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.[1]
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.[1]
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.[2] The Gang of Eight is the top two Republicans and the top two Democrats on each of those committees.[2]
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.[2][3] That, he says, is not oversight — that is gangsterism.[3]
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.[4] 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.[4] The result, in his account, is that the CIA ends up doing whatever it wants to do.[4]
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.[4][5][6]
The North Korea notification failure
Kiriakou has used the 2018 SEAL Team Six operation in North Korea as a case in which the rule was simply ignored. He states the requirement first: “the law says that the White House has to inform at least the gang of four, if not the entire committee on both sides” — the gang of four being “the chairman and vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and the House Intelligence Committee.” Where an operation is so sensitive that the White House wants it held eyes only, the gang of four is the floor, not an option.[7]
In that case neither channel was used: “they didn’t inform the committees either before or after the operation.” Kiriakou’s assessment of what followed is two clauses long: “heads should have rolled and nothing happened.”[7][8]