Intelligence and National Security

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Profiles in Intelligence: an interview with Professor

Loch K. Johnson

Mark Phythian

To cite this article: Mark Phythian (2022): Profiles in Intelligence: an interview with Professor Loch
K. Johnson, Intelligence and National Security, DOI: 10.1080/02684527.2022.2116180

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/02684527.2022.2116180

Published online: 15 Sep 2022.

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INTELLIGENCE AND NATIONAL SECURITY
https://doi.org/10.1080/02684527.2022.2116180

INTERVIEW

Profiles in Intelligence: an interview with Professor Loch K. Johnson

Mark Phythian

Introduction
Loch K. Johnson is a leading figure and one of the most familiar names in the study of intelligence. He
is one of its pioneers and key thinkers. Over some 40 years, his academic career developed in parallel
with the field of Intelligence Studies, a field he has done much to shape. His work has influenced
generations of students, academics, and practitioners.
His first book on intelligence, A Season of Inquiry: The Senate Intelligence Investigation, was
published in 1985, by which time he had already published several important articles, including
the ‘Seven Sins of Strategic Intelligence’ in World Affairs in 1983. As with A Season of Inquiry, a number
of these early articles focused on two aspects of intelligence that would come to form a particular
focus of his writing: oversight & accountability and covert action. Loch’s contribution to thinking
about these topics has been enormous. It is simply not possible to study either of them without
referring to his work. In recent years, he has produced magisterial studies of each, which represent
the culmination of a career devoted to observing and analysing them; Spy Watching: Intelligence
Accountability in the United States (2018), and The Third Option: Covert Action and American Foreign
Policy (2022).
However, the contribution of Loch Johnson’s published output to the study of intelligence is
much broader than this. For this reason, the bibliography of his books, journal articles, and book
chapters on intelligence that follows the interview here represents an invaluable resource, providing
details of the approximately 30 books, 100 journal articles, and 50 book chapters on intelligence that
he has produced to date (although even this does not include other forms of output, such as his
contributions to government publications or newspaper commentaries).
This body of work also includes landmark contributions to thinking about intelligence theory,
and publications that situate the study of intelligence within the broader study of US foreign
policy. Indeed, through the emphasis Loch gave to intelligence in books, such as America as a
World Power, the way he explained intelligence in books, such as Bombs, Bugs, Drugs, and Thugs,
and situated it within the wider American political culture in books like America’s Secret Power, he
has done much to increase recognition of the centrality of intelligence to teaching and thinking
about foreign policy and politics more generally, and provided resources via which this could be
taken forward.
His body of work also includes the series of handbooks and multi-volume reference works on
intelligence that he has edited for Routledge, Praeger and Oxford University Press. However, Loch’s
most significant editorial contribution to the development and shaping of Intelligence Studies is to
be found in his role as editor of this journal from 2001 to 2019, a lengthy period that amounted to
over half its existence at the time he stepped down as editor, and one of the experiences he reflects
on in the interview below.
In setting out Loch’s contribution to Intelligence Studies, it would be remiss of me not to mention
the enormous contribution he made as a teacher and PhD supervisor over the 40 years he spent at
the University of Georgia, in relation to which he received numerous awards. Amongst other awards,

CONTACT Mark Phythian mp249@le.ac.uk

© 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 M. PHYTHIAN

he was the recipient in 2014 of the International Studies Association’s Intelligence Studies Section
Distinguished Scholar Award.
In this interview, Loch discusses an academic career devoted to the study of intelligence and how
his interest in this area developed, including the formative influence of his work in Congress in the
1970s for both the Church Committee and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence
(HPSCI). He also reflects on a range of issues, including the tensions that can exist around the practice
of intelligence in a democratic context and the nature and development of Intelligence Studies.
What follows is the edited transcript of the interview, conducted remotely during June–July 2022, to
which Loch has added references in endnotes. The interview is followed by a bibliography of his
publications dealing with intelligence in book, journal article, and book chapter form. A number of
these are referred to in the interview.

Interview

MP: Could I begin by asking you to say a little about how became interested in studying
intelligence? What was it that attracted you to the subject? You studied Political Science
as an undergraduate, but I am guessing that, at that time, intelligence was a ‘missing
dimension’ of a Political Science curriculum?
LJ: I went to college in the 1960s, at the University of California, Davis, and, of course, read in the
newspapers about the Bay of Pigs and some other occasional intelligence flaps, but the activities
of the CIA were far from my thoughts at the time. I had several outstanding classes in Political
Science, but they offered only a small glimpse into the subject of intelligence. One of the required
texts on International Relations I read offered only 14 pages on intelligence and the CIA in an 846-
page volume.1 Even that brief exposure, though, was vividly presented and caught my attention.
The topic sounded intriguing, and brand new to my eyes. I filed ‘CIA’ at the back of my mind as
something to explore in the future.
At Davis, my initial studies were in Zoology – what today would be a Biology major. I liked Political
Science, however, in large part because of an inspiring high school ‘Civics’ teacher in Germany,
and so I kept taking courses in that subject, too. I finally switched to Political Science in my senior
year, having found the relationships among nations more absorbing than the dissection of fetal
pigs. During these years, and even in graduate school (University of California, Riverside), I never
did find the time or opportunity to follow through on my latent interest in intelligence. Assigned
seminar readings, exam preparations, and the research of my professors carried me in other
directions.
MP: What was the subject of your PhD, and in what ways – if any – did this bring you closer to
the study of intelligence?
LJ: As during my undergraduate days, my Political Science interests in grad school were equally
divided between domestic and foreign policy. For an interval of time, though, I became focused
on the topic of American presidential elections, because working on this topic was the most
talented and well-published research professor in my department (Harlan Hahn, who received his
training under the tutelage of the great V.O. Key, Jr. at Harvard University). With Professor Hahn as
the adviser, my dissertation examined America’s national nominating conventions, where every
four years presidential hopefuls seek the endorsement of their parties to run for the nation’s
highest office – the quadrennial ‘silly season’, as a University of Georgia colleague, former
Secretary of State Dean Rusk, liked to call it. In the dissertation, I looked back over several
decades to explore the profiles of delegates attending these party powwows. My main interest
was the question of whether they were seasoned professional politicians or neophyte citizen
activists, and what the implications were of both types in terms of the final candidate selections.
 INTELLIGENCE AND NATIONAL SECURITY 3

The Brookings Institution published the results, which showed an increasing number of neo­
phytes in attendance at the conventions and that they were inclined to support non-traditional
candidates.
You can see how far afield I was at the time from the study of intelligence!
My father, a New Zealander, was an RAF pilot during the Second World War, flying a Vickers
Wellington bomber against Nazi targets. He perished in that conflict in December of 1941 when I
was still in the womb. A few years later my mom, also a New Zealander, met an American Army
officer while he was on leave in Auckland between fighting the Japanese in the Pacific theater of
war. He managed to survive this hazardous island-hopping and they married a year after the
Japanese surrender, then we moved to the United States in 1946. So I grew up in an American
military family. On Army bases, information is often transmitted by posting memos and other
messages on hallway bulletin boards. I was in the habit of reading this early form of ‘social media’
and during my final year in grad school, in 1969, I noticed on a Departmental bulletin board an
announcement about nationwide interviews for an American Political Science Association (APSA)
Congressional Fellowship. The lucky recipient would spend a post-doctoral year on Capitol Hill
with a lawmaker of their choice – anyone of the 535 members of Congress. Lightning struck and I
was awarded the Fellowship following interviews at UC Berkeley. This fortunate turn of events led
me to the office of Senator Frank Church (D, Idaho), whose anti-Vietnam War activities I had
admired during my student days.
Church was a senior member of the Foreign Relations Committee and my work for him as a Fellow
was a strong gravitational pull that drew me further in the direction of foreign affairs. My attention
at the time, though, was riveted on the U.S. invasion of Cambodia, ordered by President Richard
M. Nixon in 1970 as a part of America’s war strategy in neighboring Vietnam. It was a stirring
moment on Capitol Hill, with the corridors of Congress overflowing with peaceful antiwar
protesters. Taken aback by this reckless military action, I began to study the ongoing attempts
by lawmakers to define the nation’s war powers for the modern era. The basic question was: Who
in the United States had the authority to invoke military attacks overseas? Church was convinced
the Constitution gave Congress a strong role in this domain, as illustrated by that branch’s sole
constitutional authority to declare war. I thought he was right: war-making was too dangerous a
decision to leave to a president alone. We both believed this conclusion was one of the great
insights of the nation’s founders when they gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 to draft a
Constitution for what would become one of the world’s longest lasting democracies.
At the time, I still had no involvement with intelligence, but that would soon change.
MP: After completing your PhD, you taught Political Science. Did this period help to shape
your interest in the academic study of intelligence? Was it apparent to you by this time
that this was a ‘missing dimension’?
LJ: Following the APSA Fellowship year, I accepted another post-doc opportunity, this time to teach
Political Science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (where on the rugby team I had
the pleasure of helping defeat arch-rival Duke University both in the fall and spring seasons). After
that year, I accepted yet another temporary position, this time at California State University, San
Francisco, so I could be closer to my aging parents for a year, plus enjoy life in that remarkable
city. This was an exhilarating teaching experience, given the wide diversity of the students
enrolled at SF State. I continued my teaching and research interests in both American domestic
and foreign policy. At the end of that year, I decided it was time to seek out a tenure-track
position and I found a good one at Ohio University, where the recruitment team won me over
immediately with its warmth and assurances that my research would be well supported.
Intelligence was still not much on my radar screen beyond the occasional newspaper story,
such as the revelation that the Watergate burglars had some connections to the CIA.
During this period from 1972 to 1975, I enjoyed the exceptional comradery of the Political Science
Department at Ohio University. I also befriended the rising Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis,
4 M. PHYTHIAN

who was on the History faculty at OU and later accepted a chaired position at Yale University.
While in Ohio, I pursued my teaching and research interest in American foreign policy, with a
concentration on relations between Congress and the President. These endeavors would lead to
my first book, The Making of International Agreements: Congress Confronts the Executive. During
this time, I also took a leave of absence from Ohio University for a quarter to assist Frank Church in
his successful 1974 Senate re-election bid.
This tie to Frank Church soon changed my life and academic focus. While on a research trip to
Washington, D.C. in January of 1975, I interviewed him about the Constitution’s war and treaty
powers. At the end of the session, he told me he had been chosen by Mike Mansfield (D,
Montana), the longest serving Senate majority leader, to chair an investigation into alleged CIA
abuses – chiefly improper spying against antiwar protesters inside the United States, recently
reported in the New York Times. Church asked if I would be interested in joining the probe as his
assistant. I immediately said yes, sensing this would be a rare opportunity to look behind the
heavily veiled side of America’s foreign affairs.
I moved to Washington later that spring, with Leena, my wife and editor-in-chief for 54 years now.
For the next sixteen months, I helped Senator Church with this complex and controversial inquiry
into the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC)—events that I related in my second book, A Season of
Inquiry: The Senate Intelligence Investigation.2 Suddenly, almost overnight it seemed, I had joined
the slim ranks of U.S. academics who had expertise on intelligence. During that investigation, I
visited the CIA and the other agencies in the IC many times to interview officials and examine
documents that dealt with the topics we were examining. As his ‘designee’ during the investiga­
tion (each of the eleven Committee members had one), I also assisted Church in planning and
carrying out the broad inquiry; wrote speeches for him about intelligence; helped prepare
hearings, public and closed; deposed various witnesses (the most fascinating was the legendary
CIA Chief of Counterintelligence James Angleton); and wrote sections of the Committee’s final
report. This gave me not only a baseline of knowledge about America’s spy establishment, but
also a wide range of insider contacts for later interviews when I returned to academe. The Church
Committee had kindled within me a fire of interest in intelligence that has burned ever since.
A strong added benefit of my time spent on the Church Committee was the chance to work with
associates who would go on to shine in the field of intelligence research and related academic
studies. Among them were Richard K. Betts (who already had an outstanding academic reputation
for his studies on U.S. military affairs), John Elliff, Britt Snider, and Gregory F. Treverton, all of
whom have contributed significantly to the field of Intelligence Studies; Karl F. Inderfurth, who
subsequently had an outstanding government career at the National Security Council (NSC) staff
and in the diplomatic corps (and published a book with me on the NSC); and CIA analyst Harold
Ford, who has written with firsthand experience on problems related to intelligence analysis.3 In
addition, two staff members trained in the law would go on to publish first-rate books on
intelligence: James Johnston and, separately, Frederick A.O. Schwarz, the Committee’s chief
counsel.4 Other individuals who assisted the Committee as outside consultants had already
written on intelligence. They included historian Ernest May, and political scientists Harry Howe
Ransom and Alan Theoharis.5 Among the senators on the panel, Frank Church, Gary Hart (D,
Colorado) and Walter F. Mondale (D, Minnesota) would also go on to publish on intelligence
topics.6
MP: What kind of source material was available to those, like yourself, interested in the study
of intelligence at this time? Were there any pioneering academics whose work you could
look to? Was the landscape filled more with the work of journalists, both in book form and
in the quality newspapers? Was there anyone person or publication that was particularly
influential?
LJ: In our roles as investigators on the Church Committee, Betts, Elliff, Inderfurth, Snider, Treverton,
and I had little academic literature on intelligence to guide us. The key works we read as the
 INTELLIGENCE AND NATIONAL SECURITY 5

inquiry unfolded (’We are building our boat as we go to sea’, joked Senator Gary Hart to me one
afternoon early in the Committee’s inquiry) included the classic by Professor Ransom, an APSA
Congressional Fellow in the 1950s, entitled The Intelligence Establishment (Harvard, 1970), plus
academic articles and op-eds he had written on this subject. (A professor at Vanderbilt University,
Harry later became a close friend and mentor.). Influential, too, was an exposé written by former
intelligence officers Victor Marchetti and John Marks, entitled The Cult of Intelligence.7 This
controversial volume, which the CIA sought unsuccessfully to quash prior to publication, was
certainly revealing, but less detached and scholarly than Ransom’s work and one had to take into
account the personal grievances these authors brought to the subject.
We consulted a few other works written by journalists with an intelligence beat, or by former
intelligence officers. These publications often held nuggets of insight, especially from reporters as
well connected as Seymour M. Hersh and Nicholas Horrock of the New York Times and David C.
Martin of CBS News. As well, we read the public musings of Allen Dulles, the longest serving
Director of Central Intelligence or DCI (1953–1961); and I especially valued the books written by
former high-level CIA analyst Dr. Ray S. Cline.8 On the whole, though, reliable source materials
were limited in 1975. Scholars and most journalists simply did not have much access to the
intelligence agencies before the investigation.9
MP: This period, of course, is also that of the Vietnam War and of the Watergate scandal. To
what extent did these events focus your interest on intelligence as a subject of academic
study?
LJ: They were an important backdrop to the establishment of the Church Committee. Without the
growing public suspicions in the United States about the abuse of power at high levels of
government generated by these twin disasters, the Church inquiry probably would never have
happened. Previously, there had been a culture of ‘intelligence exceptionalism’ in the United
States; the secret agencies would be allowed to conduct their activities largely as they saw fit
during the Cold War against the Soviet Union, including the adoption of unsavory operations if
necessary. That philosophy of ‘the executive branch knows best’ (a variation of the old saw
‘politics stops at the water’s edge’) was demolished by the Vietnam War and Watergate – at least
for a while, although today many have returned to the failed and dangerous embrace of the
Imperial Presidency.
For me, Watergate underscored the need for close accountability over the White House and
presidential aides; so did the war in Vietnam, which was also conducted with insufficient checks-
and-balances by lawmakers – at any rate prior to the famous Senate Foreign Relations hearings of
1966, in which Chairman J. William Fulbright (D, Arkansas) and Frank Church played a key role.
These ‘Fulbright hearings’ into the origins and conduct of the war raised doubts among American
citizens about the wisdom of that conflict. Opinion began to move in the direction of winding
down U.S. involvement in Indochina – although, despite campaign promises to the contrary, the
Nixon administration would take several more years to fulfill its withdrawal promises, at the cost
of more than 20,000 additional GI lives.
These Watergate and Vietnam lessons about the tragedies that can accompany unbridled pre­
sidential power came to the forefront during the Church Committee inquiry. Just as the White
House and the Pentagon needed close accountability over their activities, so did the CIA and its
companion agencies, as revealed by Seymour Hersh’s New York Times articles in December of
1974. In the aftermath of the Church Committee’s investigation, I joined the staff of the Foreign
Relations Committee as Church’s aide and continued research into improper uses of executive
branch powers across the board of U.S. foreign policy.
MP: After working with Senator Frank Church on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
(SSCI), and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, you become the first staff director of
the Subcommittee on Intelligence Oversight of the House Permanent Select Committee
6 M. PHYTHIAN

on Intelligence (HPSCI). These must have been a fascinating as well as formative set of
experiences.
LJ: This was a terrific chance to put my beliefs in the importance of accountability into practice with
respect to ongoing intelligence activities. Representative Les Aspin (D, Wisconsin) recruited me to
head that Subcommittee. Both he and Church had been Phi Beta Kappa members (as students at
Stanford and Yale, respectively). Church had also earned a law degree from Stanford, and Aspin a
PhD in economics from MIT; so I was blessed by the opportunity to work with well-educated and
serious-minded members of Congress. By now, my plans for an academic career seemed like a
distant mirage in the rearview mirror.
Occasionally, though, I still imagined the pleasure of returning one day to the leafy groves of
academe, rubbing shoulders with talented researchers and spending time with aspiring students.
In the meantime, I understood that here was another rare chance to learn as much as I could
about America’s secret foreign policy. I assisted Aspin and the full committee chair, Edward P.
Boland (D, Massachusetts), in the preparation of hearings, the writing of reports, budget reviews,
and travel abroad with Aspin to inspect CIA stations in various countries.
In the 1980s, legislative language drafted by Representative Boland would shut down the covert
actions in Nicaragua that the Reagan administration had underway. This rebuff led the staff of the
National Security Council (NSC) and the CIA to pursue their objectives anyway, by shifting these
hidden activities operations into – as one of the conspirators would put it later, quoting the DCI at
the time, William J. Casey (1981–1987)—an ‘off-the-shelf, stand alone, self-sustaining’ supersecret
organization operating outside the established framework of government. Known as ‘The
Enterprise’, this creation was nothing less than a subterranean entity designed to carry out covert
actions without the knowledge and against the will of Congress. The venture violated not only the
Boland laws but several other statutes related to covert action. So was born the Iran-contra
scandal, a dark stain on the reputation of the Reagan administration and the CIA.
One of the highlights during this phase of my career was to organize public hearings for Aspin in
1978 on the relationship between U.S. journalists and the CIA. As these hearings disclosed, many
of these ties were entirely legitimate. Intelligence officers sometimes debriefed journalists on
their impressions drawn from of their travels in one country or another; and, from time to time,
journalists gave their research a ‘ground-truth’ test by running thoughts past experienced
analysts. Sometimes, though, we found instances in which the relationship had become all too
cozy, as when U.S. journalists stationed overseas assisted the CIA with its local recruitment or even
its intelligence-gathering activities – two of several questionable practices curbed by increasingly
restrictive internal CIA regulations promulgated in turn by DCIs William E. Colby (1973–1976),
George H.W. Bush (1976–1977), and Admiral Stansfield Turner (1977–1981).
MP: What do you recall as the most important insights that you gained from working in these
roles during this period?
LJ: Among some of the key insights I learned during this period from 1975 to 1979, with the Church
and the Boland Committees, was that the overwhelming majority of intelligence officers I met –
several hundred individuals, mostly but not exclusively at senior levels – were outstanding men
and women with keen minds; a strong sense of patriotism (devoid of extreme nationalism); an
ethic of hard work and long hours, sometimes in dangerous settings like Saigon, Baghdad, and
Kabul; and an animated sense of the legal and ethical limits on their activities.
I also witnessed, though, that Lord Acton’s celebrated aphorism—’Power corrupts and absolute
power corrupts absolutely’—applies in spades when it comes to secret power. Some illustra­
tions: the IC’s spying on Vietnam War dissenters, as well as civil rights activists (Operation
CHAOS, the focal point of the Times reporting in 1974); the startling assassination attempts
against foreign leaders pursued by the CIA; the Iran-contra affair; the failure to track Al Qaeda’s
pre-9/11 activities; the inadequate analysis of (what proved to be non-existent) WMD in Iraq
 INTELLIGENCE AND NATIONAL SECURITY 7

prior to the 2003 U.S. invasion; the warrantless metadata operations carried out against
American citizens by the National Security Agency (NSA); and the CIA’s involvement in torture
during the interrogation of suspected terrorists. These were as much failures of intelligence
oversight by lawmakers and the White House as they were examples of moral and legal lapses
by the Intelligence Community.
While (happily) one could make a much longer list of intelligence successes – such as monitoring
the military activities of the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War, for instance, and Russia today
– the poor and sometimes shocking misbehavior of a small minority at the CIA cannot be
tolerated in a democratic society. Iran-contra is the most conspicuous illustration, spearheaded
by DCI Casey and few others at Langley. Most of my research into the realm of Intelligence Studies
has been, empirically, to trace the activities – good and bad – of U.S. secret agencies after the
Second World War; and to try to understand how to balance creativity and nimbleness – which
the IC must have – with proper safeguards against the abuse of its opaque powers. Democracies
require a mix of both effective security and liberty, together the sine quo non of a free society.
How one can best achieve this balance is one of the most difficult challenges a democracy can
face. Even the most robust of the world’s open societies have stumbled from time to time in this
quest, although the Five-Eyes nations and a few others (such as the Netherlands) have taken
important strides in this direction.
MP: You also worked closely with Senator Church as Issues Director in his 1976 presidential
campaign. What are your recollections of that role and campaign?
LJ: As I mentioned earlier, I had written a dissertation on America’s national elections, so it was a treat
to be engaged as Church’s Issues Director in an actual presidential campaign. During this time,
the New York Times referred to the Church election team as the most well informed on the issues
(which was far more a reflection of his deep knowledge of public policy based on 24 years in the
Senate than on my research efforts for him). Senator Church put up a good fight, winning against
frontrunner Jimmy Carter in some of the primaries; but the former governor of Georgia was also
an excellent campaigner and had been out on the hustings long before Church entered the
contest. Carter walked away with the Democratic Party nomination and went on to defeat his
GOP opponent, Vice President Gerald R. Ford (Michigan).
At the CIA and other places in the IC, a myth lives on that Senator Church used the intelligence
investigation of 1975–1976 chiefly as a springboard for presidential aspirations. Nothing I say will
ever dispel that belief, I suppose, among those who continue to think the inquiry was unnecessary
and politically motivated. Many close observers have noted, however, that behind closed doors
Church worked hard on the inquiry right up until the release of its reports in early 1976, and only
then entered the Nebraska primary (which he won against Carter). In the judgment of those of us
who were with Church on a day-to-day basis during this probe, he was driven overwhelmingly by
his concern about abuses of secret power by the executive branch, not by the longshot chance at
a late presidential bid.10
I also had the opportunity four years later to serve as an aide to President Carter in writing the
foreign policy briefing books for his national debate with his GOP rival Ronald Reagan. During the
election in 1976, intelligence enjoyed a high profile compared to other previous presidential
election years. Both Church and Carter had made intelligence reform a central plank in their
platforms. Both were highly critical of CIA covert actions, as well as the FBI’s vendetta against Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr. Governor Carter invited the second-ranking Democrat on the Church
Committee (Senator Walter F. Mondale, Minnesota) to be his running mate; and, further,
President Carter appointed his former Annapolis classmate Admiral Turner as a reform-minded
DCI. In sharp contrast, the topic of intelligence failed to arise at all four years later in Carter’s
debate with Reagan – although I had included a full section on this subject in the President’s
briefing book, just in case.
8 M. PHYTHIAN

MP: Following your work in Congress, you moved to the University of Georgia, initially as
Associate Professor of Political Science, then as Professor of Political Science (from 1985),
and finally as Regents Professor (from 1990). How did you go about introducing and
integrating the study of intelligence into the Political Science program? What are your
recollections of doing this?
LJ: While I was with the HPSCI staff, Leena and I were blessed with a baby girl. We decided the time
had come to return to a university setting, where I would have more time to enjoy being a proper
dad. Moreover, I would be able to write under my own name instead of for the officials with
whom I worked as an aide. It was a tight job market in 1979, but fortunately I landed an appealing
position at the University of Georgia in Athens, a beautiful campus in a lovely city with a vibrant
music scene, plus a winning football team and a Political Science Department that was both an
affable place to work and staffed with a faculty eager to make its mark.
As a new member of the Political Science faculty (none of whom knew much about intelligence), I
moved cautiously in the direction of introducing this kind of course into the curriculum –
especially since I had been hired to teach not on the subject of Intelligence Studies but rather
on the Congress, the Presidency, and American foreign policy, as well as the large introductory
course on American Government. My strategy, though, was to make intelligence a part of these
courses, integrating material on analysis, counterintelligence, covert action, and oversight into
each. These segments turned out to be among those of greatest interest to the students.
After a year, I gained tenure. Thus emboldened, I carried a proposal for a stand-alone intelligence
course to my Department and College curriculum committees. They quickly approved the
proposal, as was the case at the next step: the University-wide curriculum committee. No dissents
at any of these levels. To have attempted that at UC Berkeley or some other decidedly left-leaning
institution, with a history of protests against campus visits by recruitment teams from the
Department of Defense and the CIA, would probably have failed. I don’t know what the situation
would be like at Berkeley today, but I do know that the intelligence courses taught by Dick Betts
and the late Bob Jervis have been well established and well subscribed at contemporary
Columbia University, which – like Berkeley – was once a hotbed of antiwar protest during the
Vietnam War era. So, as Bob Dylan used to preach, maybe the times are a’changin’.
From 1997 to 2001, I led the establishment of a new School of Public and International Affairs
(SPIA) at the University of Georgia, to replace the Political Science Department in the College of
Liberal Arts. My inspiration was the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, where I had been
a visiting lecturer. Once the School was established, my intelligence course moved from being a
part of the Political Science Department to being an offering within the International Affairs
Department, which was newly created as a part of SPIA. I was always fortunate enough to enjoy
large and enthusiastic enrollments for this course (which I have also taught at Yale and Oxford);
but, since I retired in 2019, SPIA has yet to hire an intelligence specialist on the faculty. This also
happened at Yale University when the Intelligence Studies pioneer Professor Brad Westerfield
retired. These are not good signs for the discipline.
It remains a struggle to establish intelligence courses at universities. Moreover, it is a difficult
research field for young scholars, since we are talking here about secret agencies and their well-
concealed activities – a challenge to outside researchers. And it is not easy to have intelligence
research published in the mainstream Political Science and even IR journals. As a result, many
young faculty shy away from the field, concentrating on topics where there is a rich and readily
available lode of data (such as election studies). My sense is that the British universities and
journals have been more sensible in this regard and have better understood the importance of
Intelligence Studies. I should stress, though, that many scholars have been successful in pursuing
this field as a career in the United States and elsewhere, as the amount of research material in the
public sector expands.
 INTELLIGENCE AND NATIONAL SECURITY 9

In terms of developing Intelligence Studies as a new discipline, I became active in the

International Studies Association, presenting papers and presiding as president of its Southern
section.11 With the help of political scientist Glenn Hastedt (an early and solid contributor to
intelligence research12), I also set up an Intelligence Studies group within the APSA, which
allowed us to have at least one panel at each of this large organization’s annual conventions. I
have to admit, though, that convention participants – mostly American government specialists –
were not exactly beating down the doors to attend these panels. Maybe one day.
MP: By this time, you are beginning to publish regularly on the subject of national security
intelligence and, in particular, on two aspects of it: covert action and oversight. One
highlight of this period is your 1985 book, A Season of Inquiry: The Senate Intelligence
Investigation, published by the University Press of Kentucky (and recently reprinted by
the University Press of Kansas with a new Introduction). I guess this focus should come as
no surprise given your work in Congress in the 1970s?
LJ: Having been in the vortex of the Church Committee inquiry for sixteen months, A Season of
Inquiry was a natural for me to work on as I resumed an academic career.
The book was also enjoyable to write, since the Committee underwent so many exciting twists
and turns as new evidence came to light. We thought initially that we were investigating
Operation CHAOS, the CIA illegal domestic surveillance program. This we did, of course, but we
soon discovered that ‘the Agency’ had been involved in other questionable activities. So had
several other entities in the IC. As we took a close look at all the components of the Community,
tumbling out one after another came such shocking revelations as the FBI’s COINTELPRO. This
counterintelligence program involved the Bureau in improper surveillance operations against
antiwar protesters and civil rights activists – activities that included nothing less than domestic
covert actions by the FBI against law-abiding American citizens. Senators were stunned to find
that COINTELPRO agents attempted to disrupt the families of civil rights activists, for example,
and even tried to blackmail Dr. King in hopes of pushing him toward suicide. The green light for
these operations had come from the very top of the FBI: Director J. Edgar Hoover, who was an
unalloyed racist.
Then came our discovery of the grisly CIA assassination plots against Fidel Castro of Cuba, Patrice
Lumumba of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and a few other foreign heads-of-state in poor
countries. Moreover, we learned about controversial covert actions in Chile, a fellow democracy,
and elsewhere; and the Huston Plan, drafted by young White House aide Tom Charles Huston in
1970, whereby the Nixon administration tried to mobilize the IC for massive spying against
antiwar, anti-Nixon groups within the United States. We uncovered, as well, improper surveillance
activities against American citizens by the NSA since the days of the Truman administration.
Further chilling drama accompanied our proceedings, including the subsequent murders (never
solved) of mob witnesses who testified before the Committee. In addition, came our realization
that deep-seated counterintelligence disputes had rocked the CIA during the latter stage of
James Angleton’s leadership in this realm at the CIA and continued into the aftermath of his
firing in 1974 by DCI Colby on the eve of our inquiry. This is just a sample of the Church
Committee’s rollercoaster ride. Despite these ongoing jolts, in his book Government by
Investigation political scientist Paul C. Light pointed to this panel’s performance as a ‘model’ of
a successful congressional inquiry among the 100 he studied, stretching back to the Senate’s
post-war probe into the failure of the United States to anticipate the Japanese attack at Pearl
Harbor in 1941.13
With all this dramaturgy as a backdrop, Season of Inquiry practically wrote itself. What I had to be
careful about was keeping classified material out of the volume; and to make sure that I was as
objective as possible. On this first goal, the Church Committee and the CIA’s Publication Review
Board double-checked the manuscript for me; and, on the second, I relied on my social science
training, along with a determination to tell this story as truthfully as I could. I was pleased when
10 M. PHYTHIAN

the book won a prize from the Association of Retired Intelligence Officers (ARIO), whose Awards
Committee was chaired by arch-conservative William Casey and whose members included other
GOP stalwarts. The commendation praised the book for its objectivity.
MP: Throughout this period, as you publish on intelligence topics, you also publish on broader
issues of foreign and security policy. America’s Secret Power was a landmark in thinking
about the tensions that arise from the practice of secret intelligence in a liberal demo­
cratic context. What was the background to writing this book? Were you at all influenced
by events of the 1980s – especially the Iran-contra affair? How did working on this project
shape your thinking about the tension between secret intelligence practice and demo­
cratic principles – a theme that runs right through your work?
LJ: The encouraging reception of Season revved me up to carry on with this kind of research. I turned
next to a more comprehensive study of U.S. intelligence, beginning with America’s Secret Power,
published in 1989 (four years after Season). That book looked into a wide array of the Agency’s
operations, from its involvement in the Huston Plan, Watergate, and Iran-contra to its efforts – all
too often over the years – to stonewall and slow-roll congressional overseers. I also vowed during
those early years at the University of Georgia to do what I could to insert intelligence research into
a least some mainstream political science journals, such as the International Studies Quarterly.
In America’s Secret Power, I addressed key issues related to covert action; to failures in the
intelligence cycle; to a more in-depth look at the Huston Plan; to CIA relations with academe
and with the media (extensive in both cases); and, above all, to the challenges of maintaining the
new rules of intelligence accountability set in place by a bipartisan majority of members on the
Church Committee (back in the days when ‘bipartisanship’ still existed in Washington). The book
grew out of both my Church Committee and HPSCI experiences. It was the kind of research I
imagined Professor Ransom would commend and, indeed, I had the good fortune at professional
conferences, along with visits to one another’s homes (he lived in Nashville), to discuss the
drafting of this book with him as it developed. I was greatly indebted to Harry for his willingness
to read chapters and offer helpful suggestions.
The revelations about the Iran-contra affair that appeared in the media as I was writing this book
underscored for me the importance of intelligence accountability. If Operation CHAOS had been
an initial epiphany for me – and the country – in realizing the importance of restraints on
America’s secretive side of government, Iran-contra was an even more powerful one. Here was
a hidden operation that struck at the foundations of American democracy by rendering irrelevant
the congressional appropriations process, which lies at the heart of the Constitution. During the
1980s, another investigative panel on Capitol Hill, the Inouye-Hamilton Committee, painstakingly
uncovered the details of this rank corruption of intelligence. That Committee also further
advanced oversight provisions, while providing fresh troves of material for intelligence research­
ers to examine.
MP: In the following decade you published a number of books and articles that addressed the
role of intelligence in a rapidly evolving world, with the end of the Cold War giving way to
a more complex, or less easily defined, international security environment (for example,
Secret Agencies: US Intelligence in a Hostile World in 1996 and Bombs, Bugs, Drugs, and
Thugs: Intelligence and America’s Quest for Security in 2000). I recall that at the time, in his
confirmation hearings early in 1993, DCI James Woolsey (1993–1995) characterised this
environment by explaining that ‘we have slain a large dragon [the Soviet Union] but now
find ourselves in a jungle filled with a bewildering variety of poisonous snakes’. How was
intelligence changing in this period, and did this have implications for the focus of the
academic study of intelligence?
LJ: The transformation of the world from a bipolar conflict between the United States and the U.S.S.R.
into a kaleidoscope of multipolar centers of power with the breakup of the Soviet Empire made it
 INTELLIGENCE AND NATIONAL SECURITY 11

clear that the overwhelming concentration of U.S. intelligence on things Russian would no longer
suffice. The ‘poisonous snakes’ set loose were many in number and diverse in nature, as the world
became an even more complicated place haunted by global terrorism; expanding international
criminal activity (such as human trafficking and drug cartels); heated international trade disputes;
rising environmental dangers; ever-lurking pandemics; a less cohesive Western alliance up
against muscular foreign autocracies; stepped up spying against the United States and other
Western democracies not only by Russia, but also by China, North Korea, Iran, and several other
adversarial nations. My next set of books explored some of these new challenges – research that
was informed in part by my return to Washington for another stint in government at the request
of Les Aspin. After serving as Secretary of Defense in the Clinton administration, he had been
named chairman of a presidential commission to investigate U.S. intelligence agencies to see how
well they were performing in this post-Cold War era and he asked me to assist him.14 I spent the
next year in that capacity, on leave from the University of Georgia. It was a privilege to be in
harness with Aspin again – a brilliant and warm-hearted individual. We met several times each
week to review the Commission’s progress, along with the research I was conducting for him
related to the inquiry.
I have written a Season-like account of this experience, which was the second most extensive
examination of U.S. intelligence in American history (after the Church Committee). That book,
entitled The Threat on the Horizon (2011), shed light on the state of U.S. intelligence in the mid-
1990s – a relatively quiet interlude that preceded the horrendous terrorist attacks of 11
September 2001. The central finding of the Commission was the need to increase the DCI’s
authority over the entire Intelligence Community, both in terms of budget and personnel. This
theme was an old one that stretched back to the Truman era, when the DCI office revealed its
weakness practically from the beginning of the CIA’s existence in 1947. We tried to underscore the
importance of have a stronger DCI as a means of integrating the various IC siloes (although the
new office would have to be accompanied by sturdy guardrails to prevent the misuse of these
more centralized powers). As in the past, this message was largely ignored in the government
when we reported in 1996—and had been vigorously opposed by the armed services throughout
our inquiry. The Pentagon brass feared that stronger managerial control over military intelligence
units by a civilian leader might dilute their raison d’etat: support to military operations (SMO, in
the inevitable Department of Defense acronym).
This concern was unfounded. Whomever a president selected to serve as a stronger DCI would
continue to place military intelligence at the hub of America’s collection-and-analysis activities.
The safety, and maybe even the survival, of the nation depended on it. Nonetheless, the DoD is a
weighty member of the Cabinet, accustomed to having its own way, and it preferred not to have a
strong DCI boss over its head. Only eight years later would this change somewhat. In 2004,
following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, lawmakers enacted the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism
Prevention Act (IRTPA). This act of Congress created a new Director of National Intelligence (DNI).
Ironically, though, the DNI office was weaker in many respects than the old DCI office it had
replaced. At least the DCI had an army of respected CIA analysts to back up its authority in high
government councils; in contrast, the Office of the DNI was small and separated from the
intelligence brain trust at Langley by several miles. During the mark-up of the bill, Pentagon
lobbyists had again managed to emasculate attempts to create a centralized office that could
help harness together all the major intelligence agencies.
Tragically, Aspin died from a stroke at a relatively young age midway during his Commission’s
work. He was replaced by former Secretary of Defense in the Carter administration, Harold Brown.
I continued my staff research in support of the investigation, which provided me the chance to
explore the prominent global threats that had replaced the once largely exclusive IC focus on the
Soviet Union. In the wake of what was now known as the Aspin-Brown Commission, my first book
along these lines (published before my Threat on the Horizon overview of the panel’s inquiry) was
entitled Secret Agencies. It explored the state of specific intelligence activities in the immediate
12 M. PHYTHIAN

post-Cold War period: how the IC had begun to cope with the new global challenges; what moral
issues these activities presented; how their performance rated in contrast to the secret services of
other prominent nations, whether democratic or autocratic; and the degree to which the Church
Committee reforms and other oversight legislation that had come in its wake – most notably the
Intelligence Oversight Act of 1980—had panned out. On this last point, the evidence suggested a
mixed outcome, with Iran-contra reminding us that even the best, most intricately embroidered
guidelines for the legal conduct of intelligence can be swept aside by a White House determined
to pursue its policy objectives regardless of existing laws and other congressional restraints.
One chapter in Secret Agencies was a sharp departure from the usual suspects explored in
intelligence research. I studied the relationship between U.S. corporations and this nation’s spy
agencies, especially the question of whether the IC should assist these businesses to resist foreign
espionage attempts. Here was counterintelligence brought into the marketplace. DCI Turner
argued that the CIA ought to aid American companies in their global competition, not only
with counterintelligence activities but in the clandestine collection-and-analysis of such matters
as Chinese marketing strategies. Other DCIs disagreed. They maintained that the worlds of spying
and American business ought to remain separate. Further, most observers of this relationship
were convinced that, on the intelligence front, the corporations really didn’t need a helping hand
from the federal government; they already had their own robust intelligence capabilities, often
staffed by former IC officers.
Four years later in 2000, my book on Bombs, Bugs (for short) provided another canvas to explore
non-traditional national security dangers to the United States and its fellow democracies. In this
volume, I looked further into intelligence programs that touched on economic matters. I lifted the
lid, too, on how the IC was approaching environmental and pandemic threats – all extensions of
what I had researched while serving on the Aspin-Brown Commission. The ‘bugs’ in the title
referred to the danger of global diseases, with the SARS and Ebola viruses of special concern
during these years. I suggested that while continuing to monitor the whereabouts of weapons
systems and terrorists that can cause the United States grievous harm, the IC should expand its
tasking responsibilities by adding to the list environmental security threats and the outbreak of
pandemics.15 By the time of the COVID-19 ordeal that began in 2019, the IC had become
sophisticated enough in tracking pandemics that key analysts were able to provide an early
warning to the administration led by President Donald J. Trump. These alerts, including red-
flagged material on the topic in the President’s Daily Brief, were largely discounted by the
President and his assistants, however – a perennial problem confronted by intelligence agencies
in all nations and across party lines.
The environmental research I had pursued for Aspin became particularly fascinating to me when I
discovered that the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology had close ties with leading
environmental scientists at U.S. universities and labs, in a program called MEDEA. The DS&T would
solicit their views on environmentally related security issues, such as how long before climate
change would melt icebergs in the Atlantic useful as hiding places for U.S. nuclear submarines. In
return, the Agency shared with the private-sector scientists unique surveillance satellite photo­
graphy of the Earth’s surface, taken coincidentally while observing Soviet missile sites and other
foreign military installations. These images were a gold mine of longitudinal data that allowed
scientists to trace the timelines of vanishing rain forests and ice floes, coral reef deterioration, and
a wide array of other important ecological trends. In Bombs, Bugs, I referred to this unusual CIA/
university partnership as the ‘greening of intelligence’—the CIA aiding civilian scientific research
while at the same time attending to its own more immediate concerns about environmental
security threats. These threats included the reality of shrinking water supplies in some parts of the
world that could lead to civil unrest, and even warfare, among nations that shared lake and river
borders.
Much of the Bombs, Bugs book also reflected on the ongoing bureaucratic tensions between
members of the IC, most prominently over the distribution of resources – the $80 billion per
 INTELLIGENCE AND NATIONAL SECURITY 13

annum the United States has expended on its secret services in recent years. Here again was the
SMO duty, on the one hand, and the host of ‘civilian’ dangers like global environment deteriora­
tion, on the other hand. The Aspin-Brown Commission also led me more deeply into a study of
intelligence spending, another topic rarely examined but one a researcher could find out more
about from information in the public record than I had initially expected.
In sum, the end of the Cold War substantially increased the tasking duties of intelligence agencies.
Just knowing what the Russians were doing was no longer enough. The IC’s collection-and-
analysis agenda had burgeoned and, happily for outside researchers, so had the range of
intelligence topics available for serious scholarly inquiry.
MP: The intelligence landscape changed again with the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United
States. How did this affect the teaching and study of intelligence? Did it suggest a need to
revisit any previously held assumptions about the nature of intelligence, or that tension
between secret intelligence practice and democratic principles that had been such a
theme in your work?
LJ: This horrific event brought about a tidal change in American foreign policy, fatefully drawing the
United States into prolonged wars in the Middle East. The major result of 9/11 for the IC, and for
researchers studying its various activities, was a movement of attention away from Russia and
toward terrorist threats and how well the United States was combating them. New government
reports, scholarly books, and university courses sprouted, with the academic world demonstrat­
ing that much important thinking could take place on this topic without having a government
security clearance – just as, in an earlier era, significant papers on nuclear deterrence had been
written by campus and think-tank scholars, not just government defense analysts.
From the point-of-view of my own research, the understandable sense of danger to the country
instilled by 9/11 meant that intelligence accountability had an even more difficult task than usual
in standing its ground against an ‘anything goes’ attitude toward defeating Al Qaeda, ISIS, and
other terrorist organizations. Government leaks and academic research would reveal that the
government had elected to take improper shortcuts in this new global struggle. I alluded earlier
to some examples, most notably on these two fronts: the NSA engagement in improper,
warrantless wiretap activities against American citizens (few of whom had ties to terrorist
organizations), and the CIA’s resort to torture in hopes of finding out about possible future
attacks by the likes of Al Qaeda. Echoing President Harry S. Truman’s remark about
McCarthyism, my own normative perspective was that while in pursuit of liberty at home it
would be foolhardy to throw away our own laws and the Constitution. One result of the
unfortunate pathways of NSA metadata collection and CIA ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’
(EITs) was to undermine the once prominent standing of the United States around the world for
having higher standards of behavior than the intelligence agencies in authoritarian regimes.
Abiding by the Constitution, the law, and America’s traditional ethical norms of fair play were,
together, an integral part of democracy. Thus, much of my research shifted toward a closer
analysis of legal and ethical norms for U.S. intelligence activities; and how the Congress might
ensure that these values were preserved, while at the same time supporting an aggressive
defense and offense against enemies who viewed law and morality as oxymoronic.
An example: in my most recent book, The Third Option: Covert Action and American Foreign Policy
(2022), I develop a framework for evaluating this hidden and sometimes morally offensive
approach to the achievement of a nation’s international objectives. I suggested a set of criteria
for judging the worthiness of a covert action, one that combined legal, practical, and ethical
dimensions. Legally: did the CIA honor the U.S. intelligence oversight rules, especially the prior
reporting requirements of the 1980 Intelligence Oversight Act? Practically: did the covert action
have a reasonably good chance of success? (Why risk lives for long odds, except in the most
extreme emergency?). And ethically: how would the American public judge the merits of an
operation if it surfaced on the front pages of the New York Times? In this construct, the best of the
14 M. PHYTHIAN

U.S. covert actions in the modern era among my top five was the triumphant retaliation against
the Taliban regime and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan in 2001–2002, in the aftermath of the 9/11
attacks. Among the five worst, Iran-contra led the list.
MP: Around this time, having been a member of its Editorial Board since 1999, in 2002 you
become Editor of Intelligence and National Security. Can you recall how that came about?
LJ: I had long been a devotee of INS, having published a piece on journalists and the CIA (based on
the Aspin hearings of 1978) in its inaugural edition; and having been approached by the North
American Editor Michael Handel of the Naval War College – who, along with the U.K. Editor
Christopher Andrew of Cambridge University, founded the journal – to serve as his Assistant
Editor in those first months of the journal’s publication. Working closely with Michael and Chris
was a strong attraction, of course; but I was simply too involved in University activities at that
time to accept the invitation. I finally joined the journal’s Board in 1999. Afterward, Taylor and
Francis (the publishers of INS) approached me at a meeting of the International Studies
Association in 2001 and offered the top-editorial position on the North American side of the
journal’s binary administrative division. My labors on behalf of establishing SPIA had succeeded
at the University of Georgia and I was ready for new ventures. So I happily accepted, joining
forces with my British counterpart, the talented historian Peter Jackson, a Canadian-born scholar
then on the faculty at Aberystwyth University in Wales.
I’m not sure why I was chosen, but perhaps my Canadian friend, Professor Wesley W. Wark, who
was the North American Editor at the time, suggested this possibility. Whatever the reason, it was
a wonderful opportunity and I stayed in that position until I retired from the University of Georgia
in 2019. One of the many pleasures associated with my INS editorship was the chance to work
closely with Peter and then with you, as well as other top Intelligence Studies scholars around the
world.
MP: Through your involvement with INS across two decades, you have played a key role in the
development of Intelligence Studies as an academic project. Did you go into the role with
a sense of things you wanted to achieve through it, of ways in which you sought to
develop the field, of areas within it that you wanted to advance? How far did you have a
vision of what the journal should look like, rooted in your ideas about the nature of
Intelligence Studies itself?
LJ: My initial objective with INS was to help Peter Jackson continue the journal’s position as the best
in the field, a status already achieved by our predecessors Professors Andrew and Handel, and
then Professors Richard Aldrich and Wark. The journal has always had a rigorous publication
procedure that relies on anonymous (’blind’) outside reviewers who are prominent in their
subfields of Intelligence Studies. My hope was to expand the journal’s circulation, as well as
the number of experts involved in the process of manuscript reviewing. Thanks in part to
excellent support from Taylor & Francis, all this occurred. As well, Peter and I, then you and I,
did our best to diversify the kinds of research presented in these pages, as well as to encourage
the participation of a larger number of women authors, young researchers, and scholars from
countries that usually had only a minimal presence in the English-language academic literature.
We three believed, in addition, that the study of intelligence had too much of an Anglo-American
hue to it and we sought to publish research findings about the secret services in other nations. We
also tried to achieve representation from a wider intellectual spectrum than only History and
Political Science; and we were open to increased quantitative rigor when such methodologies
could be fruitfully brought to bear on Intelligence Studies. The journal has reported statistics from
time to time that support the conclusion that these quests have had success. We also came up
with a jazzier photo for the journal’s cover, as well as the use of visual materials to supplement
articles when suitable.
 INTELLIGENCE AND NATIONAL SECURITY 15

I was particularly enthusiastic about a feature that you and I initiated, which we labeled ‘Profiles in
Intelligence’. These pieces are interviews conducted by the editors with leaders inside various
intelligence agencies, as well as with leading academic scholars writing on this topic. Within INS,
we have published interviews (for example) with four DCIs, as well as the longest-serving DNI
(James R. Clapper, who held that position from 2010 to 2017).16 Several prominent Intelligence
Studies scholars have also been profiled in these interviews.
MP: You also began to publish articles that explicitly addressed intelligence and social science
theory. What led you to address intelligence in these terms? Did you see the relative
neglect of theorisation around intelligence as a limitation? How far was this a natural
extension of the thinking that informed some of your earlier work, such as America’s
Secret Power?
LJ: Anyone who has been through the rigors of a graduate program in the social or natural sciences
has been exposed to the importance of theoretical frameworks for strengthening one’s under­
standing of a field, and for thinking about new ways to expand the boundaries of scholarly
inquiry. I had long been interested in theoretical approaches to Political Science, reinforced by
the Physics courses I took as an undergraduate – the latter a field of study notably advanced by
important theoretical breakthroughs. Therefore, I was sensitive to the question of what kinds of
theoretical insights might be useful when attempting to understand a nation’s use of its
intelligence agencies.
America’s Secret Power was, in part, my initial stab at theorizing about the intelligence cycle, a
subject on which you have published significant work. I pondered what I referred to as intelli­
gence ‘pathologies’—why things can go wrong as the United States and other nations turn to
their espionage organizations as a means for enhancing national decision advantage. In what I
suppose in retrospect was an overly fanciful diagram meant to serve as a heuristic presentation of
the cycle in the form of a ‘funnel of causality’, I attempted to illustrate (in greater detail than the
usual depiction of that cycle) how over time intelligence moves through several phases as it
travels from the field to the desk of a policymaker. I especially wanted to underscore how the
collection, analysis, and uses of intelligence are filtered through a complex array of variables –
historical, institutional, and personal in nature – with each actor in the process (from collectors
and analysts to decision-makers and overseers) bringing into the brew his or her own set of
assumptions, attitudes, beliefs, myths, ideologies, openness to risk, ideology, and doctrines. I
noted that this process is ‘anything but smooth’. I viewed the various steps as ‘often bumpy and
disjointed’, and susceptible to ‘collapse altogether’. Success required ‘sensitive supervision and
extensive dialogue among collectors, analysts, managers, and policymakers along the way’.
I have an interest in art and I am sometimes drawn to the diagraming of ideas for visualizing
relationships among variables in a theoretical framework. In Spy Watching, for example, I illu­
strated a theoretical framework for what I referred to as a ‘shock theory of intelligence account­
ability’—an explanation for the ups-and-downs related to the seriousness of conduct by SSCI and
HPSCI overseers on Capitol Hill. In one drawing on covert action in The Third Option, I sketched a
graph depicting my sense of the degree of enthusiasm for covert action at the CIA and the White
House over the years since 1947. The depiction showed how zeal was high for this approach when
the United States was engaged in overt warfare somewhere on the globe, with the CIA involved in
clandestine support of that military effort. Examples include Korea (1950–1953), Vietnam (1964–
1975), and against global terrorism after 9/11. The exception to this rule occurred during the
Reagan administration. That era in the 1980s displayed a relatively low frequency of overt war-
fighting, yet embraced a vigorous use of covert action – most notably in Afghanistan, Nicaragua,
and Poland. In the case of the Reagan foreign policy team, the fervor of its anti-Russian ideology
and rhetoric was so strong that covert actions designed to thwart Red Army and KGB activities
around the globe rose dramatically in cost and frequency, even while the use of overt armed force
16 M. PHYTHIAN

was held in check (with the minor exception of America’s bizarre invasion of Grenada in 1983).
Here at least was a prologue for a theory of covert action.
The chief difficulty with this research on estimating the use of covert action is the lack of empirical
data in the public domain regarding precise budget numbers, or even frequency distributions, for
this policy initiative – all highly classified. As is often the situation in the pursuit of Intelligence
Studies, one is forced to rely on interviews with insiders (my main approach, with active and
retired intelligence officers – including several DCIs), along with piecing together shards of insight
and recollection published in previous studies, government reports, and interviews with intelli­
gence figures conducted by various scholars. These sources can be augmented by the occasional
authoritative leak that flows from the executive branch into the pages of the New York Times and
the Washington Post. I dwell on this subject of theory simply to underscore the usefulness of
looking for key threats and accompanying international responses by administrations – whether
overt military action or heated ideological confrontations supported by covert actions – that
might help to explain the government’s emphasis on one intelligence activity or another.
We certainly need solid intelligence histories – the core approach to Intelligence Studies in its
initial stages. Yet, despite some extraordinarily insightful early works by such scholars (Kahn is an
example17), I would say that a broad expanse of well-informed research on intelligence only
emerged as a rigorous academic discipline in the early 1980s. In that decade, intelligence histories
became more refined, in large part stimulated by government inquiries into spying abuses in
Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States that released to the public large amounts of
new information about the hidden dimensions of government. As well, the field began to benefit
from the modeling and theory-building influences that Intelligence Studies scholars brought with
them from other, more established disciplines to shed light on a government’s darker realm.
MP: Beyond your work in editing Intelligence and National Security, over the last two decades
you have also played a key part in defining the field by editing a number of key hand­
books of intelligence or anthologies of intelligence writing. How far do you think the
frameworks you have provided or suggested through these works have helped define the
subject matter of ‘Intelligence Studies?’ And what would you say are the boundaries of
the subject? What should it include, and where should we draw lines?
LJ : The intelligence handbooks to which you refer were not my idea, but various publishing houses
contacted me in the 1990s to see if I would take on these projects. I thought it was a useful
direction for several reasons: the opportunity to get to know better the leading researchers in the
field; to put together sets of articles that might inspire more researchers to become involved in
Intelligence Studies; and to see what kinds of writing on this subject were out there that I might
have overlooked.
The first of these handbooks came out in 2007 from Routledge, at a time when Intelligence
Studies was beginning to hit its stride. Then came Praeger, slightly later in that same year, who
proved willing to accept my notion of a five-volume handbook, divided along the lines that I like
to use as broad categories in organizing thinking about Intelligence Studies. The categories
began with an overall view of methods of inquiry (Vol. I), then I turned to the intelligence cycle
– basically the procedures and perils associated with collection-and-analysis (Vol. II). These were
followed by counterintelligence (Vol. III), covert action (Vol. IV), and accountability (Vol. V). Here
are the central topics that have captured my attention in all of my intelligence-related writing. I
have focused on covert action and accountability out of personal interest, along with a belief that
a great deal of solid research already existed on intelligence methodology, as well as on collec­
tion-and-analysis (C&A) and counterintelligence (CI).
Next, in 2010, Oxford University Press came down the pike and, in this third compilation on
intelligence, it published a single tome entitled The Oxford Handbook of National Security
Intelligence. I adopted that phrase for the purpose of clarifying in library catalogues that this
book was about what we know broadly as Intelligence Studies, as opposed to its narrower
 INTELLIGENCE AND NATIONAL SECURITY 17

subcomponents of strategic and tactical intelligence. Above all, I sought to distinguish this
subject from the many library books on human brain studies, lumped together by the word
‘intelligence’. The ‘national security intelligence’ phrase seems to have caught on, and it was
probably subliminally in my mind because of the title of this journal, Intelligence and National
Security.
The fourth handbook, published four years later in 2011, was another Routledge effort, this time a
four-volume collection that reprinted some of the best articles written on intelligence over the
years, such as a short, fascinating memoir by DCI Colby on his OSS days. Once more I organized
this work into volumes on C&A, CI, covert action (CA), and accountability. Then, in 2015, Praeger
contacted me again about a one-volume addition to the earlier multi-volume set published eight
years prior. The publisher asked me to give the book a more traditional title: Essentials of Strategic
Intelligence.
As for anthologies, for several years now James J. Wirtz of the Naval Postgraduate School in
Monterey and I have joined forces to gather a collection of outstanding intelligence articles into
one volume, primarily for use in university classes. Entitled Intelligence: The Secret World of Spies, it
is now in its sixth edition (2022). For a time, this book surfaced on the Washington Post bestsellers
list. This rarity for a scholarly academic anthology was a result no doubt of several universities in
the D.C. area assigning the book as required reading in courses on intelligence. Further, on the
classroom side of Intelligence Studies, I’ve published two books on American foreign policy, one
lengthy (Oxford) and another short (Elgar). They are unusual in that they are the only foreign
policy books that devote two entire chapters to the role of intelligence: one on collection-and-
analysis and the other on covert action. Here were additional attempts to spread the gospel of
Intelligence Studies. Finally, I wrote a textbook entitled National Security Intelligence (Polity, 2nd
edition, 2017), which presents the highlights of our field’s major research findings.
So I think that research on methods of study; on collection-and-analysis; on counter-intelligence;
on covert action; and on accountability are useful ways to organize the subject of national security
intelligence. These functions, along with the institutions that perform them, outline at least the
primary borders of Intelligence Studies as a scholarly discipline. Of course, within those broad
parameters lie many topics, such as the history of each intelligence function and each agency; and
the legal and moral constrains that either exist or ought to exist when it comes to the activities of
spy agencies. An excellent encapsulation of the field can be found in the definition that Peter Gill
and you have offered:
Intelligence is the umbrella term referring to the range of activities – from
planning and information collection to analysis and dissemination – conducted
in secret, and aimed at maintaining or enhancing relative security by providing
forewarning of threats or potential threats in a manner that allows for the timely
implementation of a preventive policy or strategy, including, when deemed
desirable, covert activities.18
Here are the important dimensions of national security intelligence that readers and researchers
associated with this journal seek to understand.
MP: In the last few years, you have published two big books with Oxford University Press, Spy
Watching: Intelligence Accountability in the United States (2018) and The Third Option:
Covert Action and American Foreign Policy (2022). They are, in some ways, a culmination of
a professional academic career spent thinking and writing about intelligence and the two
themes that have been at the heart of so much of your work. What are your key reflections
on the state of each – that is, intelligence oversight and accountability, plus covert action?
What are the most pressing issues they raise today?
LJ: The Spy Watching book was a natural for me to write, because the question of accountability had
been the key topic during my Church Committee baptism into the secretive world of intelligence
18 M. PHYTHIAN

and, as you have noted, remained a connecting thread for all of my work since then. I thought the
time had come to write a full-length volume on this subject.
Covert action was of great interest to me, as well, since I had been astonished by the Church
Committee’s findings regarding CIA assassination plots, some which included the Agency’s recruit­
ment of mobsters to eliminate Fidel Castro and the hiring of other unsavory individuals to dispatch
Patrice Lumumba of Congo. Admittedly I was relatively young (in my early thirties), but I had no
idea that the United States – with all of its lofty historical rhetoric about democracy, freedom, and
liberty – would stoop to such levels. Even most of the long-toothed senators on the panel and
within the wider chamber, Republicans and Democrats alike, were shaking their heads in amaze­
ment and disgust. Then, there were the covert actions disclosed by the Committee against the
leader of Chile, Salvador Allende, who had been selected to the presidency by the people of that
nation in a free and open election.
So here were a couple of topics firmly lodged in my mind as possible research projects down the
road. I remained intrigued as well by the record of successes and failures in the analytic domain. I
wondered what caused the ups-and-downs: the remarkably good ability to trace the develop­
ment of Soviet weaponry, for instance, yet accompanied by an inability to forecast a Soviet
invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Further, what could be more intriguing than the ‘wilderness of
mirrors’ (Angleton’s phrase adopted from a T.S. Eliot poem), that is, the dizzying puzzles of
counterintelligence? I had been the lead Church Committee staffer on the subject of CI, with
full immersion in such matters as the Huston Plan (for which I led the Committee’s public
hearings) and on Angleton’s long career at the Agency. I found him a beguiling subject of
research for his deep intelligence experience, his arcane theories of Soviet moles, and his extreme
paranoia. Oversight and covert action, though, remained my core interests.
Effective accountability for intelligence activities, or any other policy, requires several key ingre­
dients: especially honest people in important positions of executive power; lawmakers who
review executive branch activities in a regular and gimlet-eyed manner; close budget monitoring;
a vibrant, inquisitive media on the lookout for abuses of the governmental powers; and a public
that understands and takes all of these requirements seriously – and punishes at the polls those in
office who legally or ethically violate America’s law and moral traditions. These ingredients are not
always present in the affairs of state, even one with a vaunted Constitution, a strong body of laws,
and public expectations that their elected officials will honor their oaths of office to protect and
defend this vital infrastructure of freedom. Increasingly, we find ourselves living in a world where
democratic norms are challenged by leaders around the world. Hungary is perhaps the most
prominent Western example, but the United States under President Trump was on that list, too.
In my research, I found examples of intelligence accountability humming along like a well-oiled
machine, as when – in its early years – the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA, enacted in
1978) brought greater law and order to the use of electronic wiretaps by the executive branch,
whereas in the past presidents of both parties had abused this power by eavesdropping on their
political rivals. In the 1980s, lawmakers were eventually successful in reining in the Iran-contra
conspirators on the NSC staff and at the CIA, after initially trusting these organizations at face
value to honor the law. Members of Congress also eventually pushed back in the 2000s when the
NSA, as improperly ordered by the Bush II White House, sidestepped FISA in its electronic
surveillance of American citizens. Moreover, in the aftermath of 9/11, lawmakers uncovered the
CIA’s resort to torture against suspected terrorists – in dismissal of the long-established fact that
torture is not only immoral but fails to yield accurate responses, as victims lie about what they
know in hopes of stopping the pain.19
On other occasions, however, the congressional oversight committees – SSCI and HPSCI – have
been asleep at the wheel. Examples: when lawmakers failed to swear in the Iran-contra perpe­
trators under oath to question them about rumors that had surfaced in Washington regarding
these excesses of the Reagan administration; or drifted for years in a dreamy acceptance of claims
made by NSA officials that its metadata program honored the FISA rules – until the Edward J.
 INTELLIGENCE AND NATIONAL SECURITY 19

Snowden leak with evidence to the contrary shook their gullibility. (He unfortunately chose the
wrong form of an alarm clock: a massive leak that also revealed many legitimate intelligence
operations and highly classified budget data for the entire Intelligence Community – an intelli­
gence bonanza for Russian and Chinese spy agencies.) Further, congressional overseers had
initially turned their eyes away from rumors of CIA torture, until SSCI Chair Diane Feinstein (D,
California) finally insisted on a full-fledged inquiry into these alleged practices – which proved all
too real. Republican senators on SSCI refused to join the probe and, once the unsettling Feinstein
Report was completed, President Barack Obama blocked its release to the public beyond an
abbreviated executive summary of the findings. Fortunately, even this summary was sufficiently
shocking, though, to bring about bipartisan legislation to prohibit this medieval approach in the
questioning of suspected terrorists in the future. During this period, the FBI demonstrated that
positive incentives (including a friendly countenance) can produce good results, without resort to
the kinds of methods once associated more with the Gestapo and the KGB than with U.S.
government agencies.
Overall, I have found that intelligence accountability in the United States has worked well most of
the time since the Church Committee set new rules and expectations in 1975–76. Indeed, America
has established global standards for this form of government supervision, with its frequent
congressional hearings into intelligence activities (usually in ‘executive’ or closed session, given
the sensitivity of operational details); its meaningful budget review; its example of individual
members of Congress taking it upon themselves to carry out serious oversight even if some of
their colleagues seem willing to blindly trust those with secret power; its determination to ask
tough questions during hearings; its willingness to send lawmakers out to the IC’s agencies to
continue these watchdog duties; and its conduct of serious investigations into credible allega­
tions of malfeasance that may surface in the media or from responsible whistle-blowers, placing
witnesses under oath – and thereby under the threat of perjury, should they lie to the Congress
(as sometimes has happened, as with the Iran-contra perpetrators).
Often intelligence oversight in the United States has rested on the integrity of a few individuals:
lawmakers such as Les Aspin; Frank Church; Diane Feinstein, Lee Hamilton (D, Indiana); Roman
Mazzoli (D, Kentucky); Charles McC. Mathias (R, Maryland), Walter Mondale; Keith Robinson (R,
Virginia), and Richard S. Schweiker (R, Pennsylvania). While serving on the Church Committee,
SSCI, or HPSCI, these members of Congress fearlessly asked the hard questions, had no hesitation
about staying late to examine IC documents and budgets, and managed to balance the important
attributes of both skepticism and encouragement in dealing with the holders of secret power.
Legislative guardians of the law within the hidden side of government are unsung heroes, along
with the vast majority of intelligence officers who have also understood – as did Thomas
Jefferson, James Madison, George Washington, among other founders of the United States –
the importance of accountability for the preservation of democracy.
With respect to covert action, I have explored a series of myths about this hidden use of power
overseas (in Spy Watching), along with a historical meta-analysis of key cases on what conditions
have led to success and failure (in The Third Option). America has set the oversight bar higher than
any other nation when it comes to covert action, requiring prior (ante facto) notice to SSCI and
HPSCI, as opposed to after the fact (ex post facto) reporting. The latter arrives too late for members
of Congress to raise objections or suggest policy improvements. This advanced reporting,
established up by the Intelligence Oversight Act of 1980, is accompanied by mandatory closed-
session briefings and an opportunity for SSCI and HPSCI debate before an operation moves
forward. (In rare times of acute emergency, prior reporting can be delayed for a couple of days.)
In this laudable model of accountability, the executive and legislative branches of government
work closely together in an effort to ensure better policy results – the introduction of democracy
into the once pitch-black caves of covert action. By and large these procedures have operated
well, with the sobering exception of the Iran-contra affair. That scandal underscores a lesson that
goes back to the early philosophical warnings of Plato and Aristotle. As they advised, good
20 M. PHYTHIAN

government depends ultimately on the integrity of individuals in high office. In our democracies,
we must select our leaders carefully.
MP: Intelligence Studies as an academic project has developed significantly over the past few
decades, in no small part as a result of your own far-reaching contributions. How would
you characterise the development of the subject since you arrived at the University of
Georgia?
LJ: Thank you for those kind words. I would say that since I arrived at the University of Georgia in
1979, Intelligence Studies has advanced by leaps and bounds – at least in some parts of the
world. Scholars in the Five-Eyes nations, Israel, and several countries in Western Europe have
shown a lively interest in researching and writing about the less visible side of their governments.
In this journal, one also sees a rising number of articles about intelligence activities in less studied
democracies, as well as in some authoritarian regimes. Comparative analysis is a strong tool in
understanding one’s own political system, as we know from the valuable contributions to
Political Science made by researchers in the subfield of Comparative Politics. These develop­
ments are rewarding to see for those of us interested in the questions of government (open and
hidden); power (and the profound danger of its abuse); and liberty (the fundamental right to exist
as a citizen without fear of government repression). This more comparative nature of Intelligence
Studies is a key development in our field.
Of course, though, the open societies are places where scholars have an opportunity to learn
more about their nation’s secret agencies, as a result of public hearings; an inquisitive media; the
willingness of some officials to speak about intelligence activities from time to time (without
entering into classified information); and an increasing number of universities with Political
Science, IR, and History departments that value this new form of research. These are the main
reasons why so much of intelligence research has been Anglo-American driven, joined by the
relatively few other open societies (alas) that exist in the world.
I have observed some other notable developments since 1979 within Intelligence Studies. More
women are publishing research on intelligence and, as one would anticipate, they have been
making a strong contribution.20 Further, an increasing number of young scholars – assistant
professors and think-tank newcomers – are committed to an understanding of this aspect of a
nation’s foreign policy. I have also noticed that a field of study that was once dominated by
historians, who have made and continue to make great contributions, are now being joined by a
growing number of political scientists, psychologists, and economists, as well as other academic
specialists.
Gratifying, too, is the rising number of intelligence professionals, retired and active, who are
making contributions to the public literature. This is true not only with the CIA’s journal, Studies in
Intelligence (SI), but in all the other journals dedicated to this subject. SI has an impressive lineage
dating back to 1955, making it a true pioneer in the field. Authors based within the IC are
obviously expert on material related to Intelligence Studies. They have sometimes been on the
firing line of foreign battlefields; are competent researchers and writers; and have much to bring
to the table that is accurate and insightful. Illustrations: Frederic F. Manget, a retired Agency
attorney who has authored over the years several important articles on intelligence and the
judicial branch of government; and William M. Nolte, a senior NSA officer who has written widely
on intelligence topics. Moreover, some historians who have served on the CIA Historical Staff,
including Nicholas Dujmovic, David Robarge, and Michael Warner, have written first-rate pieces
for this and other public journals and handbooks.
Other examples of important open research by insiders include the publications of former CIA
officers Richard M. Bissell, Jr.; William J. Daugherty; John A. Gentry; Frederick P. Hitz; Arthur S.
Hulnick; Mark M. Lowenthal; Stephen P. Marrin; Mark Stout; and Michael Turner. They are joined
by CIA colleague Ray S. Cline; and Thomas L. Hughes, the former director, Bureau of Intelligence
and Research (INR) in the Department of State. In the U.K., well known in the field are the writings
 INTELLIGENCE AND NATIONAL SECURITY 21

of intelligence leaders Percy Cradock, David Omand, and Michael Herman. In addition, the
contributions of Australia’s Patrick F. Walsh will be familiar to readers of this journal.21 And
speaking of intelligence journals, this is yet another positive development in Intelligence
Studies, as the number and quality of these publications has increased. Two of my favorites:
the Journal of Intelligence History (published in the U.K.) and the Journal for Intelligence,
Propaganda, and Security Studies (published in Austria, in both English and German).
On the downside, too few doctoral dissertations are being written on intelligence topics; too few
university courses on intelligence are being taught; and too few professors are hired based on
their preparedness to teach these courses. All this, despite what has proven to be a voracious
appetite among students for such curricula across the United States, the British Isles, Canada, and
elsewhere. Moreover – and a great disappointment – the CIA and other IC agencies are far less
open to public discourse than was the case in the immediate aftermath of the Church Committee
inquiry. During that heyday of interactions between academe and intelligence officers (the late
1970s and early 1980s), both benefitted significantly from on-campus visits and even semester or
year-long university fellowships for top analysts and others in the IC. In addition, convocations
were held regularly at the Agency for scholars to discuss specific subjects with intelligence
professionals – and many intelligence matters can be examined publicly without jeopardizing
classified information (as panels at International Studies Association conventions demonstrate
each year).22 Further, it was once more common to see a wide participation by intelligence
officers at academic conferences, such as the annual ISA gatherings.23 The CIA and other agencies
in the IC should resume these beneficial practices, whereby intelligence officers and university
scholars mutually enrich their understanding of world affairs through conversations.
MP: And where does it go from here? What is the future for Intelligence Studies? What do you
think it will look like in ten or 20 years from now?
LJ: One of the core lessons we know from Intelligence Studies is that no one has a crystal ball. Otherwise,
analysts would have a perfect score in predicting the course of international events. Neither can
academic types pierce the fog of the future. Nonetheless, let me conclude by saying that Intelligence
Studies is alive and well, flourishing with new and sophisticated research publications and fielding a
growing number of intelligence courses at institutions of higher learning. The field remains in its
infancy, though, compared to long-standing university offerings, whether physics, chemistry, eco­
nomics, psychology, or literature. I am sure the time will come when Intelligence Studies is a popular
fixture in the universities and think tanks of all open societies.
As for specific methodological developments, the pathway of electoral studies in Political Science may
be suggestive. In that field, the first works were journalistic and historical. In the 1960s, though, political
scientists began to craft and test hypotheses about voting behavior; theories began to emerge; a broad
range of research methods were applied. All of these approaches generated a rich tapestry of knowl­
edge about elections and voting in the United States. I see similar dynamics underway in our discipline
and I am confident that we will also have favorable outcomes.
MP: Many thanks for your time, Loch. It has been a fascinating discussion.
LJ: Thank you, Mark, for inviting me to discuss my experiences in the exciting field of Intelligence Studies –
and for your wonderful partnership over the years in helping to advance research on the hidden side of
governments. Here’s wishing fair seas and following winds for Intelligence and National Security, and for
the worldwide pursuit of research in this relatively new scholarly discipline.

Notes
1. Richard C. Snyder and Edgar S. Furniss, Jr., American Foreign Policy: Formulation, Principles, and Programs (New
York: Rinehart, 1954): 224–38.
22 M. PHYTHIAN

2. The formal name for the panel of inquiry was the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations
with Respect to Intelligence Activities, United States Senate (94th Cong., 2d Sess., 1975–1976).
3. Among my favorites of their many works are: Richard K. Betts, The Enemies of Intelligence: Knowledge and Power
in American National Security (New York: Columbia, 2007); John T. Elliff, The Reform of FBI Intelligence Operations
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979); Harold P. Ford, CIA and the Vietnam Policymakers: Three Episodes,
1962–1968 (Washington, D.C.: Center for the Study of Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency, 1998); L. Britt
Snider, The Agency and the Hill: CIA’s Relations with Congress, 1946–2004 (Washington, D.C.: Center for the Study
of Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency, 2008; and Gregory F. Treverton, Covert Action: The Limits of
Intervention in the Postwar World (New York: Basic Books, 1987). For the Inderfurth and Johnson book on the
NSC, see Fateful Decisions: Inside the National Security Council (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
4. James H. Johnston, Murder, Inc.: The CIA Under John F. Kennedy (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019); and,
for example, Frederick A.O. Schwarz, Jr., Democracy in the Dark: The Seduction of Government Secrecy (New York:
Free Press, 2015).
5. Examples: Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers (New
York: Free Press, 1986); Harry Howe Ransom, The Intelligence Establishment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1970); Athan G. Theoharis, Spying on Americans: Political Surveillance from Hoover to the Huston Plan
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1978).
6. For instance: Frank Church, ‘Covert Action: Swampland of American Foreign Policy’, Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists 32 (February 1976): 7–11, and ‘Introduction’, Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders
(New York: Norton, 1976); Gary Hart, The Shield and The Cloak: The Security of the Commons (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2006); and Walter F. Mondale, Robert A. Stein, and Caitlinrose Fisher, ‘No Longer a Neutral
Magistrate: The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in the Wake of the War on Terror’, Minnesota Law Review
100/8 (June 2016): 2251–2312.
7. Ransom [Note 5 above]; Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence (New York: Knopf,
1974).
8. Allen Dulles, The Craft of Intelligence: America’s Legendary Spy Master on the Fundamentals of Intelligence
Gathering for a Free World (Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 1963); and, for example. Ray S. Cline, Secrets, Spies and
Scholars: The CIA from Roosevelt to Reagan (Washington, D.C.: Acropolis Books, 1976).
9. A standout exception to this rule has been the probing work done by journalist David Wise; see, for instance, his
The Invisible Government, with Thomas Ross (New York: Random House, 1964).
10. A recent study by a historian unaffiliated with the Church Committee concludes that Senator Church’s core
motivation was indeed intelligence reform and not election to the presidency. See, Dafydd Townley, ‘Too
Responsible to Run for President: Frank Church and the 1976 Presidential Nomination’, Journal of Intelligence
History 21/2 (2022): 213–231.
11. The history of how ISA panels in the Intelligence Studies Section were initially established and then grew like Topsy –
over twenty panels now each non-Covid year – has yet to be written, but it is an important story in the development
of Intelligence Studies. My research over the years has benefitted substantially as a result of inspiration from ISA
panels and convention hallway conversations with thoughtful colleagues like David M. Barrett [Congress and the CIA:
The Untold Story from Truman to Kennedy (Lawrence: Kansas University Press, 2005)]; Rory Cormac [Disrupt and Deny:
Spies, Special Forces, and the Secret Pursuit of British Foreign Policy (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2018)],
and Jim Wirtz, Strategic Denial and Deception (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction, 2002)].
12. See, instance, Glenn P. Hastedt, Controlling Intelligence (London: Cass, 1991).
13. Paul L. Light, Government by Investigation: Congress, Presidents, and the Search for Answers, 1945–2012
(Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 2014).
14. The official title of the panel was the Commission on the Roles and Capabilities of the United States Intelligence
Community. For its final report, see Preparing for the 21st Century: An Appraisal of U.S. Intelligence (U.S
Government Printing Office: Washington, D.C., 1996).
15. Earlier, CIA officer Diane C. Snyder and I had argued for a greater emphasis on the threat of pandemics. As we put
it, ‘ . . . the first line of defense against the outbreak of infectious disease is global surveillance of health
conditions [“Beyond the Traditional Intelligence Agenda: Examining the Merits of a World Health Portfolio’,
Journal of Conflict Studies 18 (Fall 1998): 29–46, quote at 43].
16. For instance, see the references in the Bibliography related to my interviews with DCI Turner (published in 2018);
DNI Clapper (2015); DCI Colby (2007); DCI Richard Helms (2003, who served in that position from 1966–1973);
and DCI William H. Webster (1992, who served in that position from 1987–1992).
17. See, for example, David Kahn, The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing (New York: MacMillan, 1967).
18. Peter Gill and Mark Phythian, Intelligence in an Insecure World, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2012): 15–16.
19. See my Studies in Intelligence piece on torture (2007).
20. Among many examples, see Claudia Hillebrand, ‘Intelligence Oversight and Accountability’, in Robert Dover,
Michael S. Goodman, and Claudia Hillenbrand, eds. Routledge Companion to Intelligence Studies (New York:
Routledge, 2014): 305–312; Sarah E. Kreps (with John Kaag), Drone Warfare (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2014);
Jennifer Kibbe, ‘Congressional Oversight of Intelligence: Is the Solution Part of the Problem?’ Intelligence and
 INTELLIGENCE AND NATIONAL SECURITY 23

National Security 25 (February 2010): 24–49; Rose McDermott (and Uri Bar-Joseph, Intelligence Success and Failure:
The Human Factor (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); Elke Schwarz, ‘Pursuing Peace: The Strategic Limits of
Drone Warfare’, Intelligence and National Security 32/4 (June 2017): 422–425; Jennifer E. Sims (and Burton Gerber),
Transforming U.S. Intelligence (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2005); and Amy Zegart, Spying Blind:
The CIA, the FBI, and the Origins of 9/11 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).
21. See, for instance, The Oxford Handbook of National Security Intelligence (2010): Dujmovic, ‘Getting Intelligence
History Right: Reflections and Recommendations from the Inside’, 70–86; Manget, ‘Intelligence and Law
Enforcement’, 189–211; Nolte, ‘Intelligence Analysis in an Uncertain Environment’, 404–421; Robarge,
‘Leadership in an Intelligence Organization: The Directors of Central Intelligence and the CIA’, 485–504; and
Warner, ‘The Rise of the U.S. Intelligence System, 1917–1977’, 107–121.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor
MarkPhythian is Professor of Politics in the School of History, Politics & International Relations at the University of
Leicester. He has published widely on intelligence and security topics, including the recent books Principled Spying: The
Ethics of Secret Intelligence, co-authored with Sir David Omand (Oxford University Press/Georgetown University Press,
2018) and a third edition of Intelligence in an Insecure World, co-authored with Peter Gill (Polity Press, 2018). He is co-
editor of Intelligence and National Security and one of the editors of the Georgetown Studies in Intelligence History book
series. In 2012, he was elected a Fellow of the UK Academy of Social Sciences and in 2020 received the ISA Intelligence
Studies Section Distinguished Scholar Award.

A Bibliography of Loch K. Johnson’s Publications on Intelligence (Books, Journal

Articles, and Book Chapters)
Books

Intelligence: The Secret World of Spies, sixth ed., edited with James J. Wirtz (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022).
The Third Option: Covert Action and American Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022).
Advanced Introduction to American Foreign Policy (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2021).
Spy Watching: Intelligence Accountability in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).
National Security Intelligence: Secret Operations in Defense of the Democracies (Cambridge: Polity, 2017), 2nd ed. (also
published in South Korea by Parkyoung Publishing, 2019; and in China by Gold Wall Press, 2020).
A Season of Inquiry Revisited: The Church Committee Confronts America’s Spy Agencies (Lawrence: University Press of
Kansas, 2015).
Essentials of Strategic Intelligence, editor (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO/Praeger, 2015).
American Foreign Policy and the Challenges of World Leadership: Power, Principle, and the Constitution (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2015).
The Oxford Handbook of National Security Intelligence, editor (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
The Threat on the Horizon: An Inside Account of America’s Search for Security After the Cold War (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2011).
Intelligence: Critical Concepts in Military, Strategic & Security Studies, Vol. I: The Collection and Analysis of National Security
Intelligence, editor (New York: Routledge, 2011).
Intelligence: Critical Concepts in Military, Strategic & Security Studies: Vol. II: Covert Action, the Aggressive Arm of National
Security Intelligence, editor (New York: Routledge, 2011).
Intelligence: Critical Concepts in Military, Strategic & Security Studies, Vol III: Counter-intelligence, Shield for National Security
Intelligence, editor (New York: Routledge, 2011).
Intelligence: Critical Concepts in Military, Strategic & Security Studies, Vol IV: Holding National Security Intelligence
Accountable, editor (New York: Routledge, 2011).
The Study of Strategic Intelligence, Vol. I: Approaches to Understanding the Hidden Side of Government, editor (Westport,
CT: Praeger, 2007).
The Study of Strategic Intelligence, Vol. II: The Intelligence Cycle: The Flow of Secret Information from Overseas to the High
Councils of Government, editor (New York: Westport, CT, 2007).
24 M. PHYTHIAN

The Study of Strategic Intelligence, Vol. III: Covert Action: Behind the Veils of Secret Foreign Policy, editor (Westport, CT:
Praeger, 2007).
The Study of Strategic Intelligence, Vol. IV: Counterintelligence and Counterterrorism: Defending the Nation Against Hostile
Forces, editor (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007).
The Study of Strategic Intelligence, Vol. V: Intelligence and Accountability: Safeguards Against the Abuse of Secret Power,
editor (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007).
Handbook of Intelligence Studies, editor (London: Routledge, 2007).
Seven Sins of American Foreign Policy (New York: Longman, 2007).
Who’s Watching the Spies? Establishing Intelligence Service Accountability, edited with Hans Born and Ian Leigh
(Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2005).
American Foreign Policy: History, Politics, and Policy, with John Endicott and Daniel S. Papp (New York: Pearson-Longman,
2005).
Fateful Decisions: Inside the National Security Council, edited with Karl F. Inderfurth (New York: Oxford University Press,
2004).
Bombs, Bugs, Drugs, and Thugs: Intelligence and America’s Quest for Security (New York: New York University Press, 2000);
German edition: Bomben, Wanzen und Intrigen: Amerikas Geheimdienste (Düsseldorf: Patmos Verlag, 2002).
Secret Agencies: U.S. Intelligence in a Hostile World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).
America As a World Power (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1995).
America’s Secret Power: The CIA in a Democratic Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
Decisions of the Highest Order: Perspectives on the National Security Council, edited with Karl F. Inderfurth (Belmont, CA:
Brooks/Cole, 1988).
Through the Straits of Armageddon: Arms Control Issues and Prospects, edited with Paul F. Diehl; foreword by Dean Rusk
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987),
A Season of Inquiry: The Senate Intelligence Investigation (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1985).
The Making of International Agreements: Congress Confronts the Executive (New York: New York University Press, 1984).

Journal Articles

‘Environmental Security Intelligence: The Role of U.S. Intelligence Agencies and Science Advising Groups in Anticipating
Climate Security Threats’, Journal of Intelligence History (2022), forthcoming.
’”Sources and Methods”: The Tug of War between Secrecy and Democracy in the United States’, Intelligence and National
Security 37/3 (2022): 354–359.
‘Blood, Toil, Tears, and Spies’, Intelligence and National Security 37/2 (2022): 313–323.
‘Evaluating the Merits of Proposed U.S. Drone Strikes Against Suspected Terrorists’, Journal for Intelligence, Propaganda
and Security Studies 15/2 (2021): 43–60.
‘The Spy Power, Technological Innovations, and the Human Dimensions of Intelligence: Recent Presidential Abuse of
America’s National Security Agencies’, Journal of Intelligence, Conflict, and Warfare 3/3 (2021): 2–27.
‘The Sad Loss of Michael Herman’, Intelligence and National Security 36/3 (22 February 2021): 13–14.
‘Reflections on the Ethics and the Effectiveness of America’s ‘Third Option’: Covert Action and U.S. Foreign Policy’,
Intelligence and National Security 35/5 (August 2020): 669–85.
‘Trump, Intelligence, and the Amazing Technicolor Nightmare’, Intelligence and National Security 34/7 (December 2019):
10–11.
‘From the Intelligence Archives: Witness Testimony from the Church Committee Hearings on Covert Action, 1975’,
Intelligence and National Security 34/6 (October 2019): 899–913.
‘Spies and Scholars in the United States: Winds of Ambivalence in the Groves of Academe’, Intelligence and National
Security 13/1 (January 2019): 1–21.
‘From the Intelligence Archives: Strunk and White at the CIA’, Intelligence and National Security 33/5 (August 2018): 774.
‘Profiles in Intelligence: An Interview with Professor Gregory F. Treverton’, Intelligence and National Security 33/5 (August
2018): 634–641.
‘A Remembrance: Professor Arthur S. Hulnick’, Intelligence and National Security 33/5 (August 2018): 633.
‘A Remembrance: Adm. Stansfield Turner, Naval Officer as DCI’, Intelligence and National Security 53/4 (June 2018): 587–
597.
‘Safeguarding Democracy Against the Dark Side of Government’, Intersec: The Journal of International Security 15–19
(February 2018): 15–19.
‘Senator Frank Church and the Intelligence Investigation in the United States in 1975’, Journal for Intelligence,
Propaganda, and Security Studies 12/2 (January 2018): 184–88.
 INTELLIGENCE AND NATIONAL SECURITY 25

‘Teaching Intelligence: Briefing Books, Murder Boards, and Dramatic Scenarios’ (an INS Special Issue), Intelligence and
National Security 32/7 (December 2017): 961–971.
‘An INS Special Forum: Intelligence and Drones’, editor, Intelligence and National Security 32/4 (June 2017): 411–440.
‘Kiss of Death? The Politicization of U.S. Intelligence Under Trump’, World Politics Review (March 2017): 1–12.
‘Congress and the American Experiment in Holding Spy Agencies Accountable’, Journal of Policy History 28/3 (2016):
494–514.
‘The JIC in War and Peace: The Early Years’, Intelligence and National Security 31/3 (April 2016): 439–46.
‘Intelligence and National Security at Thirty’, with Mark Phythian, Intelligence and National Security 31/1 (January 2016):
1–7.
‘Security, Privacy, and the German-American Relationship’, Bulletin of the German Historical Institute (Fall 2015): 47–74.
‘A Conversation with James R. Clapper Jr., The Director of National Intelligence in the United States’, Intelligence and
National Security 30/1 (February 2015): 1–25.
‘Torture Report: Another Episode in CIA’s History of Violating Oversight Rules’, World Politics Review (December 2014):
12–14.
‘An INS Special Forum: Implications of the Snowden Leaks’, Intelligence and National Security 29 (December 2014): 793–
810.
‘The Myths of Covert Action’, Virginia Policy Review 7 (Winter 2014): 52–64.
‘A Remembrance: Professor Harry Howe Ransom’, Intelligence and National Security 28 (April 2014): 157–158.
‘Intelligence Shocks, Media Coverage, and Congressional Accountability, 1947–2012’, Journal of Intelligence History 13/1
(January 2014): 1–21.
‘James Angleton and the Church Committee’, Journal of Cold War Studies 15 (Fall 2013): 128–147.
‘Restoring the Balance: Privacy, Security and the NSA’, World Politics Review (November 2013): 10–15.
‘Thoughts on the State of Intelligence Studies: A Survey Report’, with Allison M. Shelton, Intelligence and National
Security 28/1 (February 2013): 109–120.
‘Intelligence Analysis and Planning for Paramilitary Operations’, Journal of National Security Law & Policy 5 (2012): 481–
506.
‘National Security Intelligence in the United States: A Performance Checklist’, Intelligence and National Security 26
(October 2011): 607–615.
‘Evaluating “Humint:” The Role of Human Agents in U.S. Security’, Comparative Strategy 29 (September–October 2010):
308–333.
‘Ethical Intelligence: A Contradiction in Terms?’ Intelligence and National Security 24 (June 2009): 367-68
‘Symbiotic Spies’, Nonproliferation Review 16 (March 2009), pp. 111–18.
‘On Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes’, Intelligence and National Security 23 (December 2008): 878–85.
‘Glimpses into the Gems of American Intelligence: The President’s Daily Brief and the National Intelligence Estimate’,
Intelligence and National Security 23 (June 2008): 333–370.
‘Ostriches, Cheerleaders, Skeptics, and Guardians: Role Selection by Congressional Intelligence Overseers’, SAIS Review
28 (Spring 2008): 93–108.
‘The Church Committee Investigation of 1975 and the Evolution of Modern Intelligence Accountability’, Intelligence and
National Security 23 (April 2008): 198–225.
‘Spies in the American Movies: Hollywood’s Take on Lese Majesté’, Intelligence and National Security 23 (February 2008):
5–24.
‘Educing Information: Interrogation, Science and Art’, Studies in Intelligence 51 (December 2007): 43–46.
‘Two Cheers for the CIA’, Foreign Policy (October 2007): 6–7.
‘Harry Howe Ransom and American Intelligence Studies’, Intelligence and National Security 22 (June 2007): 402–428.
‘William E. Colby: Spymaster during the “Year of the Intelligence Wars”,’ Intelligence and National Security 22 (April 2007):
250–269, reprinted in R. Gerald Hughes, Peter Jackson, and Len Scott, eds., Exploring Intelligence Archives: Enquiries
into the Secret State (New York: Routledge, 2008): 255–76.
‘An Elephant Rolling A Pea: The 9/11 Commission Report’, Diplomatic History 30 (April 2006): 317–333.
‘NSA Spying Erodes Rule of Law’, with Alan Dershowitz, et. al., Opening Argument: Yale Law School Political Journal 1
(February 2006): 1–8.
‘A Framework for Strengthening U.S. Intelligence’, Yale Journal of International Affairs 2 (February 2006):116–131,
reprinted in Andrew Price-Smith, ed., Rising Threats, Enduring Challenges: Reading in U.S. Foreign Policy (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2015): 234–248.
‘A Centralized Intelligence System: Truman’s Dream Deferred’, American Intelligence Journal 23 (Autumn/Winter 2005):
6–15.
‘Accountability and America’s Secret Foreign Policy: Keeping a Legislative Eye on the CIA’, Foreign Policy Analysis 1
(Spring 2005): 99–120.
26 M. PHYTHIAN

‘Presidents, Lawmakers, and Spies: Intelligence Accountability in the United States’, Presidential Studies Quarterly 34
(December 2004): 828–837.
‘The Aspin-Brown Intelligence Inquiry: Behind the Closed Doors of a Blue Ribbon Commission’, Studies in Intelligence 48
(Winter 2004): 1–20.
‘The Evolving Role of the National Security Adviser: From Executive Secretary to Activist Counselor’, with Karl F.
Inderfurth, White House Studies 4 (Winter 2004): 1–22.
‘Congressional Supervision of America’s Secret Agencies: The Experience and Legacy of the Church Committee’, Public
Administration Review 64 (January 2004): 3–14.
‘Preface to a Theory of Strategic Intelligence’, International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 16 (Winter
2003–2004): 638–663.
‘Spymaster Richard Helms’, Intelligence and National Security 18 (Autumn 2003): 24–44.
‘Bricks and Mortar for a Theory of Intelligence’, Comparative Strategy 22 (Spring 2003): 1–28.
‘The Seven Sins of American Foreign Policy’, with Kiki Caruson, PS: Political Science and Politics (January 2003): 5–10.
‘Governing in the Absence of Angels: On the Practice of Intelligence Accountability in the United States’, Workshop on
Making Intelligence Accountable (Oslo: Government of Norway, 2002): 15–30.
‘The CIA’s Weakest Link’, Washington Monthly 33 (July/August 2001): 9–14.
‘Monitoring America’s Secret Foreign Policy: Congress and the Intelligence Agencies After the Cold War’, Extensions:
Journal of the Carl Albert Congressional Research and Studies Center (Spring 2001): 21–24.
‘Spies’, Foreign Policy (September/October 2000): 18–26.
‘The DCI and the Eight-Hundred-Pound Gorilla’, International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence (Spring
2000): 35–48.
‘Governing the Secret Agencies: Organizational Conundrums of America’s Hidden Government’, Espace Europe 13 (May
1999): 73–93.
‘Beyond the Traditional Intelligence Agenda: Examining the Merits of a World Health Portfolio’, with Diane C. Snyder,
Journal of Conflict 18 (Fall 1998): 177–182.
‘Intelligence and the Challenge of Collaborative Government’, Intelligence and National Security 13 (Summer 1998): 177–
182.
‘Strategic Intelligence and Environmental Security’, with Scott A. Hershovitz, Research Paper No. 44, Special Report,
Research Institute for European Studies, RIES (February 1998): 1–14.
‘Spending for Spies: Intelligence Budgeting in the Aftermath of the Cold War’, with Kevin J. Scheid, Public Budgeting &
Finance (Winter 1997): 7–27.
‘Balancing Security and Liberty’, Freedom Review 28 (Summer 1997): 37–44.
‘Ambivalent Bedfellows: German-American Intelligence Relations, 1969–1991’, with Annette Freyberg, International
Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 10 (Summer 1997): 165–179.
‘Economic Intelligence and the CIA’, Southeastern Political Science Review 25 (September 1997): 501–514.
‘Challenging the Secret Government’, Intelligence and National Security 9 (April 1997): 203–07.
‘The CIA and the Question of Accountability’, Intelligence and National Security 12 (January 1997): 178–200; reprinted in
Roger Z. George and Robert D. Kline, Intelligence and the National Security Strategist (Boulder: Rowman & Littlefield,
2005).
‘Spymasters and the Cold War’, Foreign Policy 105 (Winter 1996–97): 179–192.
‘Analysis for a New Age’, Intelligence and National Security 11 (October 1996): 657–671.
‘Strategic Intelligence and Weapons Proliferation’, 1 The Monitor (Spring 1995): 5–15.
‘American Security and Economic Intelligence’, with Amy Fletcher, World Intelligence Review (March 1995): 1–4.
‘The Evolution of CIA Accountability’, American Intelligence Journal (March 1995): 43–46.
‘Smart Intelligence’, Foreign Policy 89 (Winter 1992–93): 53–70.
‘The Study of Congressional Investigations: Research Strategies’, with John C. Kuzenski and Erna Gellner, Congress & The
Presidency 19 (Autumn 1992): 138–156.
‘DCI Webster’s Legacy: The Judge’s Self-Assessment’, International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence (Fall
1992): 287–90.
‘On Drawing a Bright Line for Covert Operations’, American Journal of International Law 86 (April 1992): 284–309;
reprinted in Jan Goldman, ed., Ethics of Spying (Toronto: Scarecrow Press, 2006): 85–120.
‘Now That the Cold War Is Over, Do We Need the CIA?’ Foreign Policy Analysis Notes, International Studies Association
(Fall/Winter 1990–91): 5–8.
‘The Role of Congress in U.S. Strategic Intelligence’, American Intelligence Journal 11 (Summer/Fall 1990): 41–45.
‘Challenges of Strategic Intelligence’, Intelligence and National Security 5 (July 1990): 215–25.
 INTELLIGENCE AND NATIONAL SECURITY 27

‘Strategic Intelligence: An American Perspective’, International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 4 (Summer
1989): 299–332; reprinted in Stuart A. Farson, David Stafford, and Wesley K. Wark, eds., Security and Intelligence in a
Changing World (London: Routledge, 2021).
‘Controlling the CIA: A Critique of Current Safeguards’, Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy 12 (Spring 1989): 371–96.
‘Covert Action and Accountability: Decision-Making for America’s Secret Foreign Policy’, International Studies Quarterly
33 (March 1989): 81–110.
‘Mr. Huston and Colonel North’, Corruption and Reform 3 (1988): 207–234.
‘Sentries in the Senate’, International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 2 (Winter 1988): 593–601.
‘Intelligence Policy in the Carter and Reagan Administrations: From Reform to Remission’, Southeastern Political Review
16 (Summer 1988): 73–104.
‘Making the Intelligence “Cycle” Work’, International Journal of Intelligence and Counter-intelligence 2 (Winter 1986–87):
pp.1–24; reprinted in Richard M. Denholm II, An Intelligence Studies Anthology (San Diego, CA: Cognella Press, 2022):
Ch. 9.
‘The CIA and the Media’, Intelligence and National Security 1 (May 1986): 143–69.
‘Legislative Reform of Intelligence Policy’, Polity 17 (Spring 1985): 549–73.
‘Decision Costs in the Intelligence Cycle’, Journal of Strategic Studies (September 1984): 318–50.
‘Legislative Control of Paramilitary Operations’, First Principles 9 (March–April 1984): 1–4.
‘Seven Sins of Strategic Intelligence’, World Affairs 146 (Fall 1983): 176–204.
‘Congress and the CIA: Monitoring the Dark Side of Government’, Legislative Studies Quarterly 5 (November 1980): 477–
99; reprinted in Allan Bogue, Joseph Cooper, Roger Davidson, Kermit Halls, eds., The Congress of the United States,
1789–1989 (New York: Carlson, 1991); and Philip Brenner, ed., The United States Political System (Mexico City, Mexico:
Siglo Veintino, 1985).
‘The CIA: Controlling the Quiet Option’, Foreign Policy 39 (Summer 1980): 143–52.

Book Chapters

‘Intelligence Studies’, in Chameron G. Thies, ed., Handbook of International Relations (Cheltenham, UK: Elgar, 2022),
forthcoming.
‘Ethics and Covert Action: The “Third Option” in American Foreign Policy’, in Seumas Miller, Mitt Regan, and Patrick
Walsh, eds., National Security Intelligence and Ethics (London: Routledge, 2022): Ch. 10.
‘American Universities, the CIA, and the Teaching of National Security Intelligence’, in Liam Francis Gearon, ed.,
Routledge International Handbook of Universities, Security, and Intelligence Studies (London: Routledge, 2020): 81–93.
‘The National Security State Gone Awry: Returning to First Principles’, in Karen J. Greenberg, ed., Reimagining the
National Security State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020): 37–70.
‘The Command-and-Control Task Force’, in Katherine A. Scott, ed., Reflections on the Church Committee (Washington, D.
C.: Library of Congress, 2015): 75–89.
‘Introduction’, in Gregory Moore, ed., Encyclopedia of U.S. Intelligence (New York: Routledge, 2015).
‘Shining a Light on Spycraft: The Church and Pike Committees’, in David Abshire, James Kitfield, Chris Lu, and Norman
Ornstein, eds., Triumphs and Tragedies of the Modern Congress (Washington, D.C.: Center for the Study of the
Presidency & Congress, 2014): 58–64.
‘Reflections on James Angleton’, in Bruce Hoffman and Christian Ostermann, eds., Moles, Defectors, and Deceptions:
James Angleton and His Influence on U.S. Counter-intelligence (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars,
2014): 15–32.
‘The Development of Intelligence Studies’, Robert Dover, Michael S. Goodman, and Claudia Hillebrand, eds., The
Routledge Companion to Intelligence Studies (London: Routledge, 2013): 3–22.
‘Blitzkrieger: Wolfgang Krieger and the German School of Intelligence Studies’, in Carlos Collado Seidel, ed.,
Geheimdienste, Diplomatic und Kried: Das Raderwerd Der Internationalen Beziehunger (Dusseldorf: Patmost-Veri,
2013): 11–14.
‘National Security Intelligence’, in Steven W. Hook and Christopher M. Jones, Handbook of American Foreign Policy (New
York: Routledge, 2012): 203–216.
‘Congress and Intelligence’, in David P. Auerswald and Colton C. Campbell, eds., Congress and the Politics of National
Security (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011): 142–150.
‘National Security Apparatus’, in David Coates, ed., The Oxford Companion to American Politics (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2011): 121–143.
‘Inside a National Security Inquiry: The Aspin-Brown Commission at Work’, in Stuart Farson and Mark Phythian, eds.,
Commissions of Inquiry and National Security: Comparative Approaches (New York: ABC-Clio, 2011): 308–24.
28 M. PHYTHIAN

‘Introduction to National Security Intelligence’, in Loch K. Johnson, ed., The Collection and Analysis of National Security
Intelligence (New York: Routledge, 2011): 1–26.
‘National Security Intelligence’, in Loch K. Johnson, ed., The Oxford Handbook of National Security Intelligence (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2010): 3–32.
‘Promoting Democracy by Example’, in Steven W. Hook, ed., Democratic Peace in Theory and Practice (Kent, Ohio: Kent
State University Press, 2010): 222–242.
‘Establishment of Modern Intelligence Accountability’, in Russell A. Miller, ed., US National Security, Intelligence and
Democracy: The Church Committee and the War on Terror (New York: Routledge, 2008): 37–56.
‘Richard Helms, Spymaster’, in Mark Carnes, ed., American National Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008):
67–72.
‘Sketches for a Theory of Strategic Intelligence’, in Peter Gill, Stephen Marrin, and Mark Phythian, eds., Intelligence
Theory: Key Questions and Debates (London: Routledge, 2008): pp. 33–53.
‘Global Security and the United States’, in Stuart Farson, Peter Gill, Mark Phythian, and Shlomo Shpiro, eds., Handbook on
Global Security and Intelligence (New York: Praeger, 2008).
‘Congress, the Iraqi War, and the Failures of Intelligence Oversight’, in James P. Pfiffner and Mark Phythian, eds.,
Intelligence and National Security Policymaking on Iraq: British and American Perspectives (Manchester: Manchester
University Press and Texas A & M Press, 2008): 172–190.
‘The Butler Report, 2004’, in R. Gerald Hughes, Peter Jackson, and Len Scott, eds., Exploring Intelligence Archives: Enquiries
into the Secret State (New York: Routledge, 2008), with Robert Jervis and Peter Jackson: 277–321.
‘An Introduction to the Literature on Intelligence Studies’, in Loch K. Johnson, ed., Strategic Intelligence, Vol. I:
Understanding the Hidden Side of Government (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007): 1–20.
‘A Conversation with Former DCI William E. Colby, Spymaster During the “Year of the Intelligence Wars”,’ in Loch K.
Johnson, ed., Strategic Intelligence: Intelligence Accountability (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007): 47–66.
‘Intelligence Oversight in the United States’, in Steve Tsang, ed., Intelligence and Human Rights in the Era of Global
Terrorism (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007): 54–66.
‘A Shock Theory of Congressional Accountability for Intelligence’, in Loch K. Johnson, ed., The Handbook of Intelligence
Studies (London: Routledge, 2007): 343–60.
‘Introduction to the Meanings of Intelligence’, in Loch K. Johnson, ed., The Handbook of Intelligence Studies (London:
Routledge, 2007): 1–14.
‘Lawmakers and Spies: Congressional Oversight of Intelligence in the United States’, in Wolbert K. Smidt, Ulrike Poppe,
Wolfgang Krieger, and Helmut Müller-Enbergs, eds., Geheimhaltung und Transparenz: Demokratishce Kontrol der
Geheimdienste im Internationalen Vergleich (Berlin: LIT, 2007): 173–92.
‘Supervising America’s Secret Foreign Policy: A Shock Theory of Congressional Oversight for Intelligence’, in David P.
Forsythe, Patrice C. McMahon, and Andrew Wedeman, eds., American Foreign Policy in a Globalized World (New York:
Routledge, 2006): 173–192.
‘The Liaison Arrangements of the Central Intelligence Agency’, in Athan Theoharis, ed., The Central Intelligence Agency:
Security under Scrutiny (New York: Greenwood Press, 2006): 85–120.
‘Governing in the Absence of Angels: On the Practice of Intelligence Accountability in the United States’, in Hans Born,
Loch K. Johnson, and Ian Leigh, eds., Who’s Watching the Spies? Establishing Accountability over the World’s Secret
Intelligence Agencies (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2005): 57–78.
‘Balancing Operational Efficiency and Democratic Legitimacy’, with Hans Born, in Hans Born, Loch K. Johnson, and Ian
Leigh, eds., Who’s Watching the Spies? Establishing Accountability over the World’s Secret Intelligence Agencies
(Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2005): 225–240.
‘German-American Intelligence Relations, 1969–1997: An Ambivalent Partnership’, with Annette Freyberg, in Detlef
Junker, ed., The United States and Germany in the Era of the Cold War, 1968–1990, Vol. 2: 171–177.
‘America’s Intelligence Liaison with International Organizations’, in Ben de Jong, Wies Platje, and Robert David Steele,
eds., Peacekeeping Intelligence (Oakton, Virginia: OSS International Press, 2003): 363–370.
‘Verdeckte Aktionen und die CIA: Amerikas Geheime Aussenpolitik’, in Wolfgang Krieger, ed., Geheimdienste in der
Weltgeschichte: Espionage und Verdeckte Aktionen von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart (München: Verlag C.H. Beck, 2003):
260–274.
‘Strategic Intelligence: The Weakest Link in the War Against World Terrorism’, in Charles W. Kegley, Jr., ed., The New
Global Terrorism (New York: Prentice Hall, 2003), pp. 239–252.
‘Die Zusammenarbeit der Nachrichtendienste’, with Annettee Freyberg, in Detlef Junker, Die USA und Deutschland in
Zeitalter des Kalten Krieges, 1968–1990, Band II (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2001): 268–278.
‘Intelligence in the Service of Economic Security’, in Harry Shukman, ed., Agents for Change: Intelligence Services in the
21st Century (London: St. Ermin’s, 2001): 237–62.
‘Global Disease Surveillance’, with Diane Snyder, in Andrew Price-Smith, ed., Plagues and Politics: Infectious Disease and
International Politics (Houndmills, U.K.: Macmillan/St. Martin’s, 2001): 56–68.
 INTELLIGENCE AND NATIONAL SECURITY 29

‘Technology, Intelligence, and the Information Stream: The Executive Branch and National Security Decision Making’, in
David S. Alberts and Daniel S. Papp, ed., Information Age Anthology, Vol. II: National Security Implications of the
Information Age (Washington, D.C.: National Defense University, 2000): 179–212.
‘Probing Government Secrecy: Louis Fisher and the Hidden Side of Government’, in Robert J. Spitzer, ed., Politics and
Constitutionalism: The Louis Fisher Connection (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000): 163–184.
‘A Portrait of Allen Dulles’, in John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, ed., American National Biography, Vol. 7 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1999): 42–44.
‘Economic Intelligence and the CIA’, in Anthony J. Eksterowicz and Glenn P. Hastedt, eds., The Post-Cold War Presidency
(New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999): 100–116.
‘Reinventing the CIA: Strategic Intelligence and the End of the Cold War’, in Randall B. Ripley and James M. Lindsay, eds.,
U.S. Foreign Policy after the Cold War (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997): 132–159.
‘The CIA and the Question of Accountability’, in Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones and Christopher Andrew, eds., Eternal Vigilance? 50
Years of the CIA (London: Cass, 1997): 178–200.
‘Playing Ball with the CIA: Congress Supervises StrategicIntelligence’, in Paul E. Peterson, ed., The President, the Congress,
and the Making of American Foreign Policy (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994): 49–73.
‘New Directions for Strategic Intelligence’, in James E. Winkates, J. Richard Walsh, and Joseph M. Scolnick, Jr., eds., U.S.
Foregin Policy in Transition (Chicago: Nelson, 1993): 76–97.
‘American Espionage in the Aftermath of the Cold War’, in Charles W. Kegley, Jr., and Eugene R. Wittkopf, eds., The Future
of American Foreign Policy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992): 46–62.
‘Controlling Intelligence: A Critique of Current Safeguards’, in Glenn Hastedt, ed., Controlling Intelligence (London: Cass,
1992): 24–36.
‘Congress and the Intelligence Community: Taking the Road Less Traveled’, in Roger H. Davidson, ed., The Postreform
Congress (New York: St. Martin’s 1992): 279–300.
‘Strategic Intelligence: An American Perspective’, in Stuart Farson, David Stafford, and Wesley Wark, eds., Security and
Intelligence in a Changing World: New Perspectives for the 1990s (London: Cass, 1991): 47–70.
‘American Foreign Policy and the Challenges of a New World’, in John C. Shea, ed., Arguments on American Politics
(Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole, 1991): 287–96.
‘Congress and Foreign Policy: Remembering the Constitution’, inJohn C. Shea, ed., Arguments on American Politics
(Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole, 1991), pp. 159–79.
‘In Search of Friends: Democracies, Dictators, and the United States’, in Martin Slann and Susan Duffy, ed., Morality and
Conviction in American Politics (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1989): 323–45.
‘Cloaks and Gowns: The CIA in the Groves of Academe’, in Stephen J. Cimbala, ed., Intelligence and Intelligence Policy in a
Democratic Society (Dobbs Ferry, NY: Transnational, 1987): 101–28.
‘Senator Frank Church, Western Populist’, in Bernard K. Duffy and Halford R. Ryan, eds., Fifty American Political Orators:
Critical Studies and Sources (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1987): 69–74.
‘Decision Costs in the Intelligence Cycle’, in Alfred C. Mauner, Marion D. Tunstall, and James M. Keagle, eds., Intelligence
Policy and Process (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1985): 181–98.
‘The Changing Face of American Foreign Policy’, in Susan A. MacManus, Charles S. Bullock III, and Donald M. Freeman,
Governing a Changing America (New York: Wiley, 1983): 543–71.
‘The CIA: Controlling the Quiet Option’, in James L. True, Jr., and Lawrence E. Grinter, eds., The National Security
Environment (Maxwell, AL: United States Air War College, 1981): 318–23.