Book Description

This is a study of the CIA's relationship with Congress. It encompasses the period from the creation of the Agency until 2004-the era of the DCIs. When Congress created a new position in December 2004-the director of national intelligence-to supersede the director of central intelligence (DCI) as head of the US Intelligence Community, it necessarily changed the dynamic between the CIA and the Congress. While the director of the Agency would continue to represent its interests on Capitol Hill, he or she would no longer speak as the head of US intelligence. While 2008 is too early to assess how this change will affect the Agency's relationship with Congress, it is safe to say it will never be quite the same. This study is not organized as one might expect. It does not describe what occurred between the Agency and Congress in chronological order nor does it purport to describe every interaction that occurred over the period encompassed by the study. Rather it attempts to describe what the relationship was like over time and then look at what it produced in seven discrete areas. I took this approach for several reasons. First, I found that telling the story in chronological sequence tended to obscure the lessons of the past, rather than illuminate them. Taking everything at once and bringing it forward made it more difficult to discern what was happening. The forest obscured the trees, if you will. Moreover, not everything that transpired in the course of the relationship can be considered historically significant. Even if it were possible to recount every interaction that took place between the Agency and Congress over the 58-year period covered by this study (and it isn't), readers would be wasting their time delving into it. "Slicing and dicing" the subject matter in this way, however, did inevitably lead to a degree of duplication. I tried to deal with this problem by limiting the explanatory material in each chapter to that which was necessary to understanding the points being made in that chapter, even if the same explanatory material were also needed (to a lesser or greater extent) to understand the points being made in other chapters. Hopefully, the reader will bear this in mind (and remain tolerant) where the duplication occurs. An element of subjectivity was also involved in choosing the examples used in the study. Several factors influenced my choices here. First, I wanted to confine myself to episodes that were historically significant and/or would best highlight the issues identified. I also chose episodes, where possible, that had some prior public context. Without it, not only would more explanation be required, but the chances of having it declassified would be practically nil. My intent was to produce an unclassified study, something that could be read by Agency employees outside the office. Readers may be surprised to learn that this created less of a problem than one might expect, since most of the significant interaction that has occurred between Congress and the Agency involves matters that have previously been disclosed in some manner. The reader should not expect to find, however, detailed descriptions of the episodes chosen for the narrative. In order to keep the study to a manageable length, I deliberately tried to distill the descriptions of the events I chose into readable summaries. What I am principally concerned with here is the congressional involvement in these episodes, not with what the Agency did or did not do that prompted Congress to become involved. Indeed, books have been written about many of the episodes described here. I am not attempting to replicate what is already in the public domain with respect to the Agency's past, but rather to describe how the Agency engaged with Congress with respect to its past. Readers who want more detail concerning the Agency's activities alluded to in the study will need to consult other sources.