Word: coverted
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...view that its members were often more interested in promoting their own policy preferences than in coordinating those of others. Now, however, this concern has been replaced by a new one: that the NSC staff has carved out a new and fundamentally different role for itself--the conduct of covert operations--and that it has done so in a way that exempts it from not only congressional oversight but that of the State Department, the Pentagon...
That this should be happening now is not without its irony. The need for a new covert channel is hardly obvious in an administration that has mounted large numbers of secret schemes under CIA auspices. The development is ironic in another sense, as this NSC staff has been widely faulted for not meeting its primary responsibility of effective policy coordination...
...Washington, as in nature, every action tends to elicit an opposite reaction; but unlike nature, political reactions may not be equal. Already there are reports that legislation is being readied to rein in the NSC advisor and his staff. One idea is to prohibit their carrying out covert operations; another would be to require that the NSC advisor and possibly his top aides be made subject to Senate confirmation and make themselves available for congressional hearings, requirements from which they have been exempt as members of the White House staff...
...Congress, the loudest uproar concerns whether the President violated Section 501 of the National Security Act. Under amendments passed in 1980, the section requires the President to keep the House and Senate intelligence committees "fully and currently informed" of all U.S. intelligence activities. In the case of covert operations, the law requires "prior notice". It permits delay in notifying the full committees "if the President determines it is essential . . . to meet extraordinary circumstances affecting vital interests of the U.S." But when a President invokes this provision, he must still give prior notice to eight top congressional leaders. Then...
Lawmakers of both parties are bitterly critical of the role of the National Security Council staff in taking over covert operations, like the arms sales to Iran, and running them without the advice or knowledge of Congress, or even most of the Executive Branch. The arms transfers were so secret that some top Administration officials are still hearing significant details for the first time; Donald Regan learned only last week about an Israeli arms shipment to Iran in November 1985 that the U.S. had condoned. Oklahoma Democrat David Boren, who will take over chairmanship of the Senate Intelligence Committee when...