Failed Attempts at Reform

Chaired by Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller, that commission's chief legacy to today's atmosphere for change was its call for the creation of new Congressional oversight committees, and a 10-year limit on the occupant's time in the CIA director's chair.

A second study, completed nearly at the same time as the Rockefeller group's, called for additional powers be given to the CIA chief as the overall manager of U.S. intelligence, establishing a sort of chairman of the board approach. It called for the creation of a new deputy, a day-to-day manager to free the spy chief from the details. As it would turn out, this would have consequences that would appear more clearly later.

Ford didn't wait for the recommendations of these groups to begin intelligence reform two decades ago. He signed the first Presidential Executive Order on intelligence on Feb. 16, 1976, making public in the process a full description of the agencies contained within the "community," and setting forth a job description for the CIA director. Incredibly, these steps had never before been taken. More than 20 other major reforms were initiated during this period.

Two years later, President Jimmy Carter issued a new executive order on intelligence, imposing new restrictions on collection activities and severe guidelines for the methods of spying on U.S. citizens. Attempts at Congressional mandates for extensive overhaul of the spy agencies themselves failed, however, due to concerns that excessive regulations would hinder the battles of the Cold War.

By the 1980's a series of spectacular spy cases drove the Congressional oversight committees established a decade before to draft more detailed legislative authority over the agencies, steps the politicians had not taken before, not wanting the responsibility that went with the authority.

The 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act began a crucial process of shifting power over intelligence from the military agencies to the Joint Chiefs. Combat functions were added to such intelligence organizations as the Defense Intelligence Agency, which was intended to make the data collection process closer to the actual needs of the users of the information: the nation's soldiers, sailors, airmen and their leaders.

But it was spy cases and political scandals such as Iran-Contra that built up overwhelming pressures for change in the community. Failure of the CIA and other agencies to anticipate German reunification, collapse of Soviet Communism, or the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait did little to restore new credibility.

In 1991, when Robert Gates was appointed CIA director following a brawling public confirmation battle that exposed internal dissent within the ranks of the once-isolated analysts, the new spy chief launched a full re-examination of the needs and roles of post Cold-War intelligence gathering.

More than a dozen task forces within the CIA and agencies such as DIA, the National Security Agency, and Naval Intelligence laid out a restructuring of data gathering priorities, increasing the role of data analysis, and placing formal rules on how to use "Human Source" data - in other words, spies. The CIA Director's staff was strengthened and a new satellite imagery office created. Uniform rules were also adopted for the sharing of the secret spy satellite photos among the civil and military agencies.

Gates had started a process that was soon picked up by the Congressional committees: defining the near-term future of the CIA, attempting to define the amount of resources devoted to the old tasks while exploring new roles such as gathering economic intelligence. But all of these changes failed to address the internal climate of the agency, and its tendency to shield itself from daily cooperation with others: the CIA remained a world into itself.