JF

4. Intelligence collection is important. We need to get secrets from other countries in order to inform our own political diplomatic, and military activities. Even George Washington relied on spies in order to wage the Revolutionary War (I highly recommend Netflix's "TURN") 3/

5. Now, intelligence collection is different from what we call "covert action." Covert action is an operation designed to achieve a specific policy objective. The origins of covert action in the U.S. goes back to something called the "fifth function" in the NSA of 1947 4/

6. The "fifth function" was a vague provision which suggested that the CIA could engage in "other activities related to intelligence which the President may direct." Was Congress intending to authorize covert action? Unclear. But unsurprisingly, Presidents interpreted it so

7. Over the next couple of decades, administrations engaged in various types of covert actions to stop the spread of Communism. Many of these operations were unsavory, and had no oversight. I recommend Tim Weiner's @360rsd Legacy of Ashes for more 5/

8. These operations -- in Latin America, East Asia, Africa, etc. are commonly what people refer to when they like to slam on the CIA. But there's a lot that happened after, if you've read anything and aren't frozen in the 70s 6/

9. For one thing, following Watergate, the Church Hearings laid bare many of the worst activities of the CIA -- including assassinations, coups, and psyops. This led to much more oversight of these kind of activities. There was also EO 12,333, which spelled out parameters 7/

9. Then, after Iran-Contra, there was even *more* oversight, and statutory limitations -- including written findings and approval by the President, transmitted to Congress, for any covert actions undertaken 8/

10. In fact, the very fact that we know about the CIA's covert activities is the result of oversight. So it's facile to use historical events from the 50s-70s, which were under a different (read: nonexistent) legal framework to inform an opinion about CIA now 9/