Stephen MarrinWorking paperApril 2001

Choosing Sides: Assessing Congressional Views of the CIA (1)

Controversies periodically erupt providing opportunities for congressional intelligence committee members opposed to intelligence activities to publicly criticize the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Meanwhile, others defend its actions despite the frequency or heinous nature of the charges brought against it. Such charges include the mining of Nicaraguan's harbors in the early 1980s, involvement in Iran Contra in the late 1980s, its failure to predict the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, and complicity in American inner-city cocaine distribution and the murder of an American citizen's husband in Guatemala in the mid-1990s. This article argues that congressional intelligence committee members are more likely to respond to controversies involving the CIA based on their underlying foreign policy goals and assumptions than on partisan or ideological considerations. If tested against the best existing explanation and proven to be more accurate, this approach may be used to explain member’s past--and possibly predict future--positions on controversial intelligence issues.

The Playing Field: Intelligence Committees Congress’ role overseeing the intelligence community has increased since the creation of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) in 1976 and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) in 1977. Congress created these committees to provide needed legislation such as funding authorization and to strengthen and institutionalize intelligence oversight by "conduct(ing) investigations, audits, and inquiries regarding intelligence activities." (2) SSCI and HPSCI have maintained an active role in oversight, and over time have also become so entwined in the operations of the intelligence community that they have become substantial consumers of finished intelligence and originators of reform proposals. (3) Given the intelligence committees’ increased role, its members’ opinions of the CIA become not just an interesting topic, but an important one as well.

Choosing SidesA legislator probably forms an opinion of CIA through an implicit--perhaps subconsciously applied--cost/benefit calculation. Simply put, a member's support for the CIA may be derived from a belief that a real or perceived foreign threat to American interests must be countered by an American capability to detect it, inform policymakers of its existence, and if necessary disrupt and destroy it covertly. At the opposite end of this spectrum, a member who opposes the CIA or a subcomponent such as covert action likely does so because the costs of maintaining an intelligence capability outweigh the benefits it provides. Such potential costs include the opportunity cost of funding national security programs over domestic ones, the American loss of international moral or ethical standing, the corrosive effect of secrecy on domestic democratic processes, and the potential for abuse of civil liberties arising from a concentration of surveillance power. (4)

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There is probably a middle ground as well that acknowledges both benefits and costs of intelligence, but the split between intelligence critics and advocates has been a constant theme in intelligence oversight studies. Frank Smist developed the "institutional oversight" model and the "investigative oversight" model to differentiate between cooperative and adversarial relationships between the committees and their overseen institutions. These models also illustrate the dichotomous approach that members take in their oversight roles. (5) In addition, HPSCI's 1996 staff study characterized member approaches to oversight by using the terms ‘adversary’ and ‘advocate.’ (6) But still left unexplained is why some members become advocates and others adversaries.

Existing Explanations InsufficientThe veil of secrecy that covers intelligence issues has deterred scholarly research and analysis into the causal factors that drive congressional attitudes of the intelligence community. Therefore, despite a large and growing body of serious academic work on intelligence issues, only Dr. Loch Johnson provides an explanation for the divergence of congressional member opinion. (7) In a 1994 article Dr. Johnson sorts intelligence committee open hearing questions from 1975 to 1990 into deferential, factual, probing, and adversarial categories. (8) He then combines the deferential and factual questions into a 'softball' category because of their 'relatively benign intervention' and the more critical into a 'hardball' category. In analyzing 'who plays hardball and why,' Dr. Johnson correlated a number of possible causal factors including ideology (Liberal/Conservative), party (Republican/Democrat), seniority, and divided government with the likelihood of throwing 'hardball' questions in hearings and concluded that ideology and partisanship appear to have the strongest predictive value for hardball questioning. In other words, conservatives throw ‘softballs’ in their support of executive power, and liberals throw ‘hardballs’ in opposition.

However, political ideology may not be as strong of a causal factor in foreign policy as it once was, and as a result Dr. Johnson's approach may no longer be relevant for today's post Cold War researchers. Since 1990—the last year of data Dr. Johnson uses--anti-Communism’s role separating Cold War liberals from conservatives has diminished in intensity, and has been overshadowed by a multitude of other foreign policy concerns. This has led to a splintering of post-Cold War political perspectives—to include isolationist Republicans and internationalist interventionist Democrats—since neither political parties nor their ideological cousins have been able to achieve consensus on post-Cold War American foreign policy. It is likely that the great diversity of foreign policy agendas currently competing in the United States and its political process will render impotent any partisan attempts to rationalize United States foreign policy absent an emergent 'clear and present danger' to United States national security. This de-linking of foreign policy to ideology has also had repercussions within the oversight process. Stephen Knott notes that between 1994 and 2000 the Democratic control of the White House and Republican control of Congress has ‘transformed’ the traditional positions that the parties have taken on the role of congressional oversight. (9) Therefore, in the future simple correlations between ideology or partisanship and attitudes toward intelligence may not be able to account for variations in oversight activity.

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Time for a New Approach The intelligence literature emphasizes the subservient role that intelligence plays to foreign policy more generally. If this is the case, perceptions of the utility of CIA should be driven at least in part by broad and fundamental assumptions of national purpose, national interest, and foreign policy. In an attempt to separate out the reasons for variations in advocates’ positions on post-Cold War CIA roles and missions, the following different positions were derived from proposals published between 1990 and 1995: 1. Expand CIA functions to target the greater variety of threats to national interests. 2. Reduce CIA functions because of the potential harm they present to American civil

liberties3. Implement procedural or structural reforms to address problems and inefficiencies

and improve the accuracy of the analytic product. 4. Expand CIA’s role to compensate for the reduced post-Cold War US military

presence worldwide.5. Reduce CIA functions due to the reduced threat resulting from the dissolution of the

Soviet Union. 6. Maintain CIA’s global coverage to provide the information necessary to support

foreign policy.

Conceptually it is possible to explain the differences in these proposals by three assumptions underlying foreign policy, and one based on the perception of intelligence’s function:

The relative weighting of domestic versus foreign policy likely causes variations in perceptions of intelligence's utility. Those who weight foreign policy heavier will also value the role of CIA more, and vice versa.

The definition of ‘national security’ also drives perceptions of the CIA’s role. The end of the Cold War provided the opportunity for some to enlarge—and others reduce—the scope of issues considered to be of national security importance. Perceptions of CIA’s optimal size tend to correspond directly to this re-definition.

The perception of the relative power of non-state and trans-state actors vis-à-vis traditional state threats also drives perceptions of the role of intelligence. Those who believe that non-state power is increasing advocate that intelligence target the more threatening of these new developments such as narcotics traffickers and terrorists while those who believe that state competitors will remain the primary threat to American national security advocate a continued focus on states.

The purpose of intelligence appears to either identify intelligence as a threat perception and warning instrument or provision of foreign policy support above and beyond limited national security concerns. The former role would imply a decreased role for intelligence during peacetime, while the latter conception would imply a continued high level of relevancy for intelligence even in peacetime as long as engagement levels remained high.

These four assumptions may have great explanatory value for variations in an intelligence committee member’s perceptions of intelligence. If a researcher had access to a

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legislator’s foreign policy preferences—either through interviews or approximated through public statements—it might be possible to test whether they drive a member’s oversight and statutory responsibilities. We could sort the members into advocates (positions 1,3,4,6) and adversaries (positions 2,5) based on their implications for CIA and then exploit Mr. Johnson's methodology to conduct correlations between the tenor of open hearing questions and the attitude of the member towards intelligence.

If the concepts have been successfully operationalized, the final product will make both a methodological and substantive contribution to our understanding of the congressional intelligence committees functioning. This approach is not the definitive one, however, and will not be able to explain all positions taken by all members. We have excluded other possible causal variables--including electoral concerns--and this has put an outer bound on the model’s accuracy since other considerations probably do enter a member’s decision-making process. (10) Therefore, further refinement of these concepts and further study of intelligence committee members’ agendas and motivations may be necessary. In addition, further refinement of the underlying foreign policy perspectives and approaches to intelligence could provide a better understanding of the reasons for such divisions. However, by subsuming intelligence perceptions to more general foreign policy assumptions this approach may provide a next step in the study of intelligence issues and the politics surrounding the field.

End Notes1. Stephen Marrin (spm8p@virginia.edu), an AFIO member and former CIA analyst, is currently a graduate student specializing in intelligence studies at the University of Virginia. This article was adapted from a graduate research proposal exploring a hypothesized causal relationship between foreign policy perspectives and its impact on intelligence developed in an undergraduate honors thesis. For the original conceptual development, see: Marrin, Stephen. ‘Why Spy?’ Honors Thesis, Colgate University, 1995.Also, as required, it was submitted to the Agency for pre-publication review.2. ‘Legislative Oversight of Intelligence Activities: The U.S. Experience,’ Select Committee on Intelligence, United States Senate, One Hundred Third Congress, Second Session, October 1994. 14-193. Snider, L. Britt. ‘Sharing Secrets With Lawmakers: Congress as a User of Intelligence.’ Center for the Study of Intelligence, CIA. February 1997 and 'IC21: The Intelligence Community in the 21st Century,' Staff Study; Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. United States House of Representatives. One Hundred Fourth Congress, 1996. 4. Alterman, Eric. 'The CIA's Fifty Candles,' The Nation. 6 Oct 1997, 5.5. Smist, Frank. Congress Oversees the United States Intelligence Community, 1947 – 1989. University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville, 1990.6. IC21.7. More than 1,000 intelligence-related books are listed in Books in Print, compared with 215 in 1994. Strauss, Valerie and Vernon Loeb. ‘CIA Sends Agents to Schools—To Teach,’ The Washington Post. 18 April 2000, A12.

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8. Johnson, Loch. ‘Playing Hardball With the CIA,’ The President, The Congress, And the Making of Foreign Policy. Ed. Paul Peterson; University of Oklahoma Press, 1994. 49-73.9. Knott, Stephen F. ‘The Great Republican Transformation on Oversight.’ International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, Vol. 13, No. 1, 49-63.10. For further information regarding the expectation that congress members will act based on electoral considerations, see: Mayhew, David R. Congress: The Electoral Connection. Yale University Press: New Haven, 1974. However, intelligence may not conform to such expectations. Michael Madigan--counsel to former SSCI member Senator Howard Baker--noted that service on SSCI ‘has no political benefit. In fact, it is a vast political detriment. The time it takes up. You get no benefits from serving on the intelligence committee. There are no pork-barrel benefits to be obtained and no state issues involved.' (Smist, 33) The HPSCI staff also notes that: 'service on HPSCI has more overt drawbacks than attractions: it likely offers no help vis-a-vis the interests of the Members' districts; it detracts time and attention from issues of direct interest to constituents; and there is little Members can say about what they do on HPSCI.' (IC21, Chapter 15)

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