ABSTRACT
A campaign against terrorists in the wake of the 1979-1980 Iran hostage crisis was an almost sure-fire way to offset the setbacks experienced by the intelligence community in the 1970s. Just as the Reagan administration used the terrorism spectacle as a wedge to reopen foreign policy options formally closed to it, it also used the terrorism spectacle as a rationale for the conduct of otherwise problematic policy options at home. Revelations of intelligence community abuses, both foreign and domestic, led to demands for strict new regulations of the intelligence community. Critics of Jimmy Carter's Executive Order believed that the restrictions placed on the counterintelligence divisions of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Central Intelligence Agency severely hampered their ability to ferret out suspected terrorists and Soviet and Cuban spies. Conservative political organizations were also utilized by the FBI in their investigation of the opponents of US foreign policy objectives in Central America.
