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The Agency and the Hill
The Agency & The Hill
CIA's Relationship with Congress, 1946-2004
by L. Britt Snider
The Agency & The Hill (divided by chapter)
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About the Author
Mr. Snider’s career in the federal government spanned 30 years, split almost
evenly between the legislative and executive branches. From 1971 until 1974, he
served as counsel to a Senate judiciary subcommittee chaired by Senator Sam
Ervin (D-NC) where he was involved in the subcommittee’s investigation of the
Army’s domestic intelligence activities during the Vietnam era. During 1975–76,
he was counsel to the Church Committee, principally focusing on the
intelligence activities of the National Security Agency and the military. From
1977 until 1987, he served as a policy official within the Office of the
Secretary of Defense, responsible for counterintelligence and security matters,
an assignment that brought him into frequent contacts with the select
intelligence committees of the Congress. In 1987, he returned to Capitol Hill,
first as minority counsel, then general counsel, of the Senate Select Committee
on Intelligence. He remained in that position for almost nine years, leaving in
1995 to become staff director of the Commission on the Roles and Capabilities
of the United States Intelligence Community (the Aspin-Brown Commission).
From there, Mr. Snider joined the Center for the Study of Intelligence
as a visiting senior fellow, where he wrote a groundbreaking study entitled “Sharing
Secrets with Lawmakers: Congress as a User of Intelligence,” published by CSI
in 1997. Later that year, after a short teaching stint at Cambridge University
in England, he became special counsel to DCI George J. Tenet. In 1998,
President Clinton, with the advice and consent of the Senate, appointed him to
be the second statutory inspector general of the Agency. He served in that
position until his retirement in 2001.
Since retirement, Mr.
Snider has been an adjunct professor at the School of Foreign Service,
Georgetown University, where he teaches a course on intelligence oversight. He
has also written numerous articles on the subject. See “Unlucky SHAMROCK: The
Church Committee’s Investigation of NSA,” published in Studies in Intelligence,
Center for the Study of Intelligence, Winter 1999; “Creating a Statutory
Inspector General at the CIA”, published in Studies in Intelligence, Center for
the Study of Intelligence, Winter-Spring, 2001; “Congressional Oversight of
Intelligence: Some Reflections on the
Last 25 Years,” published as a monograph by the Center for Law, Ethics, and
National Security, Duke University School of Law, 2004; and “Congressional Oversight of Intelligence
After September 11,” published as chapter 14 of Transforming U.S. Intelligence,
Sims and Gerber, eds., Georgetown University Press, 2005.
Mr. Snider is a
graduate of Davidson College and the University of Virginia School of Law.
Historical Document
Posted: May 09, 2008 12:05 PM
Last Updated: Jun 27, 2008 09:51 AM
Last Reviewed: May 09, 2008 12:05 PM