President Donald Trump has confirmed that he has authorized CIA “covert action” in Venezuela. This term encompasses “activities to influence political, military or economic conditions abroad, where it is intended that the role of the [United States] will not be apparent or acknowledged publicly.” Under law, such operations are overseen by the House and Senate Intelligence Committees.
The president has been mum on the details of his initiative. The administration could be complementing the ongoing military strikes at sea and threatened attacks on land against alleged narcotics smugglers with paramilitary raids targeting “connected” Venezuelan officials. Or it could be deploying propaganda, cyberattacks, and political payments designed to provoke a military coup against the leftist, authoritarian regime of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. During Trump’s first term, a U.S. official consulted with coup plotters. The covert action might also include an effort to manage a post-coup political environment.
Policymakers may see covert action as a better alternative than an all-out military invasion, remembering the 1989 U.S. intervention in Panama. That invasion of a country with currently one-sixth the population of Venezuela, required 27,000 troops and 300 airplanes. It cost 23 American lives, with more than 300 others wounded.
Still, Trump’s decision to authorize covert action is highly questionable. Its main public rationale – curbing the flow of illegal, deadly drugs into the country – falls flat when one considers that only a small portion of the cocaine and virtually none of the more lethal fentanyl entering the United States transits via Venezuela. The efficacy of ground anti-drug operations would be limited by the lack of a local government partner, unlike CIA counter-narcotics programs in Mexico, Columbia, and Peru. And the disappointing aftermaths of recent CIA efforts to overthrow authoritarian governments in Libya and Syria should also induce caution. Perhaps most important, given the history of U.S. interventionism in Latin America, aggressive action in Venezuela could spur anti-American nationalism throughout the region.
Fortunately, U.S. law provides the congressional Intelligence Committees with tools to evaluate covert action programs and spur potential legislative action. They must receive prior notice via a written finding spelling out the “identifiable foreign policy objectives” of any “significant, expected” conduct. In “extraordinary circumstances affecting the vital interests of the United States,” the finding may be restricted to the chairmen and ranking Minority members of the committees, supplemented by the Speaker and Minority Leader of the House and the Majority and Minority leaders of the Senate – the so-called “Gang of Eight.” Although the committees cannot veto initial steps, they must be kept “fully and currently informed” about the operation. In addition, the president must supply any ”information or material” about the covert program requested by the committees including its “legal basis.” The committees are also mandated to “promptly call attention” (under procedures protecting classified information) of their Appropriations Committee counterparts and even their full Houses to any matter “requiring their attention.”
Thus armed, the committees can—and have—used their jurisdiction over the CIA’s budget to shape or terminate covert actions. The Senate committee can also leverage its control of nominations to top CIA positions to bargain for policy changes.
Armed But Not Always Dangerous
Notwithstanding these resources, scholars have uncovered major flaws in the Intelligence Committees’ performances over the years. As Loch Johnson has written, “Despite all the intelligence oversight reforms, cheerleaders [who interpret their job as merely supporting the intelligence agencies] have had a greater presence of members on Capitol Hill than the champions of greater accountability.” Still, there have been notable exceptions which illuminate the path toward effective oversight on Venezuela.
Isolated from their congressional colleagues and constituents, ensconced in a claustrophobic engagement with the secretive agencies they are mandated to supervise, committee members have been: overcautious about accessing outside perspectives, timorous about investigating programs, and paralyzed by administration resistance to their inquiries. One recalls the committees’ failures to: adequately investigate the Iran-Contra scandal, question the CIA’s disproportionate allocation of weapons to radical Islamic groups in Afghanistan in the 1980s, cope with the George W. Bush administration’s denials of information on anti-terrorist “enhanced interrogations,” and penetrate the Obama administration’s overconfident assumptions behind military aid to disorganized, extremist-allied “moderate” Syrian rebels.
In contrast, when details of President Ronald Reagan’s secret paramilitary support of Contra rebels battling the left-wing Sandinista government in Nicaragua seeped onto the pages of major newspapers and liberal congressmen introduced legislation to end the program, Lee Hamilton, the Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, joined the debate. Without divulging secrets, he supported legislation prohibiting “any [future] actions for the purpose of overthrowing the Nicaraguan government.” He then worked closely with the Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee on follow-up legislation, arranging a secret session of the House to inform all members before the debate. The Senate committee, chaired by Barry Goldwater, a conservative Republican who publicly denounced the CIA Director’s withholding of information, joined in. In 1984 Congress passed legislation prohibiting further U.S. financial support for the Contra insurgency. Reagan accepted it.
Several years later, under President George H.W. Bush, Congress placed conditions on CIA lethal assistance to Angolan rebels battling the Marxist Government. As a top U.S. official subsequently acknowledged, this action “had a positive effect on both sides” of the conflict, contributing to the success of negotiations for a democratic election. In this case, two dissident Democratic members of the House Intelligence Committee teamed up with the Chairman of House Foreign Affairs’ Africa Subcommittee – of which I was Staff Director — to formulate balanced legislation providing for mutual withdrawal of Soviet and U.S. lethal assistance as progress was made toward free elections. The bill opened up legislative debate. After it passed, its approach was accepted by the Senate Intelligence Committee (chaired by a conservative Democrat), the Senate and the president.
Today, with Trump leading narrow, unusually deferential Republican majorities in the House and Senate, the prospects for such activism may seem less favorable. Yet, some congressional Republicans have publicly differed with Trump on Ukraine policy and many have complained about the lack of information on maritime attacks on alleged Venezuelan drug smugglers in the Caribbean. Plus, emerging Democratic opposition to the covert program—within the committees and Congress—could strengthen an important faction within the Trump administration that has favored negotiations with Maduro.
In any case, the Intelligence Committees and its individual members need to do their job.
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