a significant commitment to oversight activities, and now and then the full oversight committees have worked energetically as a unit. Mostly, however, intelligence accountability since 1975 has been a story of discontinuous motivation, ad hoc responses to scandals, and reliance on the initiative of just a few members of Congress—mainly the occasional dedicated committee chair—to carry the burden. Despite the recommendations of several scholarly studies and government reports, absent still is a comprehensive approach to intelligence review that mobilizes most, if not all, of the members of the House and Senate standing committees on intelligence toward a systematic plan of police-patrolling, without waiting for fire alarms.