"Foreseeing conflict between the legislative and executive branches over the proper functions of government, the Founders of the United States built into the U.S. Constitution the checks and balances that Edwin S. Corwin called "an invitation to struggle." Smist argues that congressional intelligence-oversight committees--such as Senator Church's 1975-76 committee--can, by taking up this struggle, not only handle sensitive information responsibly but help shape rational foreign policy. When Congress is shut out of the intelligence process-as in President Carter's abortive Iran rescue mission and Reagan's Iran-Contra affair-the results can be catastrophic. Smist's detailed analysis of congressional oversight of U.S. intelligence from Pearl Harbor through Iran-Contra is based largely on his interviews with participants, including senators, representatives, and executive-branch officials. The analysis is informed by Smist's dialectical model of "institutional" (conservative, supportive) versus "investigative" (radical, questioning) oversight, which allows him to uncover the frequently obscured historical value of previous Senate and House investigative committees. For example, the Pike committee, 1975-76, even though its final report was suppressed by the House, was able to elicit then Secretary of State Kissinger's admission of presidential control over covert actions, thus shattering the doctrine of "plausible deniability." Because these committees continue to wrestle with the principles underlying government, their unfolding drama is meaningful for the student of constitutional history. This book provides new conceptual tools for the study of intelligence oversight and gives the direct testimony of key participants, making it important not only as political science but as history." --

Contents: (1) Intro.; (2) House and Senate Select Committees on Intelligence; (3) Joint Committee on Atomic Energy as a Model; (4) Proposed Joint Committee on Intelligence Characteristics: Methods of Establishment; Jurisdiction and Authority; Membership; Terms and Rotation; Leadership; Secrecy Controls; Pros and Cons; (5) Alternatives to a Joint Committee: Changing the Select Committees¿ Structure and Powers; Concerns about Restructuring the Intelligence Committees; Constraints on Coordination; Increasing the Use of Congressional Support Agencies; (6) Observations on Oversight of Intelligence: Obstacles to Oversight: Secrecy Constraints. This is a print on demand edition of an important, hard-to-find publication.

All democracies have had to contend with the challenge of tolerating hidden spy services within otherwise relatively transparent governments. Democracies pride themselves on privacy and liberty, but intelligence organizations have secret budgets, gather information surreptitiously around the world, and plan covert action against foreign regimes. Sometimes, they have even targeted the very citizens they were established to protect, as with the COINTELPRO operations in the 1960s and 1970s, carried out by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) against civil rights and antiwar activists. In this sense, democracy and intelligence have always been a poor match. Yet Americans live in an uncertain and threatening world filled with nuclear warheads, chemical and biological weapons, and terrorists intent on destruction. Without an intelligence apparatus scanning the globe to alert the United States to these threats, the planet would be an even more perilous place. In Spy Watching, Loch K. Johnson explores the United States' travails in its efforts to maintain effective accountability over its spy services. Johnson explores the work of the famous Church Committee, a Senate panel that investigated America's espionage organizations in 1975 and established new protocol for supervising the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the nation's other sixteen secret services. Johnson explores why partisanship has crept into once-neutral intelligence operations, the effect of the 9/11 attacks on the expansion of spying, and the controversies related to CIA rendition and torture programs. He also discusses both the Edward Snowden case and the ongoing investigations into the Russian hack of the 2016 US election. Above all, Spy Watching seeks to find a sensible balance between the twin imperatives in a democracy of liberty and security. Johnson draws on scores of interviews with Directors of Central Intelligence and others in America's secret agencies, making this a uniquely authoritative account.