The Gang of Four and Gang of Eight
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Asked whether any congressional oversight remains over deep-cover covert action, John Kiriakou answered that there is almost none, and explained the mechanism by which it disappears.

The two tiers

When the CIA determines that an operation is so sensitive that essentially nobody can know about it, Kiriakou says, it gives the information only to what are called the Gang of Four or the Gang of Eight.

The Gang of Four, in his description, is the chairman and vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence together with the chairman and vice chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The Gang of Eight is the top two Republicans and the top two Democrats on each of those committees.

Why he calls it gangsterism

The consequence Kiriakou draws is that a member of an intelligence committee can have no idea what the CIA is doing, because even as one of the designated overseers that member is not cleared for the information. That, he says, is not oversight, that is gangsterism.

The arithmetic of oversight

Kiriakou grounds the complaint in his own time on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where he says he learned that the committees called oversight committees cannot do the job. He puts the CIA workforce at somewhere around twenty, thirty or thirty-five thousand employees, he says he has no exact idea, against roughly twenty-five people on Capitol Hill who are supposed to oversee all of it and every programme within it, and concludes that it is simply not possible. The result, in his account, is that the CIA ends up doing whatever it wants to do.

He links the same permissive culture to the maxim he was taught early in his career, described in the ask-forgiveness maxim, and treats the failure of oversight as one of the supporting arguments for his position that there should be no CIA at all.

See also

- Senate Foreign Relations Committee
- Abolish the CIA
- The Ask Forgiveness Maxim
- Concealment of the CIA budget
