Don't ask, Don't tell
Congress gives short shrift to its intelligence oversight duties
By Kevin Whitelaw and David E. Kaplan
James Pavitt would seem an unlikely backer of Congress's role as a watchdog over the nation's intelligence agencies. For the past three decades, he has been in the business of "stealing secrets," he says, as a CIA covert officer. But Pavitt, who retired last month as the CIA's top spy--its deputy director of operations--says that in practice, Congress did little to ensure that the CIA had the right resources to target terrorists before Sept. 11, 2001. "Where was the concern? Where was the intrusive oversight? . . . They weren't there," Pavitt told U.S. News in a rare interview. "On the 12th of September, Congress said, 'Oh my God, they need more.' What the hell were they doing?" Sadly, he adds, it's only gotten worse in the wake of the attacks: "I have never, in my 31 years in the business, seen the kind of partisanship I saw in the past 13 months."
The frustration is widely shared. The 9/11 commission is similarly dismissive of congressional oversight in its final report, saying that both the House and Senate intelligence committees "lack the power, influence, and sustained capability" to properly oversee the nation's 15 intelligence agencies. The commission went even further, saying that Congress shares the blame for pre-9/11 intelligence failures and calling reform of its overlapping committee structure key to fixing the larger problem.
Former White House counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke recalls being summoned to brief eight different committees, adding, "And that's just in the Senate." But even as members of Congress hold a spate of hearings about proposals for serious structural reform of intelligence agencies, few are talking about fixing their own house. Lawmakers are notoriously territorial. "What is happening right now is that the dirtiest four-letter word in government--spelled t-u-r-f--is playing out on both sides," says Rep. Jane Harman, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.
"Dealing with a weakling." Many in the intelligence world hark back to the brief period in the 1980s when Congress succeeded in performing serious and nonpartisan oversight. But gradually, the increasingly bitter partisan squabbles on Capitol Hill began to spill over more frequently into the previously collegial intelligence committees. "There has been basically a collapse of the oversight system, particularly in the Senate, since the mid-1990s," says Marvin Ott, who worked for both the CIA and the Senate Intelligence Committee before joining the NationalWarCollege. "Everyone dealing with the intelligence committees in the intelligence world knows they are dealing with a weakling."
Congress has a tough job. Lawmakers have a steep learning curve when it comes to the secret, arcane $40 billion intelligence community. With term limits on both intelligence committees, members have difficulty building up knowledge and rely heavily on their professional staffers to prepare them for hearings. "The members don't even understand their own questions; it's clear they're being fed them from staff," says one senior intelligence official who has testified in committee sessions that are closed to the public. "We have to suggest to them what questions to ask us--it's appalling."
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."
Perhaps unsurprisingly, many in the CIA and elsewhere are quick to praise the appropriations panels, which tend to be much more friendly toward the agencies. "My dealings with appropriators were always productive," says Pavitt. "These were people who listened." The reason for this, say some in Congress, is that the intelligence committees are the only ones that have at least tried to force reforms on the CIA. "We actually conduct oversight and criticize and realign resources, and the appropriators don't do that," contends a senior congressional source. "They just give them what they want."
Battles. After 9/11, with more work being done in public, the intelligence committees have also become more partisan. Since the mid-1990s, the professional staffs have been increasingly divided--either officially or unofficially--into Democratic and Republican staffers. They briefly united to produce a well-regarded joint inquiry into 9/11. But when the Senate Intelligence Committee began investigating the CIA's prewar Iraq intelligence, Republicans ensured that the first bipartisan report did not scrutinize how the White House interpreted the CIA's work. On the House side, Democrats worked on a similar report but were unable to persuade Republicans to join them--and may soon release their findings unilaterally.
Overcoming turf battles in Congress seems to many like a nearly insurmountable task. Take homeland security, for example, where some 88 committees and subcommittees claim a role in oversight. The 9/11 commission has recommended strengthening the intelligence committees by giving them the power to both approve the budget and appropriate the money, as well as creating new subcommittees to tackle crucial tasks. And there are some signs of movement on reform. The Senate has formed a working group to address possible changes in oversight. But in a sign of just how much turf is at stake, the group has some 22 members--nearly a quarter of the Senate.