William J. Casey
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William J. "Bill" Casey served as Director of Central Intelligence under President Ronald Reagan during the 1980s. A former officer of the Office of Strategic Services, the CIA's predecessor, and by John Kiriakou's description "just a true believer," he is the pivot on which Kiriakou's account of congressional oversight turns.

The National Resources Division

Within KiriPedia's source corpus Casey is referenced first as the founder of the CIA National Resources Division, the agency's domestic collection arm.

Kiriakou characterises him as "the notorious criminal that he was", but as having been "actually right on" about the division's concept. The insight was that large numbers of patriotic American businesspeople routinely travel to denied areas, countries such as China, the Soviet Union and Cuba where the CIA cannot maintain a clandestine presence, and would willingly debrief on what they had seen if simply asked, overtly.

The 1981 purge

Casey's arrival is also Kiriakou's standing precedent for what a wholesale clear-out of the CIA looks like. In January 1981, Reagan wanted the agency emptied of Carter's people. Normally, Kiriakou explains, an incoming president names the director and the deputy director and that is the extent of it; what happened instead was that Casey, once named director, chose his own deputy director, and then also named his own deputy director for operations.

That appointee was a businessman with no intelligence experience at all. Kiriakou's verdict on the practice is split: "oftentimes that doesn't work, because the businessman has no idea what he's getting into", "but sometimes you really do need a purge."

The end of oversight

Kiriakou dates the only genuine period of congressional oversight from the mid-1970s to about 1982. The Church and Pike committees, appalled by what they found, morphed into the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and those bodies had "real, true, legit oversight until about 1982."

Casey, he says, "did his darnedest to cut Congress out of everything," and that is what produced Iran-Contra "and all kinds of different terrible scandals." He died of a stroke followed by a brain aneurysm just before the end of his term, by which point, in Kiriakou's account, the oversight committees "really didn't have any idea what the CIA was doing."

The no-confidence vote that confidence won

In 1986 the committees went so far as to hold a no-confidence vote in Casey as Director of Central Intelligence. Getting it passed required a negotiation with the Republicans, and the wording they settled on, which Kiriakou grants "sounds so stupid now in retrospect", was that "William Casey is not unqualified to continue as director."

Kiriakou reads the double negative as its drafters intended it: they were not asking him to resign; they were saying only that he was not doing great.

His conclusion is that nothing recovered afterwards: "ever since then, there's not been any real oversight." His illustration is the Senate Torture Report, which as published was a Democratic-staff product, no Republican members, no Republican staff, after which the Republicans published a counter-report whose position, in his summary, was that torture worked, that it was moral, and that it was right.

See also

- CIA National Resources Division
- Central Intelligence Agency
- Church Committee
- Pike Committee
- Denied areas
