The Congress: Tracking the Iceberg

To its many critics, the Central Intelligence Agency is something of an iceberg in the warm estuaries of democracy. Since hermetic secrecy is an endemic and essential characteristic of espionage, the CIA is mostly invisible, largely inscrutable, and publicly unaccountable. Yet this very immunity to outside inspection has long irked William Fulbright and many members of his Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who charge that the CIA often operates independently of the Administration and on occasion even shapes U.S. foreign policy. Fulbright's committee —which has the reputation on Capitol Hill of not being able to keep any secret of...