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Stuart Farson and Mark Phythian. Commissions of Inquiry and
National
Security. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, .
http://www.praeger.com.ezproxy2.apus.edu/.
INVESTIGATIVE OVERSIGHT OF THE AMERICAN
INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY: PROMISE AND
PERFORMANCE
Glenn Hastedt
In 2002, Senator Trent Lott (R-MS) rose to the floor and spoke
on the subject of
special commissions, specifically the creation of the 9/11
Commission. He
observed that in his opinion congressional commissions were
“an abdication of
responsibility.” Why, he wondered, “do we have an Armed
Services Committee,
an Intelligence Committee, a Government Affairs Committee, or
a Foreign
Affairs Committee?” His objections were to no avail, and in
November of that
year the 9/11 Commission, formally known as the National
Commission on

Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, was created. Two
years later, when
President George W. Bush signed the Intelligence Reform and
Terrorism
Prevention Act of 2004, which incorporated one of the key 9/11
Commission
reform proposals, that of establishing a director of national
intelligence, he
hailed the legislation as “the most dramatic reform of our
nation’s intelligence
capabilities since President Harry S. Truman signed the
National Security Act of
1947. Under this new law, our vast intelligence enterprise will
become more
unified, coordinated, and effective.” President Bush’s
comments did not
translate into a general endorsement of commissions. In signing
the 2008
National Defense Authorization Act in January 2008, he issued
a signing
statement asserting that four different provisions of the bill
unconstitutionally
infringed upon his powers and that therefore he was not obliged
to obey them.
One of those called for creating an independent bipartisan
Commission on
Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Had it been
created, its charge
would have been to “investigate waste, mismanagement, and
excessive force
by contractors.” The Pentagon would have been forced to
provide requested
information “expeditiously” to the commission. In his signing
statement, Bush
did not explain his position but only stated that he objected.

As suggested by Lott’s remarks and the actions and comments
by Bush,
commissions are highly contentious features of the American
political scene.
Nowhere is this truer than with the establishment and operation
of intelligence
oversight commissions. These bodies are not created to manage
intelligence
organization but to investigate performance-related problems
and provide
recommendations for change. Drawing in equal parts on the
secrecy of the
world of intelligence and the carefully cultivated perception
that commissions
stand above and apart from partisan politics, recent intelligence
oversight
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commissions have come to take on an almost mystical quality as
purveyors of

truth. Reality is far more complicated. Demystifying the place
of intelligence
oversight commissions requires a twofold analysis. First we
need to be more
cognizant of the political context and conditions under which
intelligence
oversight commissions are established and operate. For
example, while pictured
by their supporters as neutral and above politics (and as such
capable of
generating widespread popular support for their findings), this
is not necessarily
how they are viewed by everyone. Lott’s critical observation
quoted about
establishing commissions rests upon the view that it is
Congress’s job to hold
inquiries into the operation of the executive branch and hold it
accountable for
its decisions. Creating commissions is, from this perspective,
both an abdication
Table 8.1 Intelligence Oversight Commissions
Commission on the Organization of the Executive Branch of the
Government (1948): First Hoover Commission
Dulles Report (1949)
Commission on the Organization of the Executive Branch of the
Government (1953): Second Hoover Commission
Schlesinger Report (1971)
Commission on the Organization of the Government for the
Conduct of
Foreign Policy (1975): Murphy Commission

Vice President’s National Performance Review (1993): Gore
Commission
Commission on the Roles and Capabilities of the U.S.
Intelligence
Community (1996): Aspin-Brown Commission
U.S. Commission on National Security in the 21st Century
(1999): Hart-
Rudman Commission
National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United
States
(2004): 9/11 Commission
Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United
States
Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction (2005): WMD
Commission
of congressional responsibility and potentially erodes its
powers.
Second, we need to take a more discriminating look at the types
of
recommendations they generate and how they are received by
policy
makers.
Before beginning this analysis, it needs to be noted that there
exists no
universally accepted definition of what constitutes a
commission. Successive
waves of researchers interested in different time periods have
often found fault
with definitions adopted by earlier scholars. Rather than select
one of these

definitions or try to reconcile them, we allow commissions to
define themselves
as relevant by the subject matter they examine: improving the
quality of
intelligence. The only definitional restrictions in place are
those shared by most
studies of commissions: they are ad hoc, permit the president or
at least
executive branch officials to appoint some of the members, and
issue a public
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report. For the purposes of this study, these intelligence
oversight commissions
begin with the First Hoover Commission on government
reorganization done
after World War II and end with the WMD Commission that
looked into the
flawed intelligence estimate on Saddam Hussein’s nuclear
weapons program

that was central to the Bush administration’s argument for going
to war with
Iraq. A listing of these commissions is found in Table 8.1.
CALM OR TROUBLED WATERS
Looking first at context it is important to recognize that
commissions do not
operate in a political void. They enter into an ongoing stream of
activity. Much
like the origins of a river are found in the merging of small
tributaries, a policy
arena is the product of several different forces coming together.
Typically they
involve the definition of a problem, the emergence of
institutions to address
that problem, and the identification of strategies and policies.
Once underway, a
river reinvents itself daily. The changes are not necessarily
visible, but over
time they become clear. International crises, accidents,
bureaucratic politics,
personalities, new technologies, and new ideas are typical
driving and shaping
forces in policy arenas. Given enough time, rivers themselves
disappear by
either merging into larger bodies of water or vanishing into the
ground as their
water flow is reduced to a trickle. Changing perceptions of a
problem or the
proper way to address it may cause the first phenomenon to
occur in policy
arenas whereas shrinking budgets and public apathy may lead to
the second
outcome.

Intelligence commissions have been injected into policy streams
that varied
greatly in the calmness of their waters. For some, the dominant
characteristic of
the existing intelligence policy stream was partisan controversy.
The first three
intelligence commissions depicted in Table 8.1 all were
launched under these
conditions, as was the most recent commission dealing with
intelligence, the
WMD Commission. The First Hoover Commission, the
Commission on the
Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government, was
established on
July 7, 1947, with the passage of the Lodge-Brown Act. Chaired
by former
president Herbert Hoover, its origins lay in the coming together
of one long-
term and one short-term factor. The long-term factor was the
dramatic growth
in the size of the federal government brought on by the New
Deal and World
War II. Where the executive branch under President Herbert
Hoover employed
600,000 individuals and had a yearly budget of $4 billion, under
President
Franklin D. Roosevelt it had grown to employ 2,100,000
individuals and have an
annual budget of $42 billion. The short-term precipitating factor
was the
anticipated Republican victory in the 1948 presidential election.
The Hoover
Commission Report was to be the basis for reorganizing the
government in a
“new Republican era.”

Overlapping the life span of the First Hoover Commission was
the creation of a
committee of outside experts by the National Security Council
(NSC) that was
tasked with studying the operation of the intelligence
community. The
committee was chaired by Allen Dulles, an Office of Strategic
Services veteran
who already had briefed Congress on several occasions over the
nature of
intelligence and its proper organization. Dulles and most
observers expected to
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hand the report over to a new Republican administration, and
the report was to
be a blueprint for reform.
The Second Hoover Commission, the Commission on the
Organization of the
Executive Branch of the Government, was established in 1953.
Three days after
signing the legislation creating this commission, President
Dwight Eisenhower

named Hoover to the commission, and he was elected chair at
its first meeting,
not a surprising development since Hoover named all of the
committee
members and determined the commission’s areas of inquiry.
Eisenhower invited
Hoover to create an intelligence task force hoping to short-
circuit any
investigation by Senator Joseph McCarthy into this area. Once
the danger of a
McCarthyite investigation passed, the Eisenhower White House
indicated it was
no longer interested in an intelligence task force and that the
inquiry could be
called off. Hoover, however, continued with the inquiry, which
was now carried
out under the direction of General Mark Clark.
Partisanship was also the dominant environmental trait when the
Commission
on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding
Weapons of Mass
Destruction was established in 2004. Iraqi pursuit and
possession of weapons of
mass destruction had been cited by the Bush administration as a
principal
reason for going to war, yet none had been found. Calls for an
independent
commission to investigate the intelligence on Iraqi weapons of
mass destruction
grew in intensity as the occupation of Iraq became more and
more violent, with
Americans being treated as unwanted occupiers and not
welcomed as liberators.
Just as with the 9/11 Commission, President Bush sought to
delay the formation

of a commission to look into prewar intelligence on Iraq’s
WMD program,
arguing such an inquiry should wait until a more exhaustive
weapons search
was completed. He changed his position reluctantly under
mounting public
pressure and finally established the WMD Commission on
February 6, 2004,
days after former weapons inspector David Kay told Congress
“we were almost
all wrong” about Iraq’s weapons program and a day after
Director of Central
Intelligence (DCI) George Tenet spoke out publicly in defense
of the CIA’s
“imminent threat” argument. Bush set March 31, 2005, as the
due date for the
commission’s report. This put it four months after the election
and two months
after Bush would leave office if he were to be defeated in the
2004 presidential
election.
After the Second Hoover Commission the subsequent three
intelligence
oversight commissions were established in less overtly political
times, yet
underlying tensions were present and easily recognized. Richard
Nixon came to
the presidency distrusting the CIA and convinced that it housed
liberal
opponents to his administration. Once in office, the Federal
Bureau of
Investigation (FBI) also became a target of his suspicions for its
failure to bring
under control either the antiwar movement or the constant leaks
to the press

that were coming from within his administration. In December
1970, Nixon
tasked Deputy Director of the Bureau of the Budget James
Schlesinger to
examine the intelligence community’s organization.
The Schlesinger Report was presented to President Nixon in
March 1971. A little
over one year later, another intelligence oversight commission,
the Commission
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on the Organization of the Government for the Conduct of
Foreign Policy, better
known as the Murphy Commission, was established. One needs
only to read the
preface of its report to sense the political divide that separated
members of the
commission depending upon their affiliation. The preface spoke
of the existence

of an increasingly pluralistic world characterized by
interdependence and rapid
technological change that was blurring the boundaries between
domestic and
foreign policy. As a consequence of these trends, it stated that
the United
States needed to reorganize the way it did foreign policy.
Senator Mike
Mansfield (D-MT) dissented to this characterization of the
problem, contending
that these global conditions were already widely recognized. He
asserted that
“the Commission paid little attention to the circumstances in
which the
legislative mandate for the Commission was created” and that
the most
prominent feature of the period was “intense confrontation
between the
executive and legislative branches of the U.S. Government.”
Rather than
addressing these issues he characterized the commission’s study
as being “a
sort of elaborate management study.”
Two decades later, President Bill Clinton launched a wide-
ranging review of
government performance under the leadership of Vice President
Al Gore. The
Vice President’s National Performance Review and the theme of
reinventing
government were widely interpreted as Clinton’s response to H.
Ross Perot’s
well-received campaign message of “making government work.”
Once
underway, it also became a vehicle for the Clinton
administration to blunt the

reorganization proposals emanating from a now Republican
Congress.
The next two intelligence oversight commissions were
established in periods of
strategic uncertainty. The first, the Aspin-Brown Commission,
officially the
Commission on the Roles and Capabilities of the U.S.
Intelligence Community,
was established after the end of the Cold War when the primary
national
security threat and intelligence target for the United States no
longer existed.
To use the language coined by Clinton’s DCI, R. James
Woolsey, the United
States now faced a world in which it no longer confronted a
dangerous dragon
but a world populated by poisonous snakes. The precipitating
event in the
creation of the Aspin-Brown Commission involved an attack by
two such
snakes: the attack on U.S. Special Forces in Mogadishu,
Somalia, and the 1993
terrorist bombing of the World Trade Center. There also existed
a strong residue
of dissatisfaction with the performance of the intelligence
community and
partisan distrust between the White House and Congress. The
former stemmed
from the failure of the intelligence community to police itself
adequately as
evidenced by the seemingly endless parade of high-profile spy
cases in the
news, most notably Aldrich Ames, John Walker, Jr., Ronald
Pelton, and Jonathan
Pollard. The later grew out of the Iran-Contra investigation into

the CIA’s role in
supporting the Contras in Nicaragua and the sale of weapons to
Iran.
The second commission formed with intelligence
responsibilities in this period of
strategic uncertainty was the U.S. Commission on National
Security in the 21st
Century, better known as the Hart-Rudman Commission. Its
charge was to
undertake a comprehensive review of the national security
environment in
which the United States would operate in the 21st century. The
Hart-Rudman
Commission conducted its investigation over 2-1/2 years and
divided its work
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into three phases, issuing a report at the conclusion of each
phase. Phase I
examined the nature of the world into which the United States
was entering.
That report was issued in September 1999. Phase II examined
existing national

security strategies and was released in April 2000. The Phase III
report was
issued in February 2001.
Of all the intelligence commissions, the National Commission
on Terrorist
Attacks upon the United States, the 9/11 Commission, began its
operation in
what was perhaps the most complex setting, one that combined
elements of
uncertainty, partisan politics, and an acute sense of national
crisis. It was more
than one year after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade
Center and the
Pentagon that President George W. Bush and Congress created
the 9/11
Commission on November 27, 2002. Political pressure for it had
been slow to
build. With U.S. forces engaged in a war against al Qaeda and
the Taliban in
Afghanistan, Republicans easily defeated efforts by some
Democrats to establish
an independent commission of inquiry. However, by December
2001 with
victory in Afghanistan seemingly assured, senators Joseph
Lieberman (D-CT)
and John McCain (R-AZ) introduced legislation that would
bring about the
commission. The Bush administration objected, citing decisions
by the House
and Senate to set up their own studies. Upset with what they felt
to be overly
narrow terms of reference on the part of the congressional
committees, the
families of the victims of the 9/11 bombings continued to press
for an

independent board of inquiry. In July 2002, the House
succumbed to their
lobbying efforts and voted to endorse a bipartisan committee.
The Senate and
White House resisted until October. One of the White House’s
concerns was that
the commission’s report would be released in the middle of the
2004
presidential campaign and lay blame at the doorstep of the Bush
administration.
Accordingly, the commission’s expiration date was set for May
27, 2004.
The 9/11 Commission got off to a rocky start. Both of its
cochairs, former
secretary of state Henry Kissinger (Republican) and former
senator George
Mitchell (Democrat), withdrew due to conflict-of-interest
charges. They were
replaced by former New Jersey governor Thomas Kean and
former congressman
Lee Hamilton, respectively. The commission held its first
hearings in late
January 2004 and by July was publicly complaining about the
lack of
cooperation it was receiving from the White House and Justice
Department in
obtaining documents and testimony from key administration
officials. Another
point of contention was the commission’s expiration date. The
Bush
administration opposed any extension but again gave in to
pressure from the
families of the 9/11 victims. In February 2004, a 60-day
extension was agreed
upon.

THE CURRENTS OF WASHINGTON POLITICS
From a policy analytic perspective, strategies and programs are
designed to
solve a problem, and their relative merits can be judged
accordingly. We will
adopt this perspective later in this paper. But if we keep our
attention on the
policy stream into which intelligence commissions are placed,
what stands out is
not the problem they are trying to solve but the contours of the
shoreline and
the protrusion of rocks that threaten to undermine their efforts.
Together they
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can produce dangerous currents that threaten the success of
presidential
commissions. At any one time, four such currents can be found
in the policy
stream comprising Washington politics. They center on the
symbolic politics
associated with intelligence reform, control over and access to
resources,
control over the political agenda, and establishing
accountability and
responsibility (blame) for intelligence problems.

Symbolic Politics
Used in the most benign and neutral fashion, language can
educate the public.
This in fact is a purpose frequently ascribed to presidential
commissions. In
theory it is the one advanced by the bipartisan makeup of
commissions and the
presence of what might be described as professional
commissioners on these
panels. Typically enabling legislation setting up a commission
specifies how
many individuals the president, the Speaker of the House of
Representatives,
the Senate majority leader, or the Senate minority leader may
appoint. The
Lodge-Brown Act that established the First Hoover Commission
specified a 12-
person commission. Speaker of the House Joseph Martin,
President of the
Senate Pro Tem Arthur Vandenberg, and President Harry
Truman each chose
four members of the commission. One-half were to be
Republicans and one-half
Democrats. According to the legislation setting up the Murphy
Commission in
1972, there were to be 12 members; 4 were to be appointed by
the President
with 2 coming from the executive branch and 2 from private
life. The president
of the Senate and Speaker of the House were each to appoint 4
members. In
each case, 1 was to come from each party and 2 from private
life.

Often, complex political bargaining is necessary in order to set
up a commission.
This was the case for the Aspin-Brown Commission because
both the
administration and the Senate were planning to go ahead on
their own with
investigations into the performance of the intelligence
community in the wake of
the Mogadishu terrorist attacks, and neither trusted the other to
conduct a
neutral inquiry. In the end it was agreed that President Clinton
would name nine
individuals from “private life” and Congress would select eight
members, four of
whom would be private citizens and the other four members of
Congress.
Considerable bargaining also went into creating the 9/11
Commission.
Agreement was reached that the White House would name its
chair and that
Republican senators John McCain and Richard Shelby would
have veto power
over one of Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott’s nominations.
The 9/11 families
wanted Rudman appointed. He was favored by McCain and
Shelby, but Lott
indicated that he would not (and did not) put Rudman’s name
forward.
One-time Republican senator Warren Rudman has been a
prominent member of
numerous presidential commissions, serving on the Aspin-
Brown intelligence
commission, the commission looking into Gulf War Syndrome,
a special panel
that investigated security problems in the Energy Department,

the Sharm el-
Sheikh fact-finding commission on Middle East violence, and
cochairing the
Hart-Rudman Commission on national security. Rudman is not
unique. Milton
Eisenhower, brother of President Dwight Eisenhower, served on
some 20
commissions. From 1950–70, 7 individuals served on three
commissions, and
25 served on two commissions. During the Reagan presidency,
John Tower,
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Brent Scowcroft, Chuck Robb, and Ed Muskie all served on
multiple
commissions.
The careful balancing of membership and the selection of
trusted individuals to
serve on these commissions is recognition of the fact that words
matter. This is
the heart of symbolic politics. Controlling the language and
images of the policy
debate gives a policy maker a heightened ability to advance
policy options.
Language can reassure the public that policy makers are aware
of a problem
and are addressing it. Language can also raise public concerns

that all is not
well and that immediate action is needed. The Dulles and Clark
committees,
neither of which had balanced or bipartisan memberships,
issued reports only a
few years apart that provide a sharp contrast in the use of
language.
Not unexpectedly, alarmist language was front and center in the
Dulles
Committee’s highly critical report of the operation of the CIA
under the Truman
administration. Dulles had taken time out from his work on the
commission to
campaign with Republican candidate Thomas Dewey and
harbored hopes of
becoming the professional head of the CIA that Dewey had told
Secretary of
Defense James Forrestal he would put into place in his
administration. The
report stated:
The principal defect of the Central Intelligence Agency is that
its
direction, administrative organization, and performance do not
show
sufficient appreciation of the Agency’s assigned functions…the
result
is that the Central Intelligence Agency has tended to become
just
one more intelligence agency providing intelligence in
competition
with older established agencies…since it is the task of the
Director to
see that the Agency carries out its assigned functions, the
failure to

do so is necessarily a reflection of inadequacies of direction.
The Dulles Report was equally unkind in its assessment of the
CIA’s intelligence
collection and the production of intelligence estimates, stating
that the Office of
Reports and Estimates was “concerned with a wide variety of
activities and with
the production of miscellaneous reports and summaries which
by no stretch of
the imagination could be considered national estimates.”
The Clark Report painted a very positive picture of the CIA and
helped counter
the fear of communist penetration inside the U.S. government
raised by
McCarthyite rhetoric and congressional investigations by the
House Un-
American Activities Committee. Reporting back to the full
Second Hoover
Commission in May 1955, the Clark Report concluded, “we
discovered no valid
ground for the suspicion that the CIA or any other element of
the intelligence
family was being effectively contaminated by any organized
subversive or
community clique.” It held the director of central intelligence to
be “industrious,
objective, selfless, enthusiastic and imaginative.” On the
negative side, the
task force was concerned with the lack of adequate intelligence
coming from
behind the Iron Curtain.
Resource Politics

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Resource politics takes as its starting point the political reality
that policies are
given life by people, budgets, bureaucratic routines, and
jurisdictional
mandates. Change any element in that equation and one changes
the operation
of organizations. Since virtually every reform proposal put
forward contains
implications for how resources are allocated, this is a frequent
area in which the
work of presidential commissions encounters the realities of

Washington politics.
Intelligence oversight commissions are not exception to this
rule. Where
symbolic politics is played out boldly in the public eye,
resource politics tends to
be a game played out in the shadows and is often dominated by
the work of
congressional committees and bureaucracies. Resource politics,
however, can
on occasion become very public, as it did in the case of the 9/11
Commission’s
recommendation that a director of national intelligence be
created. The director
of national intelligence was to oversee all-source national
intelligence centers,
serve as the president’s principal intelligence advisor, manage
the national
intelligence program, and oversee the component agencies of
the intelligence
community. Included in this power would be the responsibility
for submitting a
unified intelligence budget appropriating funds to intelligence
agencies and
setting personnel policies for the intelligence community. The
director of
national intelligence’s office would be in the White House.
The commission’s reform proposals met with different
responses from Capital
Hill and the White House. Congressional leaders promised to
move quickly on
overhauling the intelligence community’s structure while the
White House urged
caution. Acting CIA director John McLaughlin, Secretary of
Defense Donald

Rumsfeld, and Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge all
spoke out against
creating a director of national intelligence. With Democratic
presidential
candidate John Kerry endorsing the commission’s report, the
Bush
administration came under political pressure to do the same. It
came out in
favor of a director of national intelligence but with authority
only to coordinate
intelligence. Lieberman criticized Bush for wanting a “Potemkin
national
intelligence director” while then Republican senator Arlen
Specter (PA) referred
to it as a shell game.
In fall 2004, the Senate and House each passed legislation
establishing a
director of national intelligence but differed on the powers to be
given to that
person. Under the Senate bill, the CIA director “shall be under
the authority,
direction, and control” of the director of national intelligence.
In the House
version the CIA director would only “report” to the director of
national
intelligence. The House bill also only gave the director of
national intelligence
the power to “develop” budgets and give “guidance” to
intelligence community
members. The Senate bill stated that he or she would
“determine” the budget.
The Senate bill would also make the intelligence budget public,
require that
most of the director of national intelligence’s high-ranking
assistants be

confirmed by the Senate, and create a civil liberties panel to
prevent privacy
abuses.
Deadlock ensued. House Republicans led by Representative
Duncan Hunter
(CA), chair of the House Armed Services Committee, were
adamant that the
Pentagon not lose control over its intelligence budget and that
the overall
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budget remain secret. Family members of the victims of the
9/11 attacks
unsuccessfully called upon President Bush to break the
stalemate in favor of the
Senate’s version of the bill. Republican opposition in the House
also did not
budge, forcing Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-IL) to remove the
bill from
consideration in late November.
Behind-the-scenes negotiations produced a compromise bill
acceptable to House

Republicans and the White House. Title One of the act
stipulated that the DNI
not be located in the executive office of the President. It gave
the DNI the
power to “develop and determine” an annual budget for the
national intelligence
program based on budget proposals provided by the heads of
intelligence
agencies and departments. The DNI is to ensure the “effective
execution” of the
annual budget and “monitor the implementation and execution
of the National
Intelligence Program.” After consulting with department heads,
the DNI is
authorized to transform or reprogram a maximum of $150
million and no more
than 5 percent of an intelligence unit’s budget in any one fiscal
year, but he or
she may not terminate an acquisition program. Larger transfers
may take place
if the affected department head agrees. In addition, the DNI
“establishes
objectives and priorities for the intelligence community and
manages and
directs tasking of collection, analysis, production and
dissemination of national
intelligence.” He or she is also given the power to develop
personnel policies
and programs in consultation with the heads of other agencies
and elements of
the intelligence community. And, the DNI is tasked with
establishing a National
Counterterrorism Center and National Counterproliferation
Center and assigning
individuals to protect the integrity of the analytical process and
conduct

alternative analysis as appropriate.
Agenda Politics
Intelligence commissions can do more than make
recommendations to solve
problems. They can also be part of a strategy for advancing the
political
agendas of policy makers. Commissions are able to do so by
virtue of their
ability to place intelligence reforms in a broader public policy
context and to
educate the public about the need for action. Most often
intelligence
commissions have played this role when their mandate was
broadly cast and
intelligence reform was but one area of focus and not the sole
rationale for
creating the commission.
One broad agenda category into which intelligence reforms have
been inserted
by commissions is improving the overall quality of government
performance. As
noted earlier, one motivating force behind the creation of the
First Hoover
Commission was the growth in the size of the federal
government. In speaking
of the commission’s work, one observer commented,
“government bigness is
not necessarily evil” but that “the accomplishment of national
and international
objectives demands efficient government machinery” and that
the present
system of administration was “so creaky and complex that it
often cannot move

to achieve…[these goals] without costly delays.” The Second
Hoover
Commission’s mandate was even more expansive. Where the
first commission
concerned itself with how to improve the efficiency and
effectiveness of
government operations, the second commission was empowered
to examine the
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question of what government should be doing. Nonessential
services were to be
eliminated as well as those activities that competed with private
enterprise. The
Gore Report on intelligence was also part of a larger mandate to
“reinvent
government.” Its language was consistent with that used by the
larger ongoing
reform movement within the field of public administration,
which sought to alter
the behavior of bureaucrats rather than the formal structure and
processes of
the institutions they worked in. Rather than speak of consumers
of

intelligence, it spoke of customers. It spoke of the need for an
overarching
vision for the intelligence community and the need for a public
affairs strategy.
Concrete recommendations called for the DCI to convene a
visionary conference
to determine the intelligence community’s post–Cold War
mission, to appoint a
consumer ombudsman, and to appoint an integrated community
congressional
liaison office.
A second broad agenda category is the content and conduct of
foreign policy.
The Murphy Report fits into this category. As noted earlier, its
preface argued
that given the increased interdependence of world politics, the
boundary line
between foreign and domestic politics was no longer as sharp or
defining as it
once was. Consequently, the United States needed to consider
“a fresh
organization of the government for the conduct of foreign
policy.” Intelligence
was viewed in this context. The overall tenor of its report was
supportive of the
intelligence community and the role it played in the foreign
policy–making
process although it was somewhat critical of the NSC’s
oversight of it. It also
identified three obstacles to the exercise of more effective
leadership and
oversight over the intelligence community: the multitude of
agencies comprising
the intelligence community, the fact that the bulk of the
resources lay within the

Department of Defense, and the tendency to pursue new
collection technologies
without closely examining their potential costs and benefits.
Also falling into this category was the Hart-Rudman
Commission. It was
established in 1998 by Secretary of Defense William Cohen to
undertake a
comprehensive review of the national security environment in
which the United
States would operate in the 21st century. Among its overall
conclusions were
the beliefs that weapons of mass destruction would continue to
proliferate and
that the United States would become increasingly vulnerable to
hostile attack on
its homeland. A core recommendation was the creation of a
Department of
Homeland Security. Its analysis of the intelligence community
began with the
observation that “the basic structure of the intelligence
community does not
require change.” Rather than endorse calls for increasing the
DCI’s power, the
Hart-Rudman Commission concluded that “efforts to strengthen
community
management while maintaining the ongoing relationship
between the DCI and
the Secretary of Defense are bearing fruit.” What the
commission was most
interested in with regard to community management was that
greater attention
be paid to setting national intelligence priorities. In terms of
intelligence
collection it urged that 1) greater attention be paid to the
recruitment of human

intelligence sources especially against terrorism; 2) a new
emphasis should be
placed on collecting and analyzing economic and
science/technology
intelligence; and 3) greater use should be made of open
intelligence sources.
Accountability Politics
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Questions of accountability operate on multiple levels. At the
macro level,
accountability issues direct our attention to the White House
and senior policy
makers such as heads of the CIA, Department of Defense, and
other agencies.
At the micro level they involve the distribution of responsibility
and authority
within agencies. Most intense and public are the politics of
accountability at the
macro level. They were front and center in both the
establishment and
operation of the 9/11 Commission and the WMD Commission.
Fearful that the

9/11 report would be critical of its handing of intelligence on
terrorism leading
up to September 11, 2001, the White House agreed to establish
the 9/11
Commission with the proviso that its report not be issued during
the presidential
campaign. The WMD Commission was limited to an
examination of how the
intelligence community performed in making its judgment about
Iraq’s
possession of WMD. Off limits was any assessment of how
intelligence was used
by the White House. Unlike the 9/11 Commission, it did not
hold public hearings
or interview members of the administration. The commission’s
report contained
a strongly worded critique of the intelligence community that
termed much of
its data “worthless or misleading” and its analysis “riddled with
errors.” The
intelligence community itself was described as “fragmented,
loosely managed,
and poorly coordinated.” As a corrective the commission urged
greater reliance
on competitive analysis, improved information sharing, the
creation of a new
national proliferation center to coordinate efforts against WMD,
the creation of a
human intelligence directorate within the CIA, and supported
the notion of a
powerful director of national intelligence.
DOWNSTREAM LANDING
Having made its recommendations, it remains an open issue as
to what impact

a commission’s findings will have. Wide-ranging disagreement
exists on this
point. The two end points of the debate over the effectiveness of
commissions
as instruments of policy are represented by the observations that
they are “so
many Jiminy crickets chirping in the ears of deaf Presidents,
deaf Congressmen,
and perhaps a deaf public” and that they are “generally created
by presidents
who seriously want policy advice.”
Intelligence oversight commissions have encountered a variety
of downstream
landings. First, the recipient of the commission’s report is
sometimes not fully
anticipated. The First Hoover Commission and the Dulles
Committee both began
their work expecting to produce a blueprint for a Republican
administration that
would take office following the 1948 election. Little was done
to implement the
Hart-Rudman Commission’s recommendations because by the
time its final
report was issued the George W. Bush administration had just
entered office
after a bitter and controversial campaign and was interested in
distancing itself
from the Clinton administration as much as possible.
Second, personnel changes occur that reduce the impact of
proposed reforms
by removing key supporters from the policy process.
Schlesinger’s Report led to
modest changes in large measure because Schlesinger, who
moved over from

his position in the Bureau of the Budget to become DCI, stayed
in that position
for only a short time. Anne Karalekas in her history of the CIA
states that
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Schlesinger came to the position with a clear set of management
ideas for
improving the quality of intelligence. The changes he made in
his limited tenure
as DCI promised “to alter the Agency’s and DCI’s existing
priorities.” Neither
his predecessor (Richard Helms) nor his successor (William
Colby) was as
committed to the reforms contained in his report.

The Dulles Report also encountered an unexpected change in
personnel.
Secretary of Defense Forrestal warmly received the Dulles
Report and was
expected to push through its recommendations. It was Forrestal
who had
recruited Dulles to chair the commission and who at that time
had characterized
the CIA as being staffed with “deadwood.” Forrestal was
suffering from mental
illness and resigned in March 1949 and committed suicide in
May. His successor,
Louis Johnson, quickly became embroiled in conflict with
Secretary of State
Dean Acheson and delegated the task of evaluating the merits of
the report to
General Joseph McNarney and Carlisle Humelsine from the
State Department.
McNarney took the lead and generally endorsed its conclusion
that the CIA
needed strengthening through internal organizational reforms
and that it had
not met its responsibility for coordinating intelligence. In an
important dissent,
McNarney rejected the notion of collective responsibility for
intelligence
estimates by the entire set of national security organizations
through the
Intelligence Advisory Committee in favor of individual
responsibility by the
director of central intelligence, who headed the CIA. His
position was endorsed
by the NSC when it adopted the Dulles Report as amended by
the McNarney
Report in July 1949.

This change in personnel did not mean that the Dulles Report
had no impact.
Quite the opposite was the case. When General Walter Bedell
Smith assumed
the position of DCI, many of the problems identified by the
Dulles report
remained in place. Recommendations from the national security
organizations to
the NSC were often “watered-down compromises,” departmental
intelligence
organizations often withheld “operational” information and
“eyes only”
information from the CIA, and the CIA could not enforce its
collection requests
on other agencies. More vigorous implementation of the Dulles
organizational
reforms soon took place as Jackson joined Smith as deputy
director. Dulles
would also join the CIA and rise to the position of DCI. The
reforms they
oversaw created the foundation for the CIA’s organizational
profile for the next
20 years.
Third, there can be a major change in the political climate from
when the
commission was established. Part of the reason for the limited
impact of the
Murphy Commission’s report was that before it was completed,
Washington
politics increasingly became focused on Watergate and the
CIA’s role in the
break-in and covert action. These concerns spawned a series of
investigations
by Congress and the president. On January 4, 1975, President
Gerald Ford

appointed Vice President Nelson Rockefeller to head a
commission on CIA
activities within the United States. It reported out the same
month as the
Murphy Commission. Ford had hoped this inquiry would
forestall action by
Congress. This was not to be the case as both the Senate (the
Church
Committee) and the House (the Pike Committee) began their
own broader
investigations into allegations of CIA wrongdoing. Just before
the Church and
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Pike committees were to release their findings, Ford again tried
a preemptive
move. He signed Executive Order 11905, which put into place
some of the more
limited recommendations of the Murphy and Rockefeller
commissions. It

recognized the DCI as the president’s primary intelligence
advisor and
spokesperson for the intelligence community, gave him added
budget-making
responsibility, and established an Intelligence Oversight Board
to review
intelligence activities. Murphy was named its first chair.
The 9/11 Commission’s findings also were released in a
changed political
environment. Gone was the sense of urgency and crisis that
once existed. This
is particularly noteworthy given the scope of its proposed
reforms. Overcoming
the many political and institutional obstacles that stand in the
way of reforms
that entail a major redirection or restructuring of policies,
resources, and
institutions requires special circumstances. When those
conditions are present
we can speak of the existence of a window for reform. Once
opened, reform
windows operate in predictable ways. At their base is a pressure
for action.
“Confessions of impotence are not acceptable; leaders are
expected to act.”
Reorganization, or more accurately the announcement of
reorganization, is a
highly visible and symbolic action that addresses the political
imperative of
calming public fears. Not all reform windows are alike in their
ability to sustain a
reorganization proposal or prevent rollback once the window
closes. John Keeler
in his cross-national study of reform windows notes that
“windows opened

principally by crisis effects…tend to feature a perilous context
for reform.” The
result is a hollow mandate, one where no large-scale electoral
victory has
empowered or authorized the reform effort.
By the time the 9/11 Commission released its report the reform
window opened
by the events of 9/11 had largely closed. Even the events of
9/11 and the
independence shown by the commission failed to generate and
sustain a robust
reform window. For example, speaking of the 9/11
Commission’s call to create a
powerful director of national intelligence and locate the office
in the White
House, Congressman Jack Murtha (D-PA) commented in
September 2004 that
“public indifference will make Congress able to resist changes
[to the
intelligence community].” Earlier the Bush administration
succeeded in resisting
early pressures to create an independent commission and
acceded only under
public pressure from the families of 9/11 victims. A similar
pattern of resistance
and then bending to public pressure generated by these families
characterized
its pattern of cooperation with the commission and its
endorsement of the
commission’s proposal for a DNI.
THE LOGIC AND COHERENCE OF REFORM
PROPOSALS
Quite apart from questions about the nature of the political

context within which
intelligence oversight commissions operate is the matter of the
soundness of
their recommendations. Answers to this question can be sought
from two
different directions. The first approach starts with an
examination of the specific
reforms suggested by intelligence commissions. The second
looks at the
underlying logic that guides the decision making of
commissions more
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generally.
Intelligence Reforms

Taken as a collective, intelligence oversight commissions have
not moved
forward in a linear fashion, addressing one problem and then
moving on to the
next. Often commissions have revisited the same issue again
and again. A
personnel system that prevents the effective use of expertise
among the
intelligence community agencies has been a repeated complaint,
as is
dissatisfaction with the quality of scientific intelligence and the
need for greater
cooperation among intelligence agencies and communication
between
intelligence producers and consumers.
Moreover, in making recommendations, intelligence
commissions did not speak
with one voice. Nowhere is this more evident than with calls for
establishing a
director of national intelligence. The 9/11 Commission was not
the first or last
to call for a DNI-type figure to sit atop the intelligence
community. The
Schlesinger Report concluded that the main hope for realizing
improvements in
the operation of the intelligence community lay in a
“fundamental reform” of its
decision-making bodies and procedures. What was needed were
“governing
institutions.” The DCI was seen as currently unable to perform a
community-
wide leadership role effectively because of time limitations, his
multiple roles,
his lack of control over intelligence community resources, the

fact that he is a
competitor for resources, and that he may be outranked by other
department
heads who report directly to the president while he reports to
the National
Security Council.
Suggested areas of improvement included the following:
Increasing the power of the leader of the intelligence
community over
resources; providing that individual with a stronger staff
Consolidating intelligence collection and production activities
by function
Giving increased importance to competitive intelligence
analysis and
creating new estimating centers
Strengthening independent review mechanisms
Increasing centralized control over military intelligence units
The Schlesinger Report identified three fundamental approaches
to
solving this leadership problem. The option it favored was
creating a
director of national intelligence who would control all major
collection
assets as well as research and development. The director of
national
intelligence would also direct the government’s principal
intelligence
production and national estimating center. The CIA would
retain
responsibility for covert action. The other two options
identified were
providing the director of central intelligence with a strong
presidential

mandate and stronger staff and creating a coordinator of central
intelligence who would act as White House or NSC overseers of
the
intelligence community. All three were seen as having pluses
and
minuses, but creating a director of national intelligence was
seen as
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having the greatest promise.
The WMD Commission’s report described the intelligence
community as
“fragmented, loosely managed, and poorly coordinated.” As a
corrective it
urged greater reliance on competitive analysis, improved
information sharing,
the creation of a new national proliferation center to coordinate
efforts against
WMD, the creation of a human intelligence directorate within
the CIA, and
supported the notion of a powerful director of national
intelligence.
Aligned against these intelligence oversight commissions were
others that
rejected a director of national intelligence. The Murphy
Commission concluded

“it was neither possible nor desirable to give the DCI line
authority over that
very large fraction of the intelligence community which lies
outside the CIA.”
Instead it recommended increasing the DCI’s political clout by
placing this office
“in close proximity to the White House and be accorded regular
and direct
contact with the President.” The AspinBrown Commission’s
report endorsed a
similar conclusion decades later. It examined but rejected a
restructuring
proposal that would give the DCI more direct authority over the
“national
elements” of the intelligence community along with one that
would have
reduced his responsibility for the CIA so as to allow more time
for community-
wide tasks.
Judging the contributions made by intelligence oversight
commissions to
improving the functioning of the intelligence community is
difficult because of
the stream-like quality of policy making. The ripple effect of
action taken at any
one point in time may not be immediately apparent, and it, in
turn, is subject to
future downstream activity. For example, according to the
CIA’s official
historian, Arthur Darlington, the Eberstadt Report that was part
of the First
Hoover Commission inquiry “seems not to have been read by
many” and had
little influence on the 1949 Central Intelligence Agency Act.
Yet one positive

impact attributed to the Hoover Commission’s work is the later
creation of the
Board of National Estimates as a collective body to review the
quality of
estimates produced. (The Hoover Commission said, “there be
established within
the agency at the top echelon an evaluation board or section
composed of
competent and experienced personnel who would have no
administrative
responsibilities and whose duties would be confined solely to
intelligence
evaluation.”)
The Board of National Estimates was created in 1950 as part of
the Office of
National Estimates, a reform pushed through after members of
the Dulles
Report joined the CIA. Over time it became less of a
community-wide
coordinating and review body and more of a component of the
CIA. Gradually,
the Board of National Estimates became isolated from the
policymaking process,
and in 1973, with one-half of the board’s seats vacant, DCI
Colby disbanded the
Office of National Estimates and in its place created the
National Intelligence
Officers (NIO) system. NIOs were not given a staff but instead
relied upon the
work of the CIA and other intelligence agencies to produce
intelligence
estimates. That changed in 1980, when they were placed under
the supervision
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of a newly created National Intelligence Council (NIC), given
an analytic staff,
and moved from under the control of the DCI to the CIA’s
deputy director for
national foreign assessments. Under President Ronald Reagan,
the NIOs were
moved back to reporting to the DIC only to have their status
changed again in
1992 when DCI Robert Gates made the NIC an independent
body.
A similarly complicated chain of downstream events
characterizes commission
calls for civilian presidential advisory boards. The Clark Report
called for the
creation of a committee of private citizens to periodically meet
and examine the
work of the intelligence community. President Eisenhower acted
on this
recommendation in 1956, creating a President’s Board of
Consultants on Foreign
Intelligence Activities. In 1962, this board was renamed the
President’s Foreign
Intelligence Advisory Board. Eisenhower acted largely to
forestall a move to
bolster congressional oversight of intelligence. Similar political
logic was
responsible for Gerald Ford’s endorsement of several of the
Murphy Commission
reform proposals, including the strengthening of the President’s
Foreign
Intelligence Advisory Board. Ford did so as part of a unilateral
strategy to
forestall unwanted congressional action that might result from
the Church and
Pike committee investigations. The Gore Report called for

merging the
President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and the
President’s Intelligence
Oversight Board. Clinton acted on this recommendation by an
executive order in
September 1993. In March 2008, President Bush took away
much of the power
of the Intelligence Oversight Board. Under the rules
established by Ford, when
the board uncovered intelligence actions that were “unlawful or
contrary to
executive order” it had to report that finding to both the
president and the
attorney general. Under Bush’s executive order, its authority to
inform the
attorney general was deleted and the president was to be
informed only if other
officials were not “adequately” addressing the matter. Also
changed was the
requirement that the inspector generals of intelligence agencies
file a quarterly
report with the board.
One of the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations was the
creation of a Privacy
and Civil Liberties Oversight Board to ensure that citizens’
rights were not
violated in the war on terrorism. A compromise between
Congress and the
White House resulted in having a provision creating this board
included in the
Intelligence Reform Act of 2004. This compromise allowed the
president to
appoint its members and have them serve at his pleasure,
although they are
confirmed by the Senate. Housed in the White House, the

administration
exercises control over the board by the ability to deny it
subpoena power and
giving the attorney general veto power over any request for
documents. Five
months after the act was passed, the White House had not yet
named members
to the board or provided it with a small budget. The Privacy and
Civil Liberties
Board held its first meeting in March 2006 and its first public
hearing in
December 2006 and was only briefed by the administration on
the existence of
the warrantless wiretap program in October of that year, almost
one year after
its existence had become public knowledge. In its first report to
Congress
submitted in March 2007, the board noted that it had
concentrated on three
activities during its first year of existence: establishing
organization and
administrative processes, engaging in education and outreach,
and prioritizing
its tasks.
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of
Downstream politics also affected the implementation of Aspin-
Brown
Commission reforms. Although it did not endorse the creation
of a director of
national intelligence, the commission did favor giving the DCI
additional tools to
carry out his community role. Among the measures proposed
that would aid the
DCI were the addition of a deputy director for the intelligence
community and a
deputy director for the Central Intelligence Agency. The DCI
would concur in the
appointments of the directors of the National Security Agency,
the National
Reconnaissance Office, and the Central Imagery Office and be
consulted on the
appointment of the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency
along with a
number of other key intelligence officials housed outside the
CIA. Intelligence
analysis was to be improved by promoting closer ties between
producers and
consumers of intelligence, making greater use of expertise
outside the
intelligence community, and taking advantage of the revolution
in open source
material. To further these changes in operating habits the
commission
recommended restructuring the National Intelligence Council as
a National

Assessments Center.
Congressional action on the recommendations of the Aspin-
Brown Commission
report and the House Intelligence Committee staff study led to
the creation of
the National Imagery and Mapping Agency and the
establishment of two NSC
intelligence committees as well as granting the DCI a
strengthened voice in
budgetary and appointment matters. It also established two
deputy DCI
positions as recommended and three assistant DCIs, all of who
would be
approved by the Senate. In signing this legislation, Clinton
pointedly objected to
the requirement that the DCI be consulted or concur in the
appointment of
certain intelligence officials and the restructuring of the NSC
system. DCI John
Deutch voiced his opposition to the addition of new assistant
DCIs who would
require Senate confirmation. Given this opposition, it is not
surprising that the
implementation of provisions to strengthen the intelligence
system in this
manner was not pursued vigorously. George Tenet, who
succeeded Deutch,
stated he felt his statutory power was sufficient to coordinate
the work of the
intelligence agencies.
The Logic of Commission Reforms
Commissions have been found to search for information and
solutions in quite

predictable ways. A key element in their approach is to try and
solve
problems by increasing control and improving efficiency. The
problem is that
bureaucracies are too decentralized. What is needed is “strong
managerial
leadership, clear lines of authority and responsibility,
manageable spans of
control, meritocratic personnel procedures, and the utilization
of modern
techniques for management.” However, as the impetus behind
the reform
movement weakens, political considerations begin to cast their
shadow over
commission recommendations. Talk of effectiveness and
centralization are
joined and then surpassed by concerns that all constituencies are
listened to
and that there be both managerial and political control over new
and
restructured organizations.
The 9/11 Commission’s call for a strong DNI located in the
White House is fully
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consistent with the logic of a centralized management approach
to
reorganization. Clear lines of accountability would be created
and a direct link to
the president established. Where the Bush administration
supported locating
Homeland Security in the White House to keep congressional
influence to a
minimum, it balked at placing the DNI in the White House
because doing so
invited Congress in through its confirmation and budgetary
powers. The
countering political logic of reorganization quickly emerged
here, too, as key
Bush administration officials spoke out against the creation of a
strong DNI.
Even more significantly, an alliance between the Pentagon and
its congressional
overseers asserted itself and imposed its will on the reform
process. Finally,
advocacy of a DNI is fully consistent with the overall thrust of
previous
investigations of the intelligence community and the limited
nature of the
search for information produced by reorganization efforts. A
recurring criticism

was the managerial problem presented by having the DCI serve
simultaneously
as head of the CIA and head of the intelligence community
while a large portion
of the intelligence budget resided beyond this person’s reach.
The solution was
equally obvious to previous commissions. The two positions
should be split and
a new position established that would have true control of the
intelligence
community’s budget to provide centralized control and
direction. Richard Posner
notes that apparently unexamined was the experience of other
countries that
experienced strategic surprise and the lessons they learned.
Most notably he
points to Israel and the findings of the Arganat Report issued
after the 1973
Yom Kippur War, which stressed the value of diversity in
intelligence and
rejected greater centralization as a solution.
Other commissions, while not calling for a DNI, did embrace
the logic of
administrative reforms in other ways. The First Hoover
Commission called for
vigorous efforts to improve the internal structure of the CIA and
the quality of
its products. The Second Hoover Commission recommended that
the director of
central intelligence concentrate on the coordination of
community-level
intelligence efforts and leave the day-to-day administration of
the CIA to an
executive officer or chief of staff. The Murphy Commission
called for delegating

much of the DCI’s day-to-day authority for running the CIA to a
deputy. The
Gore Report spoke of the need for the DCI to place greater
emphasis on his
community responsibilities and the need for greater information
sharing among
community members. In an observation similar to those made by
earlier
commissions, the Gore Report saw a need to reform personnel
policies by
calling for the adoption of a common set of personnel standards
and practices
throughout the intelligence community as a means of furthering
collaboration
and efficiency.
The principle of efficiency was also applied by commissions to
relations between
intelligence agencies and Congress. The Clark Report called for
Congress to
consider creating a joint intelligence committee similar to the
Joint Committee
on Atomic Energy. The Murphy Commission recommended
creating a Joint
Congressional Committee on National Security to oversee all
activities in this
area but wanted omitted any requirement that the president
personally certify
covert action operations. The 9/11 Commission revisited this
solution, putting it
forward as one of two alternatives it recommended to Congress
as means for
organizing intelligence oversight. The other was to increase the
status of the
36

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existing intelligence select committees by transforming them
into standing
committees with authorization and appropriation authority.
The principal limitation to commission reform recommendations
based on the
logic inherent in administrative reorganization as a solution to
policy problems is
that not all problems have solutions. Some are “wicked
problems for which
there are only temporary and imperfect solutions.” Intelligence
failures fit
nicely into this category. Virtually all accounts of intelligence
analysis and
estimating stress that the causes of intelligence failures are
multiple and that
surprise is endemic to the fundamental nature of world politics.
Surprise cannot
be avoided in any absolute sense. There is no magic formula for
anticipating the
future, and intelligence analysis should not be confused with
fortune-telling.
Additionally, any organizational solution imposed from above
or outside the

organization likely will come with diminishing returns built in.
As Richard Betts
notes, if reforms in procedure do not fulfill day-to-day
organizational needs, or
should they complicate organizational decision-making
procedures, they will fall
into disuse or be given little more than lip service by those in
the organizations.
Only those reforms that are seen as providing frequent practical
benefits and
meeting one’s own needs will survive.
CONCLUSION
Demystifying intelligence commissions requires obtaining a
clearer
understanding of the conditions they operate under as well as
the content of
their recommendations. Only then will we be in a position to
make informed and
impartial judgments about their value as instruments of
intelligence oversight.
An inspection of the conditions under which intelligence
commissions operate
from their point of entry into an ongoing policy stream through
navigating the
politics of Washington to the circumstances under which their
conclusions are
presented leads to caution in making any generalizations about
what constitutes
the politics of a “normal” intelligence oversight commission.
Three summary
observations stand out. First, politics matters. Intelligence
oversight
commissions do not receive a free pass in conducting their
investigations. They

are not seen as politically neutral in spite of their tendency to
be bipartisan in
composition and receive words of praise by presidents upon
presenting their
report. Second, both intelligence commissions that advance
particularly far-
reaching intelligence reforms such as the 9/11 Commission and
those, such as
the Murphy Commission, that make modest suggestions for
improving the
functioning of the intelligence community, or what critics such
as Senator
Mansfield referred to as limited tinkering with its structure, are
equally likely to
touch upon, and encounter, opposition in the major political
rocks found in the
waters of Washington intelligence politics. In turning to the
matter of content, it
is evident that intelligence oversight commission
recommendations are a
decidedly mixed bag falling somewhere in between the two
extremes noted
earlier. They have not been totally dismissed but are seldom
totally embraced.
It perhaps is fitting to end by citing Frank Popper’s observation
that “presidents
do not establish commissions to hear unrelieved criticism of
their own
policies.” To the extent that intelligence oversight commissions
heed this rule,
their recommendations may influence policy.
37
38

39
40
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Page 21 of
NOTES
1. Trent Lott, “Special Commissions,” Congressional Record,
September 23,
2002, S9050–53.
2. GPO Access, “Weekly Compilation of Presidential
Documents,”
http://www.gpoaccess.gov/wcomp/search.html.
3. Thomas Wolanin, Presidential Advisory Systems: Truman to
Nixon
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975); David Flitner,
Jr., The
Politics of Presidential Commissions: A Public Policy

Perspective (Dobbs
Ferry, NY: Transaction, 1986); Amy Zegart, “Blue Ribbons,
Black Boxes:
Toward a Better Understanding of Presidential Commissions,”
Presidential
Studies Quarterly 34 (2004): 366–93; Frank Popper, The
President’s
Commissions (New York: The Twentieth Century Fund, 1970);
and
Terrence Tutchings, Rhetoric and Reality: Presidential
Commissions and the
Making of Public Policy (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1979).
4. Not all intelligence commissions have studied intelligence
failures. The
Taylor Commission set up by President Kennedy and chaired by
General
Maxwell Taylor looked into the Bay of Pigs covert action
operation. Its
report is found at
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB29/index.htm
l.
5. Frank Gervasi, Big Government: The Meaning and Purpose of
the Hoover
Commission Report (New York: Whittlesey House, 1949), p. 8.
6. A declassified partial version of the Dulles-Jackson-Correa
Report can be
found in William Leary, ed., The Central Intelligence Agency:
History and
Documents (University: University of Alabama Press, 1984), p.
138.
7. Richard Norton Smith, An Uncommon Man: The Triumph of
Herbert Hoover

(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984), p. 411.
8. The report can be found on the Air University Web site at
http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/nssg/.
9. Peter Grose, Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles
(Boston, MA:
Houghton Mifflin, 1994), pp. 275–90.
10. The Dulles Report, in Leary, Central Intelligence Agency, p.
140.
11. Ibid., p. 138.
12. Commission on the Organization of the Executive Branch of
the
Government, Intelligence Activities: A Report to Congress
(Washington,
DC: Government Printing Office, June 1955), pp. 13–14.
13. Walter Pincus, “Intelligence Plan Reviewed,” Washington
Post, August 4,
2004, p. A17.
14. Gervasi, Big Government, p. 5.
15. National Performance Review, The Intelligence Community:
Accompanying
Report of the National Performance Review Office of the Vice
President
(Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, September
1993).
16. The report and other related documents can be found in
Craig R. Whitney,
The WMD Mirage: Iraq’s Decade of Deception and America’s
False Premise

for War (New York: Public Affairs Press, 2005).
17. Senator Ted Kennedy quoted in Flitner Jr., The Politics of
Presidential
http://www.gpoaccess.gov/wcomp/search.html
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB29/index.htm
l
http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/nssg/
12/2/12 9:49 PMPSI
Page 22 of
Commissions, p. 2.
18. Thomas Cronin, “On the Separation of Brain and State:
Implications for the
Presidency,” in Modern Presidents and the Presidency, ed. Marc
Landy
(Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1985), p. 61.
19. Anne Karalekas, History of the Central Intelligence Agency
(Laguna Beach,
CA: Aegean Park Press, 1977), pp. 83–85.
20. Arthur Darlington, The Central Intelligence Agency: An
Instrument of
Government to 1950 (University Park: Pennsylvania State
University Press,
1990), pp. 404–5. This document was declassified in 1989.

21. John T. S. Keeler, “Opening the Window for Reform:
Mandates, Crises, and
Extraordinary Policy-Making,” Comparative Political Studies 25
(1993):
433–86.
22. James March and Johan Olson, “Organizing Political Life:
What
Administrative Reorganization Tells Us about Government,”
American
Political Science Review 77 (1983): 290.
23. Keeler, “Opening the Window for Reform,” p. 478.
24. Walter Pincus and Peter Baker, “Panel Assails Intelligence
on Banned
Weapons,” The Washington Post, September 12, 2004, p. A5.
25. The report and other related documents can be found in
Whitney, The WMD
Mirage.
26. Report of the Commission on the Organization of the
Government for the
Conduct of Foreign Policy (Washington, DC: Government
Printing Office,
June 1975), p. 98.
27. Commission on the Roles and Capabilities of the Untied
States Intelligence
Community, Preparing for the 21st Century: An Appraisal of
U.S.
Intelligence (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office,
1996).
28. Darlington, The Central Intelligence Agency.

29. See Gervasi, Big Government, p. 281.
30. Karalekas, History of the Central Intelligence Agency, p.
87.
31. Charlie Savage, “President Weakens Espionage Oversight
Board Ford
Created,” The Boston Globe, March 14, 2008, p. A1.
32. The report can be found on the Privacy and Civil Liberties
Board’s
homepage at
http://www.privacyboard.gov/reports/2007/congress2007.
33. Barry Sraw, et al., “Threat-Rigidity Effects in
Organizational Behavior,”
Administrative Science Quarterly 26 (1981): 501–24; and Eric
Stern,
“Crisis and Learning: A Conceptual Balance Sheet,” Journal of
Contingencies and Crisis Management 5 (1997): 69–86.
34. March and Olson, “Organizing Political Life,” p. 283.
35. Stern, “Crisis Learning,” p. 73.
36. Richard Posner, Preventing Surprise Attacks: Intelligence
Reform in the
Wake of 9/11 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), p.
84.
37. U.S. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the
United States (the
911 Commission), Final Report (Washington, DC: Government
Accounting
Office, 2004), p. 420–21.
http://www.privacyboard.gov/reports/2007/congress2007

12/2/12 9:49 PMPSI
Page 23 of
38. Charles Wise, “Organizing for Homeland Security,” Public
Administration
Review 62 (2002): 133.
39. Richard K. Betts, “Analysis, War, and Decision: Why
Intelligence Failures
Are Inevitable,” World Politics 31 (1978): 71–72.
40. Frank Popper, The President’s Commissions (New York:
Twentieth Century
Fund, 2000), p. 9.
CRS Report for Congress
Prepared for Members and Committees of Congress
Sensitive Covert Action Notifications:
Oversight Options for Congress
Alfred Cumming
Specialist in Intelligence and National Security
April 6, 2011

Congressional Research Service
7-5700
www.crs.gov
R40691
Sensitive Covert Action Notifications: Oversight Options for
Congress
Summary
Legislation enacted in 1980 gave the executive branch authority
to limit advance notification of
especially sensitive covert actions to eight Members of
Congress—the “Gang of Eight”—when
the President determines that it is essential to limit prior notice
in order to meet extraordinary
circumstances affecting U.S. vital interests. In such cases, the
executive branch is permitted by
statute to limit notification to the chairmen and ranking
minority members of the two
congressional intelligence committees, the Speaker and minority
leader of the House, and Senate
majority and minority leaders, rather than to notify the full
intelligence committees, as is required
in cases involving covert actions determined to be less
sensitive.
Congress, in approving this new procedure in 1980, during the
Iran hostage crisis, said it intended
to preserve operational secrecy in those “rare” cases involving

especially sensitive covert actions
while providing the President with advance consultation with
the leaders in Congress and the
leadership of the intelligence committees who have special
expertise and responsibility in
intelligence matters. The intent appeared to some to be to
provide the President, on a short-term
basis, a greater degree of operational security as long as
sensitive operations were underway. In
1991, in a further elaboration of congressional intent following
the Iran-Contra Affair,
congressional report language stated that limiting notification to
the Gang of Eight should occur
only in situations involving covert actions of such extraordinary
sensitivity or risk to life that
knowledge of such activity should be restricted to as few
individuals as possible.
In its mark-up of H.R. 2701, the FY2010 Intelligence
Authorization Act, the House Permanent
Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) replaced the Gang of
Eight statutory provision,
adopting in its place a statutory requirement that each of the
intelligence committees establish
written procedures as may be necessary to govern such
notifications. According to committee
report language, the adopted provision vests the authority to
limit such briefings with the
committees, rather than the President.
On July 8, 2009, the executive branch issued a Statement of
Administration Policy (SAP) in
which it stated that it strongly objected to the House
Committee’s action to replace the Gang of
Eight statutory provision, and that the President’s senior
advisors would recommend that the

President veto the FY2010 Intelligence Authorization Act if the
committee’s language was
retained in the final bill.
The Senate Intelligence Committee, in its version of the FY2010
Intelligence Authorization Act,
left unchanged the Gang of Eight statutory structure, but
approved several changes that would
tighten certain aspects of current covert action reporting
requirements.
Ultimately, the House accepted the Senate’s proposals, which
the President signed into law as part
of the FY2010 Intelligence Authorization Act (P.L. 111-259).
Both the House and Senate Intelligence Committees appeared
not to make any further changes to
the Gang of Eight notification procedure when both committees
approved respective versions of
the 2011 Intelligence Authorization Act (H.R. 754; S. 719).
This report describes the statutory provision authorizing Gang
of Eight notifications, reviews the
legislative history of the provision, and examines the impact of
such notifications on
congressional oversight.
Congress

Congress
Contents
Requirements for Notifications of Sensitive Covert Actions to
Congress ..................................... 1
Changes to Gang of Eight Provisions
.................................................................................... 2
When Prior Notice to the Gang of Eight is
Withheld.................................................................... 3
Congress Signaled Its Intent That the Gang of Eight Would
Decide When To Inform the
Intelligence
Committees.............................................................................
.............................. 4
Congress Approved Gang of Eight Notifications in 1980,
Following the Iran Hostage
Rescue Attempt
..................................................................................... ..........
......................... 5
Authority of Gang of Eight to Affect Covert
Action..................................................................... 5
Impact on Congressional Intelligence Oversight
.......................................................................... 6

Gang of Eight Notifications: The Historic Record
....................................................................... 7
Conclusion: Striking a
Balance...................................................................................
................. 7
Contacts
Author Contact Information
...............................................................................................
......... 8
Congress
Congressional Research Service 1
Requirements for Notifications of Sensitive Covert
Actions to Congress
Under current statute, the President generally is required keep
the congressional intelligence
committees fully and currently informed of all covert actions1
and that any covert action2
“finding” 3 shall be reported to the committees as soon as
possible after such approval and before
the initiation of the covert action authorized by the finding.
If, however, the President determines that it is essential to limit
access to a covert action finding
in order to “meet extraordinary circumstances affecting vital

interests of the United States,”4 then
rather than providing advanced notification to the full
congressional intelligence committees, as is
generally required, the President may limit such notification to
the “Gang of Eight,” and any
other congressional leaders he may choose to inform. The
statute defines the “Gang of Eight” as
being comprised of the chairmen and ranking members of the
two congressional intelligence
committees and the House and Senate majority and minority
leadership.5
In addition to having to determine that vital interests are
implicated, the President must comply
with four additional statutory conditions in notifying the Gang
of Eight. First, the President is
required to provide a statement setting out the reasons for
limiting notification to the Gang of
Eight, rather than the full intelligence committees.6 The two
intelligence committee chairmen,
both Gang of Eight Members, also must be provided signed
copies of the covert action finding in
question.7 Third, the President is required to provide the Gang
of Eight advance notice of the
covert action in question.8 And, lastly, Gang of Eight Members
must be notified of any significant
changes in a previously approved covert action, or any
significant undertaking pursuant to a
previously approved finding.9
1 National Security Act as amended, Sec. 503 [50 U.S.C. 413b]
(b) and (c).
2 A covert action is defined in statute as an activity or activities
of the United States Government to influence political,
economic, or military conditions abroad, where it is intended

that the role of the United States Government will not be
apparent or acknowledged publicly. See the National Security
Act of 1947, Sec. 503(e), 50 U.S.C. 413b(e).
3 A Finding is a presidential determination that an activity is
necessary to “support identifiable foreign policy
objectives” and “is important to he national security of the
Untied States.” See Intelligence Authorization Act for
FY1991, P.L. 102-88, Title VI, Sec. 602 (a) (2), 50 U.S.C. 413b
(a).
4 National Security Act of 1947 as amended, Sec. 503 [50
U.S.C. 413b] (c) (2). See Addendum A, Title V of the
National Security Act as amended. The authorization for Gang
of Eight notification also permits the President to notify
“such other Member or Members of the congressional leadership
as may be included by the President.”
5 Ibid.
U.S.C. 413b] (c) (4). The statute does not explicitly specify
whether such a statement should be in writing, nor specifically
to whom such a statement should be provided.
7 Ibid.
U.S.C. 413b] (c) (2). The President must comply with these
last two requirements—providing signed copies of the covert
action and providing advance notification—when
notifying the full committees of covert action operations that
are determined to be less sensitive than “Gang of Eight”
covert actions. Sec. 503 [50 U.S.C. 413b] (a) (1) requires a
written finding unless immediate action by the U.S. is
required and time does not permit preparation of a written
finding. In the latter situation, a contemporaneous written
record must be immediately reduced to a written finding as soon
as possible within 48 hours.
9 Ibid, (d).

Congress
In report language accompanying the 1980 enactment, Congress
established its intent to preserve
the secrecy necessary for very sensitive covert actions, while
providing the President with a
process for consulting in advance with congressional leaders,
including the intelligence
committee chairmen and ranking minority members, “who have
special expertise and
responsibility in intelligence matters.”10 Such consultation,
according to Congress, would ensure
strong oversight, while at the same time, “share the President’s
burden on difficult decisions
concerning significant activities.”11
In 1991, following the Iran-Contra Affair,12 Intelligence
Conference Committee Conferees more
specifically stated that Gang of Eight notifications should be
used only when “the President is
faced with a covert action of such extraordinary sensitivity or
risk to life that knowledge of the
covert action should be restricted to as few individuals as
possible.”13 Congressional Conferees
also indicated that they expected the executive branch to hold
itself to the same standard by
similarly limiting knowledge of such sensitive covert actions
within the executive.14
Changes to Gang of Eight Provisions
Congress approved several changes to the Gang of Eight

notification procedures as part of the
FY2010 Intelligence Authorization Act (P.L. 111-259). First, it
required that a written statement
now be provided outlining the reasons for a presidential
decision to limit notification of a covert
action or significant change or undertaking in a previously
approved finding. Previously, such a
statement was required, but there was no explicit requirement
that it be written. Second, the
President is now required no later than 180 days after such a
statement of reasons for limiting
access is submitted, to ensure that all members of the
congressional intelligence committees are
provided access to the finding or notification, or a statement of
reasons, submitted to all
committee members, as to why it remains essential to continue
to limited notification. Finally,
Congress required that the President now ensure that the Gang
of Eight be notified in writing of
any significant change in a previously approved covert action,
and stipulated further that the
president, in determining whether an activity constitutes a
significant undertaking, shall consider
whether the activity:
• involved significant risk of loss of life;
• requires an expansion of existing authorities, including
authorities relating to
research, development, or operations;
• results in the expenditure of significant funds or other
resources;
10 Addendum A, S.Rept. 96-730, 96th Cong., 2nd sess. (1980),
p. 10. This report accompanied S. 2284, from which Title

V of P.L. 96-450 is derived. Gang of Eight notification was
included in a new Title V, Sec. 501, Sec. 501 (a) (1) added
to the National Security Act of 1947 as amended by Sec. 407 (a)
(3) of P.L. 96-450.
11 Ibid.
12 The Iran-Contra affair was a secret initiative by the
administration of President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s to
provide funds to the Nicaraguan Democratic Resistance from
profits gained by selling arms to Iran. The purpose was at
least two-fold: to financially support the Nicaraguan
Democratic Resistance and to secure the release of American
hostages held by pro-Iranian groups in Lebanon.
13 Joint Explanatory Statement of the Committee of
Conference, accompanying Conf.Rept. 102-166, 102nd
Congress,
1st sess. (1991), p. 28. The Joint Explanatory Statement
accompanied H.R. 1455, the FY1991 Intelligence
Authorization Act, which was subsequently signed into law
(P.L. 102-88). The “risk to life” language is not repeated in
statute.
14 Ibid.
Congress
• requires notification under section 504 [50 USCS § 414];
• gives rise to a significant risk of disclosing intelligence
sources or methods;
• presents a reasonably foreseeable risk of serious damage to the

diplomatic
relations of the United States if such activity were disclosed
without
authorization.
The unclassified version of the FY2011 Intelligence
Authorization Act, which the House and
Senate Intelligence Committees approved in 2011, contained no
further changes to the Gang of
Eight notification procedure.15
When Prior Notice to the Gang of Eight is Withheld
Although the statute requires that the President provide the
Gang of Eight advance notice of
certain covert actions, it also recognizes the President’s
constitutional authority to withhold such
prior notice altogether by imposing certain additional conditions
on the President should the
decision be made to withhold. If prior notice is withheld, the
President must “fully inform” the
congressional intelligence committees16 in a “timely fashion”17
after the commencement of the
covert action. The President also is required to provide a
statement of the reasons for withholding
prior notice to the Gang of Eight.18 In other words, a decision
by the executive branch to withhold
prior notice from the Gang of Eight would appear to effectively
prevent the executive branch
from limiting an-after-the-fact notification to the Gang of Eight,
even if the President had
determined initially that the covert action in question warranted
Gang of Eight treatment. Rather,
barring prior notice to the Gang of Eight, the executive branch
would then be required to inform
the full intelligence committees of the covert action in “timely
fashion.” In doing so, Congress

appeared to envision a covert action, the initiation of which
would require a short-term period of
heightened operational security.
15 H.R. 754 and S. 719, respectively.
U.S.C. 413b] (c) (3).
17 Ibid. What constitutes “timely fashion” was the subject of
intense debate between the congressional intelligence
committees and the executive branch during the consideration of
the fiscal year 1991 Intelligence Authorization Act. At
that time, House and Senate intelligence committee conferees
noted that the executive branch had asserted that the
President’s constitutional authorities “permit the President to
withhold notice of covert actions from the committees for
as long as he deems necessary.” The conferees disputed the
President’s assertion, claiming that the appropriate meaning
of “timely fashion” is “within a few days.” Specifically,
conferees stated, “While the conferees recognize that they
cannot foreclose by statute the possibility that the President
may assert a constitutional basis for withholding notice of
covert actions for periods longer than ‘a few days,’ they believe
that the President’s stated intention to act under the
‘timely notice’ requirement of existing law to make a
notification ‘within a few days’ is the appropriate manner to
proceed under this provision, and is consistent with what the
conferees believe is its meaning and intent.” The
conference report included the text of a letter sent to the
chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, in which
President George H.W. Bush stated: “In those rare instances
where prior notice is not provided, I anticipate that notice
will be provided within a few days. Any withholding beyond
this period will be based upon my assertion of authorities
granted this office by the Constitution...” See H.Conf.Rept.
102-166, 102nd Cong., 1st sess., pp. 27-28 (1991). Despite

President George H.W. Bush’s refusal to commit to either
“timely” notification as defined by Congress, or any
notification at all, Robert M. Gates, President George H.W.
Bush’s nominee as Director of Central Intelligence, said he
believed that non-notification should be withheld for no more
than a few days at the most, and that he would
contemplate resignation if it extended beyond that time period.
See Congressional Quarterly Almanac, 102nd Cong., 1st
sess., 1991, Vol. XLVII, p. 482.
18 Ibid.
Congress
Congress Signaled Its Intent That the Gang of Eight
Would Decide When To Inform the Intelligence
Committees
During the Senate’s 1980 debate of the Gang of Eight provision,
congressional sponsors said their
intent was that the Gang of Eight would reserve the right to
determine the appropriate time to
inform the full intelligence committees of the covert action of
which they had been notified.19
The position of sponsors that the Gang of Eight would
determine when to notify the full
intelligence committees underscores the point that while the
statute provides the President this
limited notification option, it appears to be largely silent on
what happens after the President
exercises this particular option. Sponsors thus made it clear that

they expected the intelligence
committees to establish certain procedures to govern how the
Gang of Eight was to notify the full
intelligence committees. Senator Walter Huddleston, Senate
floor manager for the legislation,
said “the intent is that the full oversight committees will be
fully informed at such time the eight
leaders determine is appropriate. The committees will establish
the procedures for the discharge
of this responsibility.”20
Senator Huddleston’s comments referred to Sec. 501(c) of Title
V of the National Security Act
which stipulates that “The President and the congressional
intelligence committees shall each
establish such procedures as may be necessary to carry out the
provisions of this title.”
With regard to Sec. 501(c), Senate report language stated:
The authority for procedures established by the Select
Committees is based on the current
practices of the committees in establishing their own rules. One
or both committees may, for
example, adopt procedures under which designated members are
assigned responsibility on
behalf of the committee to receive information in particular
types of circumstances, such as
when all members cannot attend a meeting or when certain
highly sensitive information is
involved.21
Congressional intent thus appeared to be that the collective
membership of each intelligence
committee, rather than the committee leadership, would develop
such procedures.22 Moreover, the

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