Challenging the Secret Government: The Post-Watergate Investigations of the CIA and the FBI.

• Author: Corn, David

About a year ago at a tony Washington party, I joined a conversation with Anthony Lake, the national security adviser to President Clinton. At the time, the CIA was yet again mired in public controversy. It had been disclosed that a Guatemalan military thug--implicated in the murders of an American hotelier and a rebel leader married to an American--had been on the agency payroll. There were the usual calls for congressional investigation and institutional reform, and renewed questions about the role of the post-Cold War intelligence community. Naturally, the talk at the party turned to this Guatemalan business. What would the White House do about the CIA in response to the latest scandal? Lake was asked. "We don't have a dog in this fight," he replied.

To Lake, the current controversy was mostly a cat-and-dog scuffle between the CIA and the State Department. But his comment was an astonishing recognition of the President's unwillingness to take full responsibility for the CIA--which does, theoretically at least, exist to serve him. No serious effort would be made by the White House to rethink or remake the CIA in these post-Soviet days.

That's par for the course. True reform of the cloak-and-dagger community--that is, reform predicated on a serious evaluation of the necessity (if any) for Constitution-defying instruments such as the CIA and its acronymic brethren--has proven to be the most elusive of goals in Washington.

A recent spate of reports advertise themselves as blueprints for intelligence reform, but they are mostly guides for tinkering. The Council on Foreign Relations, the Republicans of the House Intelligence Committee, and a presidential commission established by Clinton in the wake of various scandals (among them the Ames travesty) each have coughed up so-called programs for change. But, as former CIA analyst Melvin Goodman notes, "major problems received little scrutiny from these studies and major questions went unanswered. For example, what is the proper role for espionage and covert action in the post-Cold War era? What is a proper expenditure for intelligence? ... Which intelligence programs are making a difference in addressing national security threats and which programs can be reduced or abandoned?"

These paper-tiger reports fit nicely into the long, ignoble history of intelligence reform, as we are reminded by Kathryn Olmsted in her well-researched study, Challenging the Secret Government. Olmsted, a lecturer at the...