Spymaster Richard Helms: an interview with the former US Director of Central Intelligence

In this previously unpublished interview with Richard Helms in 1990, the former US Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) offered his views on a wide range of intelligence issues. Contrary to conventional wisdom, he argued that members of Congress had maintained rigorous accountability over the secret agencies in the years before the major spy scandal of 1975, when the Central Intelligence Agency was found to have spied on American citizens. He emphasized, too, the vital importance of human (as opposed to technical) intelligence, and expressed cynicism about the effectiveness of large-scale covert actions. For Helms, the DCI's most important job was to bring the facts to the table at high policy meetings.     

JFK,FBI, and CIA: playing hardball over an intelligence leak to the New York Times

On 26 July 1962, the New York Times published a front-page story by reporter Hanson Baldwin which, among many things, showed the vulnerability of Soviet land-based missiles, in the event of a first strike by the US. Drawing at least indirectly from a National Intelligence Estimate, it also showed how US intelligence had obtained that information. The story infuriated President John F. Kennedy, who believed it harmed the security of the United States. This article details an aggressive FBI investigation of who had leaked to Baldwin, as well as an initiative at the Central Intelligence Agency to conduct its own future leak investigations inside the US, both authorized by President Kennedy.     

Shorter note

US Senate Hearings before the Select Committee on Intelligence, 102nd Congress, First Session on the Nomination of Robert M. Gates to be Director of Central Intelligence: Vol. 1, September 16, 17, 19, 20 1991; Vol.2, September 24, October 1, 2 1991; Vol.3, October 3, 4, 18 1991 (Washington DC: US Government Printing Office, 1992).     

A conversation with former DCI William E. Colby: Spymaster during the ‘Year of the Intelligence Wars’

In this previously unpublished interview, William Colby, former US Director of Central Intelligence, discusses the Intelligence Community's relationships with Congress and the White House, the value and conditions for effective human intelligence, the challenges of managing the Central Intelligence Agency, and his experience leading the Agency during the domestic spying scandals of the 1970s. Colby argues that the attentiveness of congressional intelligence committees waxes and wanes, just as it does for any other oversight committee. He states that Congress and the press, along with the integrity and initiative of individual citizens working in the intelligence community, provide the strongest guards against abuse. The interview was conducted in 1991, the last year of the Cold War.     

A probit analysis of the Senate vote on Gramm-Rudman

The Leviathan theory of government was seemingly contradicted when the U.S. Congress passed the Gramm-Rudman deficit reduction law. This study analyzes the Senate vote on Gramm-Rudman to try to determine whether legislators acted in their own self interest. A prisoner's dilemma argument explains how Senators made themselves better off by limiting their own spending abilities. A probit analysis shows how voting for deficit reduction was consistent with the personal incentives faced by individual legislators. The eventual failure of Gramm-Rudman to eliminate the deficit reveals a need to consider institutional as well as constitutional means of controlling government.     

Legislative Television as an Institutional Entry Barrier: The Impact of C-SPAN2 on Turnover in the U.S. Senate, 1946–1998

The present study examines the impactof televised U.S. Senate sessions (byC-SPAN2) on turnover rates in the U.S.Senate over the period 1946–1998. Using atheoretical model wherein politicalservices are viewed as search/experiencegoods, it is argued that there are manyparliamentary procedures available to U.S.Senators (e.g., filibustering, SpecialOrder Speeches, etc.) that serve them aslow-cost forms of persuasive advertising. These outlets provide opportunities forpolitical ``grandstanding'' on popular issueswhich challengers would have to spend largesums of money to combat and/or replicate. In this way C-SPAN (potentially) servesincumbent Senators as an entry barrier.     

Public affairs enters the US President's subcabinet: creating the first assistant secretary for public affairs (1944 –1953) and subsequent developments

• A majority of US cabinet departments now have an assistant secretary for public affairs. As a subcabinet office, such appointments are presidential nominations and require Senate confirmation. Given Congress's general hostility to public affairs in the US executive branch, how did such a position first come into being, thereby creating the precedent and a template for other departments? This historical inquiry identifies the US State Department as the first with an assistant secretary for public affairs. However, the office only gradually emerged as a staff position, with Congress never having an opportunity to vote on the principle of creating such a subcabinet office. Once established, other cabinet departments gradually followed suit, to the point that such positions are now routine in Washington, DC.

Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Why does the Senate “win” in conference committee?: A stability explanation

This paper develops a bicameral stability model wherein the conference committee serves as a vehicle for mutually advantageous bicameral exchange. The goal is to maintain a single party's bicameral majority. Majority party leaders use the conference committee to attenuate the outlying positions of House standing committees that threaten the bicameral majority. Conference outcomes favor the Senate because it is more vulnerable to party turnover. Statistical results on data from the U.S. Congress, 1949 through 1991, demonstrate that when one party holds a bicameral majority, a relative increase in conference bills preserves at the margin, Senate majority-party seats at the expense of House majority-party seats.     

The supermajority core of the US Senate and the failure to join the League of Nations

The failure of the United States to join the League of Nations is often considered to be an outcome of isolationist influence. The supermajority requirement of treaty ratification in the US Senate also is blamed for allowing a minority of isolationists to block the will of the majority that supported the treaty. To determine the cause of the failure, I analyze the Senate debate over the treaty using the concepts of the supermajority core and supermajority winset. Using all 157 votes on the treaty, I estimate senatorial positions and the locations of both the status quo and the treaty on the same metric space. From this analysis, I find that isolationists were not influential enough to block the ratification. Instead, President Wilson’s unwillingness to compromise is found to have played a critical role in the treaty’s defeat. The treaty’s defeat thus was not an indication of the power of isolationism. This study contributes to the growing body of literature that debunks claims about the dominance of isolationism in the interwar period. At the same time, the paper demonstrates how the core and winset concepts can be useful in answering substantive collective choice questions.     

‘US Intelligence and Vietnam’: The Official Version(s)

Recent declassifications of the official histories of Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency activities in the Vietnam War give historians a sharper outline of the overall American intelligence effort in that conflict and a trove of supporting details. While scholars will have to use the new releases with caution, the histories (when combined with appraisals from the Armed Services) offer glimpses of the scale of the US intelligence program and some of the complications that hindered its effectiveness. Two particular features stand out when these materials are viewed in conjunction: the disconnectedness of the various agencies' and Services' efforts from each other (and from decision makers in Washington); and the difficulties that all of them had in working with America's South Vietnamese allies. The picture emerging is thus one of a congeries of largely independent intelligence campaigns working simultaneously against the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong targets. Intelligence miscues did not lose the Vietnam War for the Americans and South Vietnamese, but it now seems clearer that they made victory less likely.     

Perfect Failure: the USA,Cuba and the Bay of Pigs, 1961

In 1961 the US Central Intelligence Agency master‐minded a sea‐borne invasion by Cuban exiles aimed at overthrowing the regime headed by Fidel Castro. With minimal logistical support from the USA the attempted counter‐coup launched at the Bay of Pigs was an unqualified disaster: a ‘perfect failure’, in the words of an authoritative contemporary. This essay locates the fiasco in the longer history of US–Cuban relations, concentrating on the Cold War years, the history of US political intervention and subversion in Latin America, and the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista and the rise of Castro himself—both men offering different models of Latin American caudillismo (the power and cult of military strongmen). The essay concludes with an analysis of Cuba as an issue in US domestic politics and the impact of the Bay of Pigs in consolidating the Cuban revolution and setting the framework for the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962.     

Addressing ‘This Woeful Imbalance’: Efforts to Improve Women's Representation at CIA, 1947–2014

From the wartime Office of Strategic Services to the contemporary Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), women have played a key role in US national intelligence. Yet, aside from episodic attention to the especially colorful lives of individual spies or analysts, few resources have been available to assess the broader status and service of these women. On 30 October 2013, the Central Intelligence Agency released the document collection From Typist to Trailblazer: The Evolving View of Women in the CIA's Workforce, a set of declassified files related to women's employment at the agency. This essay places these documents – which include personnel files, interagency memoranda, and internal CIA surveys and studies – into their broader institutional and social contexts, arguing that, despite the slow pace of change, CIA has made significant progress in addressing sex discrimination within its ranks.     

Bargaining in the appointment process, constrained delegation and the political weight of the Senate

The President and the Senate bargain over the appointment of the Head of a key government department. The operating unit of the department has private information about its operating environment. We model the appointment process as a constrained delegation of policymaking to the operating unit (agency). When the Senate is sufficiently close to the agency the President has to give the agency more authority. On the other hand, given the Senate’s ideal point, when the information is more precise the President can tighten delegation bounds.     

Reforming the Spanish Senate: Mission Impossible?

Attempts in recent years to reform the Spanish Senate have proven futile. Using an institutionalist approach, this article highlights some of the weaknesses of the Spanish Senate in terms of its constitutional design and institutional development. The article explains how attempts at reforming political institutions are influenced by the historical context in which the institution was originally designed and the political context in which it has subsequently developed. The debate over Senate reform is analysed by examining the Senate's institutional setting and its relationships to broader political settings such as the legacy of the transition to democracy, political party discourse, and a competitive culture in Spain's system of intergovernmental relations.     

Winning Coalition Formation in the U.S. Senate: The Effects of Legislative Decision Rules and Agenda Change

Recent empirical work has brought a renewed attention to the effect congressional rules of procedure have on the size of winning coalitions. Specifically, scholars have posited that legislative success hinges on the support of legislators identified by institutionally defined decision rules. Under these theories, supermajority decision rules in the U.S. Senate lead to larger, more inclusive coalitions on final passage. In this article, I reevaluate these claims by controlling for changes in the legislative agenda and the roll‐call voting record. I find that the aggregate size of winning coalitions is highly responsive to the underlying legislative agenda, the size of the Senate's majority party, and the manner in which researchers treat unrecorded votes. Further, my findings suggest that any connection between changes in the Senate's voting rules and the size of winning coalitions is spurious. Eric Schickler and Gregory J. Wawro have authored a response to this article, and Anthony J. Madonna has authored a rejoinder to this response. Both are available as Supporting Information .     

‘They are not my people’: Barack Obama on lobbying and lobbyists

This article traces the development of Barack Obama's sometimes ambiguous and sometimes antithetical attitudes and relationship to lobbyists. During his childhood in Indonesia, his stepfther was a lobbyist for a US oil company. Obama engaged himself in what many would consider to be lobbying in his career as a ‘community activist’ in Chicago. As an Illinois state senator, he befriended lobbyists and enjoyed poker and basketball games with them, in addition to raising about two thirds of his campaign finance from big business, unions, and political action committees. In the US Senate, Obama involved in ethics reforms that curbed the influence of lobbyists. His presidential campaign rhetoric was hard‐hitting, often decrying the irresponsibility of lobbyists while he had a number of lobbyists in key positions in his campaign team. On his first full day in office, President Obama signed an executive order restricting lobbyists from working in his administration. He later banned registered lobbyists from having personal meeting with officials about economic stimulus projects. Both these pledges have, however, had unforeseen or unwelcome consequences. More recently, Obama decided to ban lobbyists from membership of federal advisory panels but continues to meet frequently with favored lobbyists and corporate executives behind closed doors. The article questions whether Obama's history in this area adds up to a coherent or principled track record or whether it simply relates a series of inconsistent and political decisions. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Subs and PSYOPs: The 1982 Swedish Submarine Intrusions

In the 1980s, the Soviet Union was believed to have targeted Sweden by sending submarines into Swedish archipelagos and naval bases, which forced Prime Minister Olof Palme to terminate his ambitious foreign policy. The ‘imminent Soviet threat’ changed Swedish public opinion drastically. Twenty years later, statements made by the responsible US and UK leaders, including then US Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and then UK Navy Minister Keith Speed, show that these operations were run by US and British submarines testing Swedish coastal defences. Then US Secretary of Navy John Lehman and the Swedish Secretary of the Submarine Inquiry, Mathias Mossberg, indicate that these operations were also deception operations and psychological operations. Swedish former defence ministers have said that ‘it was wrong to point to the Soviet Union’, indicating that the more visible submarines may have been from the West. Ralf Lillbacka's article in Intelligence and National Security in 2010 does not take this information into consideration. The technical evidence we now have is proof of Western submarines operating in Swedish archipelagos. This evidence confirms the statements made by responsible leaders.     

Did the CIA Reproduce ‘Soviet Satellite’ Imagery of the US During DCI McCone’s Era? Evidence from a Document at the National Archives

The US developed the capability to see and reproduce photo imagery taken by Soviet satellites crossing the American landmass, according to notes of a conversation between DCI John McCone and Secretary of State Dean Rusk in 1963. We analyze the implications of this conversation, and report results of a literature search to explore how the US might have developed such a capability, and whether it lasted.     

Balancing constituency representation and party responsiveness in the US Senate: the conditioning effect of state ideological heterogeneity

Spatial proximity theories of representation focus on the importance of the average views of constituencies in guiding legislators’ decisions. However, legislative scholars also identify political parties as central in structuring behavior. We present and test a theory of how legislators might resolve this tension. We propose that heterogeneity in constituent preferences conditions how legislators balance the (sometimes) rival pressures of constituency and party. Specifically, greater preference heterogeneity weakens the impact of the average constituency views on roll-call behavior while strengthening the impact of party. We show support with data from the US Senate and discuss the implications for democratic representation.