The damage done to the CIA by this congressional oversight regime is quite extensive. The real aberration occurred in the mid-1970s when the United States granted its legislative branch the greatest control over intelligence matters of any Western nation, and overturned the system which had prevailed in the United States since the Founding. This pattern persisted until the mid-1970s with little or no change, other than the increasing size and bureaucratization of the nation’s intelligence apparatus in the twentieth century. Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Andrew Jackson, and Abraham Lincoln, all authorized clandestine operations out of this fund, and did not report the details to Congress. The president was not required to report how he spent this money, he merely had to divulge the amount of money spent, without revealing to whom or for what reasons it had been spent. Washington was given this fund, in the amount of $40,000, a sizable sum in the early 1790s. President Washington, in his first annual message to Congress in 1790, requested a Contingency Fund, or “secret service” fund, as one member of Congress described it. Senator Frank Church and his allies claimed that an assertive legislative role would bring the United States “back to the genius of the Founding Fathers.” This assertion was made despite the fact that American presidents from 1789 to 1974 were given wide latitude to conduct clandestine operations they believed were in the national interest. It is still widely believed that the Church and Pike reforms were an attempt to cure a “cancerous” growth on the Constitution that had developed during the Cold War, an era which witnessed an increasing reliance on executive secrecy and the creation of a “private army” for the president in the form of the CIA. Spurred on by the sensational revelations of the Church Committee hearings in the Senate and the Pike Committee in the House, both bodies established permanent intelligence committees.11 Proponents of congressional intelligence oversight argued that openness and accountability were the cornerstone of a legitimate foreign policy, and it was believed that Congress, due to its diversity of opinion, possessed greater wisdom than the executive branch. Secrecy was seen as antithetical to the American way, and there was widespread agreement that “rogue” agencies such as the CIA were a threat to liberty. In the aftermath of Vietnam, Watergate, and revelations of CIA assassination plots and domestic spying, Congress moved in the mid-1970s to “reassert” its role in shaping American foreign policy, including the most controversial tool of that policy, covert action. ![]() The story of how the executive branch lost its control over the CIA is well known, but deserves a retelling, since it is often presented incompletely. ![]() ![]() Any “reform” is doomed to fail if Congress continues to play its role as a partner, if not outright “owner,” in the management of the CIA. Under both Democratic and Republican chairmen, the intelligence committees have transformed the CIA into the functional equivalent of the Department of Agriculture, preventing the agency from acting in a shrewd and, as is sometimes necessary, ruthless manner. If the committees are interested in genuine reform, they would do well to begin by acknowledging their own culpability in crippling the agency. It would be shortsighted for the intelligence committees to place the blame for this latest intelligence failure exclusively on the CIA’s management. Some committee members want to see CIA Director George Tenet replaced, others are demanding radical changes in both the analytical and operational divisions of the agency. One utterly predictable response to the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington were calls by members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees to “shake-up” the Central Intelligence Agency.
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