Never a quick fix at the CIA

Washington Post: THIS tale, perhaps apocryphal, is one that CIA officers still tell with glee:
It’s the mid-1950s, and two elderly lawmakers sit in a Senate subcommittee hearing room, listening to the CIA’s deputy director of operations drone through his prepared statement on the agency’s latest covert action. The CIA official raises his voice for a moment, more to relieve his own boredom than to stir his audience. “Paramilitary activities,” he intones, “have been an important part of our program since the early days of the Cold War.”
A slumbering senator awakens with a start. “Parliamentary activities?” he bellows. “You fellas can’t go messin’ round with parliaments. I won’t have it!” With that, the octogenarian rose and left the room.
The moral of the story is evident: Not only did the CIA’s legislative watchdog have no teeth, it was sound asleep.
Attorney General Eric Holder’s appointment last week of a special prosecutor to investigate CIA prisoner abuses is but the latest of many efforts to rein in the agency. I’ve been a witness to some of those efforts, as an assistant to Sen. Frank Church of Idaho during his committee’s investigations in the 1970s and later as an aide to former Defense Secretary Les Aspin when he led a probe of agency structures in the aftermath of the Aldrich Ames spying scandal.
Such inquiries can prove useful, leading to critical reforms, stronger oversight and, perhaps most important, changed attitudes about the CIA and other intelligence agencies. But I’ve also learned that high-profile investigations will not transform human nature, turning intelligence officials — or the presidents and White House aides who direct them — into angels, unsusceptible to zeal and folly. Even when the watchdogs on Capitol Hill or in the Justice Department awaken, intelligence abuses and scandals will recur. We will launch new investigations and introduce new reforms, but sometimes all we can do is clean up the messes after the fact. So let’s get used to it.
During the first half of the Cold War, the CIA was largely free of serious congressional supervision. And despite controversies such as the U2 shoot-down over the Soviet Union, the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the covert funding of the National Student Association, the agency escaped widespread public opprobrium. That changed in 1974, when the New York Times’s Seymour Hersh reported that the CIA had deployed its dark arts at home, spying on American citizens. In response, Senate leaders tapped Church to lead the first major investigation of the CIA.
THE Church Committee discovered that CIA had indeed spied on Vietnam War dissenters at home, but the FBI had gone further, disrupting the lives of anti-war protesters and civil rights activists. Church was equally appalled by the overseas excesses of the CIA, including covert actions against democratic regimes — such as Chile’s — and assassination plots. He vowed to take a new approach but found it difficult to learn exactly who told the CIA to do what — a dilemma the nation faces today in trying to understand who ordered secret prisons, harsh interrogations and extraordinary renditions.
After one of our closed sessions on CIA assassination plots, Church leaned back in his chair and rubbed his forehead in frustration. Who had ordered the plots against Patrice Lumumba of Congo and Fidel Castro of Cuba? The president? The director of central intelligence? Someone lower down in the CIA? The testimony from the agency’s witnesses was filled with ambiguities,” Church fumed to a particularly evasive (or forgetful) witness. “And we’re talking about a matter of such grave importance as assassination!” The committee was never able to pinpoint responsibility.
In the wake of the Church Committee inquiry, the majority of lawmakers agreed that sleeping watchdogs were no longer acceptable. Congress established Senate and House intelligence committees; passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to rein in the National Security Agency and created stronger reporting requirements to keep lawmakers on the two committees informed of important intelligence activities. A new era of accountability had dawned in Washington. Or so we thought.
WITHIN a decade, the Iran-Contra scandal revealed more misdeeds, when the Reagan administration and elements of the CIA bypassed oversight procedures to conduct covert actions in the Middle East and in Nicaragua. Then, in 1994, the CIA found itself again on the front pages when it was discovered that a Soviet mole, Aldrich Ames, had effectively dismantled the agency’s spy ring in Moscow. President Bill Clinton appointed Aspin, a former defense secretary and congressman from Wisconsin, to head an inquiry into this treason.
Aspin was determined to scrutinize the nation’s intelligence activities in 1995, but tragically, he died during the inquiry. His replacement, former Defense Secretary Harold Brown, followed Aspin’s agenda, and the commission presented in 1996 several useful (if unheralded) reforms.
With such midcourse corrections US intelligence officers appeared to grow aware of their legal and ethical boundaries and their new and (supposedly) improved oversight from the Hill. But Sept. 11, 2001, changed all that. In the crucible of fear that followed, the safeguards we’d so painstakingly fashioned over the years fell apart. Following directives from the Bush White House and the Justice Department, the CIA ratcheted up its counterterrorism methods, leading to the secret prisons abroad, the kidnapping of terrorism suspects, the use of torture.
But even with improved oversight, human nature decrees that things will go wrong. The president who brought us the CIA in 1947, Harry S. Truman, understood that oversight — though important — would not be enough. “You see, the way a free government works,” he said, “there’s got to be a housecleaning every now and then.”
That is why Holder’s appointment of a federal prosecutor, John Durham, to examine the charges of CIA prisoner abuse is the right call. But a true housecleaning also requires a special commission to explore the broader ethical and foreign policy questions that emerged from the scandal, as well as examine the broader litany of offenses — and lines of responsibility — that took the fight against terrorism off track, transforming it into a war against America’s own ideals.
As with the Church and the Aspin-Brown reforms, success will depend on the willingness of elected officials in the executive and legislative branches to maintain a closer watch over the secret agencies. As another wise president, Thomas Jefferson, understood, vigilance is the price of liberty — an axiom still valid today.