Challenging the Secret Government: The Post-Watergate Investigations of the CIA and the FBI.

About a year ago at a tony Washington party, I joined a conversation with Anthony Lake, the national security adviser to President Clinton. At the time, the CIA was yet again mired in public controversy. It had been disclosed that a Guatemalan military thug--implicated in the murders of an American hotelier and a rebel leader married to an American--had been on the agency payroll. There were the usual calls for congressional investigation and institutional reform, and renewed questions about the role of the post-Cold War intelligence community. Naturally, the talk at the party turned to this Guatemalan business. What would the White House do about the CIA in response to the latest scandal? Lake was asked. "We don't have a dog in this fight," he replied.

To Lake, the current controversy was mostly a cat-and-dog scuffle between the CIA and the State Department. But his comment was an astonishing recognition of the President's unwillingness to take full responsibility for the CIA--which does, theoretically at least, exist to serve him. No serious effort would be made by the White House to rethink or remake the CIA in these post-Soviet days.

That's par for the course. True reform of the cloak-and-dagger community--that is, reform predicated on a serious evaluation of the necessity (if any) for Constitution-defying instruments such as the CIA and its acronymic brethren--has proven to be the most elusive of goals in Washington.

A recent spate of reports advertise themselves as blueprints for intelligence reform, but they are mostly guides for tinkering. The Council on Foreign Relations, the Republicans of the House Intelligence Committee, and a presidential commission established by Clinton in the wake of various scandals (among them the Ames travesty) each have coughed up so-called programs for change. But, as former CIA analyst Melvin Goodman notes, "major problems received little scrutiny from these studies and major questions went unanswered. For example, what is the proper role for espionage and covert action in the post-Cold War era? What is a proper expenditure for intelligence? ... Which intelligence programs are making a difference in addressing national security threats and which programs can be reduced or abandoned?"

These paper-tiger reports fit nicely into the long, ignoble history of intelligence reform, as we are reminded by Kathryn Olmsted in her well-researched study, Challenging the Secret Government. Olmsted, a lecturer at the University of California at Davis, takes us back to the mid-1970s, when the spooks were on the run. The Vietnam War had produced a crop of CIA horror stories, and the CIA connections of the Watergate burglars had directed more unwanted attention toward the spy service. Then came a series of disclosures: the CIA had meddled in Chile, and it had engaged in a massive spying campaign against Americans. The latter scandal prompted a rash of inquiries. President Ford convened a commission and the House and Senate formed special committees to study intelligence abuses. Legislators called for massive restructuring of the CIA. Pundits suggested an end to the agency's covert actions. Far-ranging reform seemed practically inevitable.

It does not detract from Olmsted's book that we know the eventual result: piddling reform. She ably chronicles the fall from high expectation to Washington handwringing. When the investigations began in the mid-seventies, it was imaginable that the revelations of intelligence malfeasance--assassination attempts against foreign leaders, a plot that slipped LSD to unwitting Americans, a mail-opening operation, schemes to undermine democratic elections overseas--might end Americans' deference to secret government.

But when the spy dust had settled, the reformers had almost nothing to show. The House voted to suppress the final--and damning--report of its Pike Committee. (A leaked copy of the report, initially published in The Village Voice, remains one of the most penetrating analyses of intelligence operations.) The Senate's Church Committee managed only one reform: the establishment of a Senate committee to oversee the intelligence community. Their record has been--at the very best--spotty.

Olmsted argues that after Vietnam and Watergate, the body politic could no longer process more bad news about its government and was tired of troubling revelations. Such information was "not the kind of truths we most need now," said Senator J. William Fulbright, who had been a crusading opponent of the Vietnam War. This sort of thinking and general scandal fatigue also inflicted the media. Olmsted explodes the myth that this era was a time of journalistic courage and a heyday of investigative reporting. After the Pentagon Papers episode and then Watergate, the prestige media revived its deferential posture toward the national security club. The editorial boards of both The Washington Post and The New York Times requested caution from the committees investigating the CIA (The Times was the first in the media to discover that the CIA had tried to murder foreign leaders, but it did not run the story because its editors had learned this during a meeting with President Ford. After he blurted out the secret, Ford insisted it was off the record. The paper abided by the President's request.)

With the mainstream media not pressing the investigators of Congress, it is no surprise the investigations yielded no real change. Congress has never done a good job on the intelligence front. When it held hearings on the National Security Act, which created the CIA in 1947, it left untouched the topic of covert operations and psychological warfare. To their credit, the lawmakers apparently thought they were establishing an outfit to gather and evaluate foreign intelligence--not one that would run secret wars, produce propaganda, foment coups, and the like. In later years, there was no congressional scrutiny of the philosophy that allowed the spooks (and the Presidents who dispatched them) to engage in such dirty work. A 1954 presidential commission determined that "Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply" in the Cold War. "[We] must learn to subvert, sabotage, and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated, and more effective methods than those used against us. It may become necessary that the American people be made acquainted with ... this fundamentally repugnant philosophy." But the American people were never given that courtesy.

As ineffectual as congressional reform efforts have been, White House proposals often make things worse. Clinton's commission on the CIA has recommended transferring CIA analysis of satellite photography to a Defense Department outfit. This would designate the Pentagon--which has a budgetary interest in overinflating threats from abroad--the sole authority for interpreting weapon developments in other nations.

There has never been much of a political upside to trekking through the vexing and difficult terrain of intelligence reform. Today, Clinton and his advisers, such as Tony Lake, do not see it as their mission to address, let alone question, the deeply entrenched assumptions of the secret bureaucracy. (The budget of the intelligence community is reportedly $29 billion--about the size of Russia's entire military budget.) The spooks take the occasional bashing in the press for, say, misplacing billions of dollars or hobnobbing with killers. They may have to grimace through the rare congressional hearing. But they really have it quite good, remaining well-protected from the most dangerous of threats: Americans who dare to question the rationale for the existence of such an expensive and extensive spy apparatus.