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Strategic intelligence is requisite to national security. But fitting an intelligence function, with its ancillary covert action and counterintelligence activities, into the U.S. constitutional framework is an enduring and perhaps unsolvable problem. Conduct of the government's clandestine operations overseas is an executive function requiring extraordinary secrecy. Yet the Constitution requires that the president share with Congress decisions about intelligence policy, organization, funding, and operations. And Congress is the principal institution for enforcing accountability. Efforts since the beginning of the contemporary intelligence establishment in 1947 to balance the conflicting requirements of executive secrecy and legislative oversight are surveyed. A foreign policy consensus on ends and means is found to be essential for the effective functioning of an intelligence system within a democratic framework. The absence of policy consensus generates a politicization of intelligence activities, inviting intelligence failures and policy disasters.

I begin, with apologies, by mentioning two of my own books; Can American Democracy Survive Cold War? (1963) and The Intelligence Establishment (1970). The titles say much about the development of a debate that promises to be with us for some time.The first title/question posed the dilemma of an American democracy facing a perceived threat (perceived at least by the foreign policy elite) to national security. An assumed monolithic “world communism” provoked the creation of a vast arsenal of foreign policy instruments, including espionage and covert political operations overseas. Managing mis mammoth security apparatus required highly centralized control. Indeed, at times it required deception, lying, and deep secrecy.