The Senate Intelligence Committee marks up the intelligence reauthorization bill Tuesday, providing fresh opportunity to address hotly debated concerns over the intelligence failures and abuses that have plagued debate in the 110th Congress, including the question of greater congressional oversight.

Marvin Ott, a professor of national security policy at National Defense University, former senior CIA analyst and senior staff on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence for seven years, spoke with CQ Homeland Security on the eve of the markup.

With his diverse, legislative and executive branch background, Ott brings a unique perspective to the issue of congressional oversight of the intelligence community. Ott testified recently before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Oversight of Government Management, the Federal Workforce and the District of Columbia on the issue. He speaks only for himself in the following interview and not for the Department of Defense.

Q: The 9/11 Commission said that currently intelligence oversight is “dysfunctional.” What are some of the causes of the current problem, in your opinion?

A: To answer that, I’d like to do a long prelude in terms of what made the system work in the first place. It’s worth saying that there’s growing interest in this issue. I think the reason for that is an explicit or instinctive recognition that intelligence, the business of acquiring and analyzing secret information and pursuing targets that are cloaked in secrecy, is more important today than it has ever been.

The CIA was born as an instrument of the Cold War as a counterpoise to the KGB [and] Soviet Union. I think it’s fair to say that despite that, the entire role of intelligence was significant but nevertheless not central to the outcome. The outcome had to do with economic competition, with the inherent weaknesses of the Soviet system, with NATO as a block to the Soviet ambitions. But in a post-Cold War world, we’re dealing with a principal threat that emanates from militant violent Jihadist movements — al Qaeda and related sorts of networks — and these are a quintessential clandestine, secret threat. They operate clandestinely, they are asymmetric in the military sense that they don’t try to face up against Western security forces, police or military, in any overt way. They try to operate by surprise, by suicide bombings and attacks sprung in secret; even in a military battlefield such as Iraq the preferred weapon is an IED [improvised explosive device]. The point being that this is a threat that does not match up well with the sort of overt mainline capabilities of the West: the uniform military, economic capacity, diplomacy, and all the rest of it. All of these have an important place, particularly the police and FBI-type capabilities, but a lot of the threat has to be dealt with clandestinely and through capabilities that are designed to go after secret networks and secret organizations, and that’s what the intelligence community is.

Q: How has the situation changed now that the enemy has changed?

So the intelligence community now finds itself in a situation where it is truly the point of the spear in a post-Cold War world, [and] the whole question of how you make intelligence work efficiently [and] effectively has now become a central issue — it’s not “on the margin,” it’s not “a luxury,” it’s not “well, intelligence is important, but if it doesn’t work we can get by.” This has to work, and so you then start looking at the various components, the things that make intelligence work and not work, and I and others would argue that it tends to get overlooked, but the role of congressional oversight is a critical element in determining whether intelligence works effectively or does not.

That then leads to a sort of a derivative point, intelligence oversight. The use of a parliamentary body, a legislature, Congress, to oversee the secret world of intelligence, the CIA’s, the National Security Agencies, and so on is an inherently very difficult thing to do. I think it’s probably fair to say — say this without great certainty but as, I think, an educated guess, there probably is no country in the world that really does it effectively at the present time. The United States for a period, and basically that period coincided with the decade of the 1980s, did do it effectively. It was really one of the remarkable achievements of this system of government, and essentially, to reduce it to a couple of sentences, it reflected an outcome from the post-Vietnam hearings, the Church and Pike committee hearings that produced the two oversight committees, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. And through the late 1970s these two committees, and I’ll focus more on the Senate committee, found their footing and figured out how do to this thing, and in the 1980s they really began to function effectively.

[There were] two critical elements of that success: one was having a chairman and vice chairman [who] really acted as a co-chairmanship. The two principal figures on the Senate side were Sen. David Boren [D-Okla.], chairman, and Sen. William Cohen [R-Maine], vice chairman. Through most of the period, they worked closely together. They had two critical things in common: Both of them were dedicated to the idea that intelligence oversight was nonpartisan, or bipartisan, if you prefer, that partisanship, whether you were a Democrat or a Republican, the political calculations related to that was a central fact of life in the Congress as a whole but it had no place in the business of intelligence oversight, no place. That meant that if you were the proverbial fly on the wall watching the committee function behind closed doors as it typically did during this period, you would have had no way of knowing that there were Democrats or Republicans in the room. There was nothing that happened that identified members and their staffs of having partisan loyalties.

The second thing was that both Boren and Cohen were dedicated to professionalism and to expertise. That meant on their part they did their homework. The business of intelligence is complicated. It can be very arcane. One way of illustrating it is, if you take someone who is very bright but knows nothing about this business and put them in a congressional seat and put a briefer, a senior official from the National Security Agency, in the witness chair and have the NSA official brief this person on NSA programs, I can guarantee you no matter how smart the person is, within two or three minutes, they will have absolutely no idea what’s going on. And the reason is they will get, in the first instance a blizzard of acronyms, which are completely — they might as well be in ancient Aramaic in terms of your ability to understand them, unless you simply have delved into it, have spent hours and hours learning what these things mean, learning what the programs are, what they’re attached to.

Q: Is there enough of that kind of expertise among members or staff?

A: In addition to that kind of expertise, there is a lot of technical knowledge that is required. The big ticket decisions related to large budget items, often related to overhead systems, satellite systems — believe it or not, a working knowledge of orbital mechanics, of how downlinks work, of what the capabilities were of ground stations receiving downlinks, of the capabilities of communications systems: All of this was part of the working knowledge of the chairman and the vice chairman to understand what they were hearing and to make judgments on it as part of their dedication to professionalism and expertise. And I say parenthetically, any member of the Senate has a heavy burden of other obligations: other committees, maybe other chairmanships, he’s got his home state constituents, he’s got political matters, he’s got fundraising, he’s got all kinds of stuff. So it’ll be the very rare member who will fence off and dedicate the time and energy, and just the sheer mental energy, required to master this stuff. Boren and Cohen did that, and as part of that they were committed to and implemented a hiring of staff that was professional and nonpartisan, that reflected these values. Much of the staff — I’d say most of it during this period — were former members of the intelligence community itself. So they were hired out of the community.

That meant that, as you looked around the staff, you were looking at people with long profession experience in the business. They knew where the bodies were buried, they knew how these programs worked, they knew the right questions to ask, all of that. And in addition to that, they tended to stay with their brief, for example, counterintelligence, for a long period of time, and built up real expertise over time. The individuals who handled counterintelligence, the staff member by the mid-1980s and late-1980s was more expert on counterintelligence programs than the people in the FBI who actually ran those programs, and the reason was that the people in FBI had probably been in the job two, three, four years, were moving as their careers developed from one responsibility to another, whereas the Senate staff member had been with those programs for 15 years, and he would end up educating the FBI person running the program on his own program, and that’s unique mix.

The result of it was that you had a committee that not only knew what it was doing but was perceived by the intelligence community that it knew what it was doing. There’s an ingrained distrust on the part on the intelligence world with regard to Congress, and in a fairly short length of time the smart people at the senior levels, I’ll say at the CIA particularly, perceived that they were dealing with people who did know what they were doing, and they understood that these people were not an adversary, they were an ally.

Q: What was the media’s role in all of this?

A: Now, to go back to the earlier point about the difficulty of doing this job, the reason it’s so hard is fairly obvious when you think about it: The congressional work is open, it’s transparent, the media is an integral part the whole thing — as a general rule the more public knowledge and media coverage you get the better. It’s a highly politicized environment, and it’s a non-bureaucratic environment. It’s basically a pretty flat organization, lots of authority resident in staff, for example. Contrast that with the intelligence community. It is not an open, media-saturated world; quite the contrary, it’s a secret world, it’s a world of classified information, of need to know, a world in which politics in the sense of politicized issues has no place. It’s a very hierarchical, chain-of-command kind of world. The two worlds, the worlds of the Congress and the worlds of the intelligence community, could not be more different. They have different kinds of personalities in them, they’re people that have been socialized different ways. And so to get these two to work together is inherently a very hard thing to do.

What Boren and Cohen did in the professionalism of the staff was, over two, three years, [they] established credibility with the intelligence community, so that there was the perception that despite the inherent differences and despite the inherent suspicion that Congress is a place where secrets go to die, and where everything will become public and they’ll play everything for political purposes, and it’s completely irresponsible in terms of keeping the nation’s secrets close, the perception is no, that’s not right, that this committee that knows how to keep secrets. And I’ll say also parenthetically that one thing done early on in these committees was to set up a system that managed classified information and kept it classified, a whole series of controls that were every bit as tight and rigorous, and met all the standards as were used in the intelligence community.

So the net of all of that was, as you got into the mid-1980s for example, there was the perception that the committee was professional, that it in fact was quite expert, that it could be trusted, and that instead of being viewed as an adversary and as a place to be stonewalled and manipulated if you could, it was a place to work with, and that the committee was in fact an asset in several dimensions. The committee and the committee staff became an advocate for intelligence-community interests in the Congress, so when questions were raised in the broader Congress about the CIA, often based upon a rather spotty understanding of what the CIA and the intelligence community were doing, it was the committee members and the committee staff that could go to other parts of the Congress and say, ‘let me tell you, we are on top of this, we know what’s going on, I can give you a brief sketch of what’s going on, I can’t go into details, but trust us, this issue is being managed effectively.’ So the committee became a shield for arbitrary intervention by the Congress into the world of intelligence. It also became the place where the community went to solve problems; whether it was on the pension system, or something having to do with the way technical systems were being managed, or funding, you name it, the committee was the place that could solve the problems for the community that required some kind of congressional action. So it all added up to a remarkably effective system.

Q: So the system worked. What happened?

A: One other part of it [is] the intelligence committees are authorizing committees. Anybody who’s been around the Hill knows that the real power on the Hill lies with the appropriators. So your authorizing committees start from playing a weak hand to begin with. In the case of the intelligence committees, I’m talking about the Senate side now specifically — I think it would also apply to the House, but I’ll speak to what I know — in the case of the Senate side, the hand was further weakened by the fact that the specific provisions were embedded in the armed services authorization bill. So the Intelligence Committee in effect transferred its judgments and its decisions over to the Armed Services Committee, and the Armed Services Committee then in effect had a chop on it.

The Armed Services Committee is a heavyweight committee, and if the Armed Services Committee chose to, they could basically override everything the Intelligence Committee had done, as a practical matter. So one of the things necessary to make the oversight committee function effectively was to have an effective relationship with the Armed Services Committee and with the Appropriations Committee. In the case of Boren and Cohen — first of all, they had Sam Nunn, chairman of the Armed Services Committee at the time, on the Intelligence Committee as well — Sam Nunn and David Boren and Bill Cohen had a very good working relationship. The result was, Sam Nunn made it explicit, on various occasions he cited it publicly, that he would defer to the judgments of the Intelligence Committee on matters of intelligence. And the relationship at the staff level was also effective, and a good, not always easy, but nevertheless a good, mutually respectful, professional relationship. The result was that what the Intelligence Committee did as an authorizer generally went though Armed Services and basically was accepted, blessed and embedded in the Armed Services Committee action in a way that preserved what the Intelligence Committee had done and gave it weight and effect.

The same thing was true for the appropriators. Robert C. Byrd [D-W.Va.], was the chairman of the Appropriations Committee at the time. David Boren had a very good relationship with Robert Byrd. Similarly at the staff level there was mutual, professional respect, and the result was that when the intelligence authorization and the recommended budget lines went forward, they were treated with, I’ll say deference and respect, by the Appropriations Committee.

So the upshot of it was, if you were sitting in the intelligence world, the CIA for example, and you watched all of this happening and you understood what was going on, you were impressed by the fact that the judgments reached by the Intelligence Committee were in fact passing right through the system and becoming law. And during this period the Intelligence Committee had an authorization bill every year  . . . every semi-colon of it was actually written in the Senate Intelligence Committee and it ultimately became law. All of these pieces added together was a remarkably effective system.

Q: It seems to be that during this period, a lot of what you’re talking about is the right way of looking at intelligence among the chair, the ranking member, and also their relationships with the heads of various committees. I’m wondering how you would contrast that with the period that came afterward.

A: By the very early 1990s both Cohen and Boren have left the committee and have left the Senate and so the chairmanship and the committee now pass into different hands. You have two very short tenures, Sen. [Dennis] DeConcini [D-Ariz.], then [Arlen] Specter of Pennsylvania as chairmen. In both cases, I think it’s fair to say there was a lack of attention, a kind of autopilot quality, living off of past assets. The processes of oversight didn’t break down, really, but they degraded, they kind of lost momentum during this period. Then, when you enter a period, a longer chairmanship, under Sen. [Richard C.] Shelby [R-Ala.] things just totally break down, and the nonpartisanship, the professionalism, basically goes away, and the committee becomes a very different kind of place, and it becomes, frankly, very typical of a lot of Senate committees, and it conducts oversight the way a lot of Senate committees conduct oversight. The norm in the 1980s had been this committee functions in a unique way, and that was lost, that was totally lost in the 1990s and essentially has been lost ever since.

The effects were predictable. One of the effects is that over time — it doesn’t happen overnight, it happened gradually — was a perception in the intelligence community, and after all the community has liaisons working with the committees up on Hill, people with a very close-in view of how committees are operating, it doesn’t take long before there’s an understanding back in the community of what’s going on. And so what the community sees is a loss of bipartisanship, a loss of professionalism, and as a consequence the trust in that the community has invested in the committees erodes, dissolves and eventually disappears. This was exacerbated by a particular sort of idiosyncratic factor which was Sen. Shelby seemed to have a personal vendetta going with George Tenet, who was the DCI, called for his resignation repeatedly. So it became a kind of a sidebar distraction that the chairman was looking for the scalp of the DCI, and that had predictable sorts of — it just exacerbated the sort of change in climate and functioning that I’m describing.

The results you see to the present day. The Senate committee, which used to produce an authorization bill every year that marched through Armed Services Committee and Appropriations, for the last several years hasn’t even produced a bill. This is the sort of mark of dysfunctionality that has characterized the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for years and years, [which] is they can’t produce a bill, much less a bill that could survive a process through the Armed Services and the Appropriations committees. The reaction in the community is predictable: Oversight is no longer an asset, it’s now a problem; it’s something to be stonewalled, to be slow-rolled, to be manipulated if you can, and the sort of collaborative, mutual efforts to solve practical problems facing intelligence in the country, that goes away.

If you’re in the intelligence community, it now becomes the business of, “we’ll try to do it on our own, we’ll try to do it without the intelligence oversight people knowing much about what we’re doing, because whenever they get involved, things get more difficult,” and it functions like that.

Q: There have been a number of proposals presently and in the past to improve intelligence oversight, including the 9/11 Commission’s proposal to establish a joint standing committee on intelligence and Senate legislation that would expand the GAO’s oversight to the Central Intelligence Agency. Can you speak to the effectiveness of any of these proposals?

A: I’ve suggested that there are consequences of that [the decline intelligence oversight] for just the general ability of the Hill and the community to work together. I’ll make a tendentious argument, but it’s one I believe is accurate, and that argument is that the catastrophe of 9/11, in my judgment, would probably not have happened if intelligence oversight had been functioning effectively in the late-1990s [and] early part of this decade, as it did in the 1980s  . . .  If intelligence oversight had been functioning effectively in the wake of the first bombing of the World Trade Center and then the attacks and the bombings on the embassies in East Africa and then the attack on the U.S.S. Cole, all of these would have been registered within the oversight committee as something very serious, something that the committee had to dedicate permanent assets to; i.e., terrorism was now a serious threat to U.S. security, it related directly to intelligence, and the committee needed to focus on it. And that probably would have taken the form of one or probably two, maybe even three members of the professional staff, people that had come out of the community by and large, assigned probably full time to work this issue of terrorism.

Now, if you’re a staffer who’s been given an assignment like that, what that means is you are out visiting various parts of the bureaucracy that have anything to do with dealing with this issue, understanding it, acting against it, and so on, and you’re asking questions, you’re probing into programs, you’re probing into what we know, you’re asking why we don’t know something more than this, what we’ve done about things. And fairy quickly all the problems that the 9/11 Commission identified of stovepipes, of people not communicating with one another, of dots not being connected, would have been highlighted, and very quickly members of the staff would have been going to, for example, somebody in CIA, saying, you know, you people don’t think that commercial aircraft could be used in a terrorist attack, you’ve discounted that for various reasons, maybe people I’ve been talking to at FBI tend to discount it, but I’ve also been talking to people over at Civil Aviation Authority, and they have a different view of that, and I’m aware of a couple of analysts out in the think tank community that have a different view of that,

See, the great asset a Senate staffer has that a member in the bureaucracy does not have they can range across the bureaucracy, they are not trapped in the stovepipes, their job is to connect the dots, to relate what the FBI person said yesterday and talk to the CIA person about it and ask why they’re not taking it more seriously and vice versa, going out into the field, into East Africa. In my judgment, if that sort of process had been ongoing, the sort of threat that manifested after 9/11 would have been identified and something would have been done about it. But because oversight had become completely dysfunctional, none of that ever happened.

Now turn to the issue of remedies. As far as the 9/11 Commission recommendation of creating a standing joint committee, that’s in fact an old recommendation that’s been out there a long time. From where I sit, in terms of my diagnosis of what’s happened, that strikes me as not answering the question. Simply establishing a different committee, making it standing versus a select, making it joint rather than specific to a particular house of Congress doesn’t get at issues of professionalism and bipartisanship. There’s nothing inherent in a standing committee that means it will be bipartisan, have a professional staff, etc. It can be just as dysfunctional as the committees became.

Q: What about the GAO?

A: Now, the other remedy that you referenced and one I testified on recently is the bill (S 82) to empower the GAO in a way that is not currently empowered to do intelligence oversight, which echoes an earlier effort in 1987, I believe, by Sen. John Glenn [D-Ohio] to put forward a similar bill is more interesting. In the case, Glenn sat in the committee and presented to his colleagues the arguments for empowering GAO, his colleagues listened to him respectfully and respectfully decided to disagree. And the disagreement was basically, part of it was turf, that this may dilute the authorities of the Intelligence Committee because it will give a vehicle for other committees to get into the oversight game via the GAO, that was clearly in the atmosphere. But the principal argument was that, at the time Glenn was making this proposal, oversight was working, and not only was it working effectively through congressional oversight , but the oversight committee was in the process of establishing at Glenn’s initiative a statutory inspector general for the CIA, which they had not had before, and establishing it as confirmable by the Congress, which the CIA didn’t want. [The committee said] it’s got to have statutory protection, it’s got to be confirmable by the Senate, it’s got to be responsible to the Senate, and that’s the way they established it.

Run the clock forward to 2008. I think its fair to say that the history of the IG at the CIA has been one that validated the initial hope for and the initial judgment that went into creating it. It’s been an effective office. Recently the IG has been under pressure that has raised a lot of eyebrows, and the DCI has brought in sort of overseers of what the IG has been doing, and there’s been some concern that the IG’s independent ability to function without fear or favor is being at least, a cloud is being at least put over it. Whether that cloud will dissipate or not, I’m not in a position to say. But the oversight part has broken down. So under those circumstances, there now is an argument to say oversight is important, it’s in fact critical, and it’s not at all clear that it can be restored. I mean this is so difficult to do, and after you have basically trashed the process for close to 15 years, Humpty Dumpty has fallen off the wall, has shattered into thousands of pieces, and whether Humpty Dumpty can be put back together again and put back up on the wall, I don’t know. If it can be done, it’s going to be done over time, and it’s going to be done with great difficulty. Under those circumstances, oversight needs all the help it can get.

GAO is an effective organization, it is a professional organization, it has not had a significant role in intelligence oversight because the community has basically said to the GAO we have oversight in the intelligence committees, we do not recognize your authority to get very far into our business. So that would have to be made legislatively explicit, and under the current circumstances, I would argue and have testified that on balance, getting another professional instrument or organization into the oversight business, specifically the GAO, is a net plus.

Q: Any risks you see in that?

A. The one danger I see, and I’m sure it’s a danger that is seen in the intelligence community is that, how would this work? GAO is accessible to all the members of Congress and all the committees of the Congress. Would GAO then become a channel through which virtually anybody in the Congress could get into the oversight business? If that were to happen we’d be back to pre-Church, pre-Pike days, when it was sort of seen as chaotic and uncontrolled, and oversight will not work effectively under those circumstances. You can’t have 20, 30, 40 different committees. This is the sort of problem that we’re having, one of the problems that we’re having, in Homeland Security right now. If you’re going to empower GAO, I would argue it has to be done with some kind of built-in restrictions and limitations as to how GAO gets used and who has authority to use it. That would strike me as an important, first-order issue if you’re actually going to get serious about this.

Matt Korade can be reached at mkorade@cq.com.