CIA liaison relationships are the intelligence-sharing arrangements the Central Intelligence Agency maintains with foreign governments — arrangements John Kiriakou says expanded sharply after the September 11, 2001 attacks, when the CIA suddenly had reason to open relationships with countries it previously had no cause to deal with, including the Central Asian states.[1]
The risk officers don’t weigh
Kiriakou says CIA officers do not consider the long-term risks of these relationships: “Does anybody inside the agency ever stop to consider the long-term risks of liaison activities — that by disclosing your most sensitive operations to a foreign intelligence service, which has its own separate national interest, you’re just handing over America’s darkest secrets, giving those governments leverage, even potential blackmail material, over the United States itself?” His answer: “No, they don’t consider it. They don’t consider it at all.”[2]
The collapse of oversight
Kiriakou attributes part of the problem to high turnover — officials rotate out every two or three years, so institutional memory of why a liaison relationship was established gets lost — compounded by the disappearance of congressional overseers willing to challenge the agency. He names Senator Frank Church, Congressman Otis Pike, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Senator Ted Kennedy as the last overseers with the will to do so, noting they are all dead, and that no one currently in Congress has the guts to stand up to the CIA.[3]