Congressional investigations and their historical impact

Intelligence

The Importance of the Congressional Hearings of the 1970s

It is difficult to overstate the importance of the Congressional hearings of the 1970s for the health of the U.S. intelligence community. The U.S. intelligence community became a force unto itself in the years immediately after the end of World War II when intelligence operations shifted from military to civilian hands. But oversight in those early years was lax at best. By the early 1970s, the Watergate scandal and the unpopular Vietnam War both contributed to new calls for greater control over abuses of power (Van Wagenen). Then, in December 1974, a collection of files became public that were known as "the family jewels." These documents outlined actions made by the CIA that were illegal, unethical, or out of sync with the values of the United States. They included, notably, assassination attempts, subversion of foreign governments, and civil rights abuses against U.S. citizens (DeYoung and Pincus; Van Wagenen).

As these abuses were made public through Congressional investigation, subsequent oversight was inevitable. While some in the intelligence community may have resented the intrusion of Congress and calls for transparency, the investigations and oversight gave the CIA and the intelligence community a stronger moral footing in the U.S. democracy (DeYoung and Pincus). In a nation in which freedom and open-ness are core values, the continuance of an intelligence community that operates outside of those bounds and values is ethically unacceptable. The long-term health of the intelligence community in the nation was predicated on those Congressional investigations of the 1970s, which successfully infused the U.S. intelligence community with some degree of a "conscience."