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Yet former CIA Director John McCone, among many others, argues that only a few leaders of the Administration and Congress should be informed of sensitive intelligence projects, and other officials should be let in on secrets only if they "need to know." After the rush of disclosures about the CIA, everybody on Capitol Hill wanted to find out what the agency was doing. Oversight was spread among eight, sometimes sievelike, congressional committees. The eight still exist, but Turner increasingly is reporting to only two intelligence committees, one each in the House and Senate. The new executive order confirms this arrangement. The trend is toward reducing the number of people involved in oversight, though they will be more watchful than their predecessors in the '50s and '60s.
With the new supervision and tougher regulations, the national uproar over the CIA can be expected to subside. Damage has been done, but the U.S. intelligence community will survive. Jonathan Moore, director of the Institute of Politics at Harvard, feels that the attacks on the CIA might have "put us at a disadvantage under certain circumstances, but I'd put it in the category of runnable risks. After the debate is ended, after Chile, Viet Nam and Watergate, we say we are going to clean up our act, but we sure as hell are going to have an act. We might be more potent than before."
There even seems to be a swing of public opinion in support of the CIA, a recognition of the basic point that it is not a contradiction for an open democracy to have a secret intelligence agency. Senator Daniel Inouye, the Hawaii Democrat who formerly chaired the Senate intelligence committee, feels that: "If a poll were taken today, it would find spying is still essential. We hate wars, but we must maintain our defense posture. Our spies are not monsters." Nor will they be saints in a world and an occupation that produce very few. A certain realism and perspective is necessary. Intelligence must be recognized for what it is: occasionally dangerous, sometimes dirty, sometimes exhilarating, often tedious, very necessary work.