Word: musts
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Analysis, which provides the basis for so many key decisions in American foreign policy, must be improved. At present, it is spotty: good in some areas, bad in others. A prominent consumer of CIA reports on Capitol Hill gives the agency an over-all grade of Cminus. The agency gets pretty good marks for its reporting on Russia and China, and it feels it has stayed on top of developments in turbulent Central America. In Iran, on the other hand, it was embarrassingly inept. Says Birch Bayh, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence: "Technologically, it's unbelievable...
...less important is the analyst at headquarters who must make sense of copious, often conflicting information. He has to feel free to speak his mind, to dissent, to challenge. His independence needs to be safeguarded. Above all, he must have time to think. Caught up in a crisis, a President has a tendency to turn the agency into a kind of wire service to provide hour-by-hour commentary. This cuts down man-hours that should be available for the long-range analysis that may help a President prevent a crisis in the first place. The CIA fights a constant...
...believes ways can be found to help a friendly regime that is in trouble if there is a will to find them. What people do not realize, says Helms, is that "the war is being fought in back alleys, not with tanks, guns or nuclear weapons. The CIA must be strengthened or we will lose this...
Oversight of the CIA, both executive and congressional, must be clear and rational. Until the CIA came under attack, the President was able to evade responsibility for covert actions even though he had initiated them. Currently the President is required by law to approve all covert actions. That makes him the only major chief of state who is not insulated from potential embarrassments caused by his intelligence arma situation that the services of other nations regard with horror. Nevertheless, it is probably the only workable system in the U.S. today...
Until the mid-1970s. Congress exercised oversight through powerful committee chairmen who did not examine covert actions closely, if at all. Now any plans for similar operations must be submitted to eight different congressional committees, far too many to keep anything secret. When the CIA proposed aiding anti-Communist forces in Angola in 1975, the plan was quickly leaked to the press by a hostile Senator and thus killed by exposure. The oversight committees should be reduced to the two current Select Committees on Intelligence, which, as a matter of fact, have taken their job fairly seriously and have avoided...