Don't ask, Don't tell
Congress gives short shrift to its intelligence oversight duties
For their part, many on Capitol Hill complain that intelligence officials, whose instinct is to provide as little information as necessary, can use their experience to intimidate members and deflect tough questions. "The executive branch is very good at blowing smoke and only answering precisely what you ask them," says Harman. Covert officers also like to impress lawmakers with spy tales of derring-do in faraway capitals. "They come in with their swagger and tours of Luxembourg," a senior congressional source says sarcastically.
To many intelligence officials, the committees' oversight often smacks of micromanagement. "We were getting questions on $100,000 line items in a budget of tens of billions," says James Simon, a former assistant director of central intelligence. "No business operates that way." Another former senior official tells of the time a committee demanded that the CIA boost the number of clandestine officers stationed in an obscure Nordic nation. The reason: After an official visit, the committee wanted to help the overworked CIA officers there.
Another criticism: Oversight committees have been largely reactive, driven mostly by press coverage and current crises. For instance, intelligence veterans say there was little attention paid to the quality of the intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction until the weapons failed to turn up after the war. Similarly, before 9/11 there was no systematic approach to overseeing issues like the efficacy of the CIA's analysis or collection efforts. "There were no hearings about the strategic direction of the intelligence community," says a former senior CIA official. When Clarke appeared before Congress during his White House tenure, it was usually to sound the alarm on the latest terrorism threats. "They'd all be horrified," he says, "and then look at their watches for the next hearing."
The veil of secrecy further constrains effective congressional oversight. Even the overall budget figure is considered a state secret. "There is no outside organization that is providing consistent oversight, and whistle-blowing is not a respected tradition in the intelligence community," says Rep. Rush Holt, a Democrat who sits on the House Intelligence Committee. "There is nobody else to help." Both the CIA and the intelligence committees have blocked the Government Accountability Office, which performs independent audits of the federal government, from getting access to the CIA.
The committees are hobbled by their own structure, which reflects the fractured nature of the intelligence community. The bulk of the intelligence budget goes to agencies like the National Security Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office, which are primarily run by the Pentagon. This gives rise to competing jurisdictions in Congress, between the intelligence committees and the more powerful armed services and appropriations committees. Repeatedly in recent years, U.S. News has learned, the Senate Intelligence Committee has tried to kill big-ticket projects at the NSA and NRO, only to have lawmakers on other committees reverse those decisions after intense pressure from the Pentagon and its allies. Intelligence officials have learned how to play the committees off one another. "The problem is an entrenched bureaucracy that knows how to manipulate the system," says Rep. Curt Weldon, the Republican vice chair of the House Armed Services Committee, adding that with several relevant committees, the agencies "have five or six shots to cause trouble."
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