American Foreign Policy in a Globalized World by David P. Forsythe

Author:David P. Forsythe [Forsythe, David P.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Public Policy, Political Science, General
ISBN: 9780415953979
Google: TdHtAAAAMAAJ
Goodreads: 2476907
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 1984-05-01T00:00:00+00:00

As indicated by the findings in Table 7.1, Congress produced several key legislative proposals related to intelligence during this time span. Of the ten major initiatives shown in the table, only one occurred outside the context of a major fire-alarm response. That single exception, the Intelligence Identities Act of 1983, was the result of a conclusion reached by lawmakers (at the CIA’s urging) that a law was necessary to provide stiff penalties against anyone who revealed without proper authorization the name of a U.S. intelligence officer or asset. The rest of the oversight initiatives were the result of inquiries and the stage of intense patrolling that followed fire alarms.

Some of the initiatives, such as the Intelligence Accountability Act of 1980, took a considerable amount of time for the Congress to craft—four years in this case. In this instance, some lawmakers originally hoped to pass an intelligence charter, over 270 pages long, designed to provide a broad legal framework for the secret agencies. Their intention was to construct an omnibus accountability law to replace the out-of-date language of the 1947 National Security Act. This sweeping measure attracted many dissenters, however, and the bold charter proposal ultimately gave way under the weight of effective CIA lobbying to a three-page bill. The much shorter law still had teeth, though, and required, among other provisions, the director of central intelligence to report to Congress in advance on all important intelligence activities.25 The president could delay reporting in extraordinary circumstances, but only for a maximum of two days.

The Frequency of Intense Intelligence Accountability

The most important intelligence wake-up call for lawmakers in the period before the formal creation of the CIA and America’s modern intelligence community in 1947 was the Japanese attack against Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The intelligence portions of the National Security Act of 1947 were a delayed response to that intelligence failure, coupled with a growing concern about a new threat to the United States: the rise of the Soviet Union as a global rival, steered by a Marxist philosophy anathema to America’s espousal of market-based democracies.26

Following the establishment of the intelligence community, several low- threshold fire alarms sounded during the early years of the Cold War. Among the most notable were the failure to predict the outbreak of war on the Korean peninsula (1950), the Bay of Pigs disaster (1961), the controversy over CIA ties to the National Student Association and other domestic groups (1966), and an alleged CIA connection to the Watergate burglars (1973).27 None of these alarms was as shattering as the subsequent high-threshold shocks delivered by the domestic spy scandal, Iran-Contra affair, the Ames case, the 9/11 attacks, or the mistaken WMD report that helped fuel an American war in Iraq in 2003. With the possible exception of the Ames case, these fire alarms caught the attention of Americans across the nation, which in turn caused lawmakers to focus on the events; the Ames case certainly sounded an alarm among national security officials inside the D.C. Beltway.

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