Tough criticism unlikely to change CIA’s mandate
WASHINGTON — Over a lunch in Washington in 1976, James Angleton, for years the ruthless chief of counterintelligence at the CIA, likened the agency to a medieval city occupied by an invading army.
“Only, we have been occupied by Congress,” he told a young congressional investigator. “With our files rifled, our officials humiliated, and our agents exposed.”
The spymaster had cause for worry. He had endured a public grilling about his role in domestic spying operations by a select committee chaired by Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho, that spent years looking into intelligence abuses. And the CIA, used to doing what it wanted while keeping Congress mostly in the dark, was in the midst of convulsions that would fundamentally remake its mission.
Nearly four decades later, another Senate committee’s allegations that the CIA has engaged in torture, lying and cover-up has stirred echoes of the Church era — raising the question of whether the agency is in for another period of change.
But the scathing report the Senate Intelligence Committee delivered this month is unlikely to significantly change the role the CIA plays in running America’s secret wars. A number of factors — from steadfast backing by Congress and the White House to strong public support for clandestine operations — ensure that an agency that has been ascendant since Presi- dent Obama came into office is not likely to see its mission diminished, either during his waning years in the White House or for some time after that.
The Church Committee’s revelations about the abuses committed by the intelligence community came at the end of America’s wrenching military involvement in Vietnam and during a period of detente with the Soviet Union. The disclosures of CIA assassination schemes and spying on Vietnam War protesters fueled a post-Watergate fury among many Americans who had grown cynical about secret plots hatched in Washington.
The grim detailsled to a gutting of the agency’s ranks and a ban on assassinations, imposed by President Gerald Ford. They also led to the creation of the congressional intelligence committees and a requirement that the CIA regularly reported its covert activities to the oversight panels.
By contrast, the Senate Intelligence Committee’s recent report on CIA excesses since the Sept. 11 attacks arrived in the midst of renewed fears of global terrorism, the rise of the Islamic State and the grisly beheading videos of U.S. hostages.
A CBS News poll released last week found that although 69 percent of those asked consider waterboarding to be torture, 49 percent think that brutal interrogation methods are sometimes justified.
And the Obama administration has made clear that it has no plans to make anyone legally accountable for the practices described by the CIA as enhanced interrogation techniques and the Intelligence Committee as torture.
And as America’s spying apparatus has grown larger, richer and more powerful than during any other time in its history, it has become ever harder for those keeping watch over it.
“We are 15 people overseeing a $50 billion enterprise,” said Sen. Angus King, a member of the Intelligence Committee, speaking of his fellow committee members.