Vice President Dick Cheney listens as President George W. Bush makes a statement in the "Cash Room" in the Treasury building.
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No secret there; that's what the CIA has done since it was founded in 1947. Every CIA operative deals in contingencies all the time, including assassination. In Lebanon once, I asked a source if he could grab a Hizballah terrorist. He said no, but he would be happy to kill him. I declined, knowing I didn't have the authority, then filed the thought away in the event those circumstances ever changed. But I sure never considered informing Congress of the offer. If the CIA always raised a contingency like this with Congress, the agency would spend all its time on the Hill.
I think we're going to find out that the CIA's assassination program was dealing in pure hypotheticals, ones it intended to tell Congress about if they became real possibilities. (I won't try to guess what Cheney would have done.) Yet however overblown the story, if a full-fledged investigation into it does occur, it could be the last nail in the CIA's coffin. This Congress could succeed where the Church Committee failed. Even if things are not that dire--people are always talking about abolishing the CIA--it will undermine morale for years. Congress, no doubt, will explain in the coming months how a program that was no secret was somehow beyond the pale. But if this game is nothing more than political bickering, it is not worth the candle.
Baer is a former Middle East CIA field officer and TIME.com's intelligence columnist