Intelligence Reform, The Third Act.(Review)

Publication: ORBIS

Publication Date: 01-JAN-01

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COPYRIGHT 2001 JAI Press, Inc.

Fixing the Spy Machine: Preparing American Intelligence for the Twenty-First Century. By Arthur S. Hulnick. (New York: Praeger, 1999. 222 pp. $65.00; $19.95, paper.)

Intelligence: From Secrets to Policy. By Mark M. Lowenthal. (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Books, 1999. 276 pp. $28.95, paper.)

On Intelligence: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World. By Robert David Steele. (Fairfax, Va.: AFCEA International Press, 2000. 495 pp. $34.95.)

Flawed By Design: The Evolution of the CIA, JCS, and NSC. By Amy B. Zegart. (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999. 342 pp. $45.00.)

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about efforts to reform U.S. intelligence collection and analysis is simply how long the nation has been working on it. The campaign for intelligence reform is an enterprise spanning almost three decades, or long enough to fill the entire career of a public official, academic, reporter, or pundit. This seemingly endless process has evolved through three phases to date. The first began around 1973, when the press reported widespread allegations of illegal or improper activities by U.S. intelligence agencies. The resulting controversy led to the Church and Pike Committee hearings, which in turn led to the establishment of the congressional oversight system we have today.

Phase Two began roughly in 1986 with the Iran-Contra affair. Relations between the congressional overseers and the intelligence community had been tense throughout the administration of Ronald Reagan. Thanks to issues such as covert action and U.S. support for the Nicaraguan anticommunist resistance, the oversight committees and the director of central intelligence, William Casey, regarded each other with deep suspicion. It did not help that Americans were sharply divided over how to wage the Cold War (a fact that has been obscured over time). Disclosure of the arms-for-hostages deal brought the conflict to a head and led to congressional investigation and a legal prosecution.

These investigations became a quest to link top administration officials to illegal acts and sparked an effort to establish tighter rules for notifying Congress before a covert operation could be undertaken. Both efforts failed. Casey fell ill just as the investigations began and died soon after. The convictions of Oliver North and John Poindexter, the two other officials most closely linked to the scandal, were overturned on legal technicalities, whereupon the investigations ran into a dead end. When Congress passed legislation that would have tightened the rules requiring the president to notify Congress before undertaking covert action, President Bush vetoed the bill and legislators lacked the votes to override him. Investigators then dropped their prosecution of the legal case, and Phase Two ended with senior intelligence officials' simply promising to work more closely with Congress. The election of Bill Clinton in 1992 probably also defused the confrontation, as it gave the Democratic Party control of both the presidency and majorities in the House and Senate. Several of the congressional staffers who took part in the investigations were appointed to positions in the intelligence community during the new administration, further easing tensions about oversight.

We are now in Phase Three, punctuated in turn by the Aldrich Ames espionage case and several glaring intelligence failures (notably, the Indian nuclear tests and a North Korean missile test), along with several lesser gaffes. The National Reconnaissance Office was charged with using funds improperly. The CIA was criticized for using agents guilty of human rights violations in Guatemala. Former director of central intelligence (DCI) John Deutch was criticized for using an unsecure computer to do classified work at home, and several top CIA officials were accused of failing to investigate the matter aggressively once it had been discovered.

But the biggest challenge in Phase Three has been figuring out what the intelligence community should do in the post--Cold War world and how it should do it. Several government and private commissions began to study this question in...

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