Spy Watching: Intelligence Accountability in the United States

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.

Table of Contents:
Preface List of Figures Introduction: Democracy and Intelligence PART I: THE MAGNITUDE OF THE CHALLENGE Chapter One: Tracking an Elusive Behemoth Chapter Two: Intelligence Exceptionalism PART II: THE EVOLUTION OF INTELLIGENCE ACCOUNTABILITY Chapter Three: Democracy Comes to the Secret Agencies Chapter Four: The Experiment in Intelligence Accountability Begins Chapter Five: Spy Watching in an Age of Terror PART III: THE PATTERNS OF INTELLIGENCE ACCOUNTABILITY Chapter Six: A Shock Theory of Intelligence Accountability Chapter Seven: The Media and Intelligence Accountability Chapter Eight: Ostriches, Cheerleaders, Lemon-Suckers, and Guardians PART IV: THE PRACTICE OF INTELLIGENCE ACCOUNTABILITY Chapter Nine: In the Trenches: Collection-and-Analysis and Covert Action Chapter Ten: In the Wilderness: Coping with Counterintelligence PART V: THE FUTURE OF INTELLIGENCE ACCOUNTABILITY Chapter Eleven: Intelligence Accountability and the Nation's Spy Chiefs Chapter Twelve: The Ongoing Quest for Liberty and Security Acknowledgements Abbreviations and Codenames Appendix A: The U.S. Intelligence Community, 2016 Appendix B: U.S. Intelligence Leadership, 1947-2016 Appendix C: The Intelligence Oversight Act of 1980 Bibliography

About the Author :
Loch K. Johnson is one of America's leading experts on the nation's intelligence organizations. He is the Regents Professor of Public and International Affairs at the University of Georgia and served as staff director of the Senate Committee on Intelligence, as well as assistant to the chairman of the Aspin-Brown Commission on Intelligence. Johnson is the author of America's Secret Power and The Threat on the Horizon, both published by Oxford University Press.

Review :
"Johnson offers a necessary and encyclopedic account of intelligence oversight...bring[ing] a wealth of knowledge to this ambitious project... Spy Watching will surely come to be seen as an essential part of the literature on intelligence administration in the US."--CHOICE "In this insightful examination of America's struggle to balance liberty and security, Johnson... writes from personal experience and extensive scholarship, so readers will encounter a great deal of information, much of it unsettling... [A] thoughtful, not terribly optimistic analysis of the perpetual tension between secret services and liberal democracy."--Kirkus "This is a learned, mighty and magisterial book."--Professional Security Magazine "With his experience as a congressional staffer involved in the investigation of abuses by the intelligence community and a distinguished career as a scholar of intelligence issues, Johnson brings a wealth of knowledge to this ambitious project... Spy Watching will surely come to be seen as an essential part of the literature on intelligence administration in the US."--CHOICE Reviews ". . . . a superb, beautifully written book, teeming with eminently quotable passages and erudition . . . Johnson calls for greater public understanding of the value of intelligence accountability, a laudable ambition that academics can play a part on helping to achieve. His book is a first step in the right direction . . . . Spy Watching is history writing of the first rank that demands time to mine its treasures and to absorb fully the important issues it raises."--Christopher R. Moran, Intelligence and National Security "Spy Watching is an impressive, even encyclopedic, review of America's experience regulating its large, powerful, and compulsively secretive intelligence agencies... Johnson is eminently qualified to undertake this study-a highly-regarded professor, author, journal editor, and icon in the small but growing academic discipline of intelligence studies... Spy Watching is a valuable history and comprehensive study of America's ongoing experiment with democratic oversight of its essential, but imperfect, intelligence enterprise."--Lawfare Blog "[A] deeply informed study of political oversight of US intelligence services... [Spy Watching] deserves close attention, because of the personal experience that underpins [Johnson's] judgments, together with their evenhandedness and common sense. He considers the past only to address the future: How can intelligence services that have been granted unprecedented powers since President George W. Bush launched his ill-named War on Terror be subjected to democratic scrutiny? How can the loss of public trust be restored? How can citizens be taught to recognize that the US, like all nations, possesses secrets that must be preserved for the common good; that absolute openness on the part of government and its institutions is the enemy of national security?" --Max Hastings, New York Review of Books