The growing body of evidence about problems at the Central Intelligence Agency, in particular, prompted and unusual flurry of high-level government and public scrutiny in 1994. Frustrated with CIA's analytic performance, Director of Central Intelligence R. James Woolsey's stubborn and sometimes caustic defense of CIA's bureaucratic interests, and Woolsey's unwillingness to punish senior operations officers for lapses in managing confessed spy Aldrich Ames, the Congress in 1994 required President Clinton to launch an Executive Branch reevaluation of the Intelligence Community. It required the president to name a 17-member commission to investigate and evaluate the roles and missions of the entire United States Intelligence Community, and to report on its findings by March 1996. Thereafter, I was pleased that he and his staff indicated a greater willingness to examine all aspects of intelligence. I urge the Commission and the Congress to take broad approaches to their inquiries and to examine issues normally directly under the jurisdiction of agency heads.
Major problems exist here.
Agency heads, including former Directors of Central Intelligence, either helped created these problems or ignored them. Just as wars are too important to be left to generals alone, the problems of the Intelligence Community call for broad inquiry and very senior-level redress. I focus particularly on the Central Intelligence Agency because it has the major analytic role and capabilities, and because I am most familiar with it. However, it is not possible to talk fruitfully of only one part of intelligence. The collection and analytic functions are intricately linked.