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Streamlining Congressional Oversight of the CIA
| Article
# : |
19314 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1991 |
2,004 Words |
| Author
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Ray S. Cline
Ray S. Cline, former CIA deputy director for intelligence, is
chairman of the United States Global Strategy Council. |
Clearly there is a great deal of restiveness and confusion in Congress now about how to deal with the armed forces and the intelligence community in light of America's spectacular success in using both high-technology intelligence systems and military power in the Persian Gulf War. Demands are being made to reduce military budgets drastically and even to abolish the CIA.
The Senate usually has been more responsible in the oversight of intelligence, probably because it shares with the president the constitutional duty of ratifying foreign treaties. The House, on the other hand, has been rather frivolous in dealing with its oversight responsibilities from their inception with the original Otis G. Pike committee in 1975. For its own purposes, it tried to capitalize on the publicity Sen. Frank Church was getting in the same period by investigating and exposing the processes and programs employed by the CIA and other intelligence agencies. That is the way democracies work, but both the Church and Pike Committees went overboard in exposing the CIA.
Since that day, it seems, some members of these oversight committees and their personal staffs have from time to time leaked interesting items to the press rather than soberly monitored ways to support and improve national foreign intelligence programs.
One reason is that congressmen are never subjected to the personal security investigations that all executive branch employees receiving secret information must undergo. The oversight committees do require their staffs to have security clearances, but there are such a large number of staff officers rotating through them that security regulations are not always rigorously supervised.
Though a few congressmen are confirmed left-wingers, they need no security clearance even if they are on committees that receive classified secret information. Those who serve on the oversight committees are ideal repositories for material sought by Soviet, Chinese, and Cuban agents active in the United States.
This anomaly is something that should be corrected because the lives of individual operations in the intelligence services may be endangered if intelligence sources and methods are exposed, as they sometimes are. The director of central intelligence is charged with protecting sources and methods, but it is hard to see how he can discharge his duties if he is obliged to provide detailed data on intelligence activities to all the members of the Senate and
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