ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the development of intelligence and intelligence oversight mechanisms within the tension. It demonstrates how intelligence has changed in response to the threat, and how oversight mechanisms have reacted to that relationship. Intelligence and oversight in the United States have suffered from two problematic constraints, structure and ideology. Structural provisions governing the oversight of intelligence are relatively recent creations in the US system of government. Covert action was pivotal to the development of intelligence oversight. Terrorism elides the US division between foreign and domestic intelligence that has plagued the structural composition of the national security enterprise. The Cold War was the formative period for the US national security state. When Congress passed the 1947 National Security Act, military and intelligence institutions were shaped to confront the Soviet Union. The chapter concludes by taking the counterfactual that American liberal traditions are changing.
