By Samuel Goldman The Week

The intelligence community enjoys enviable status in popular culture. In shows like Homeland and films like the Jason Bourne series, the agency is presented as hyper-vigilant, super-competent, and brutally effective. Older works and period pieces place intelligence agents in a clubby, vaguely aristocratic milieu. Recent depictions emphasize their seamless immersion in foreign cultures and the high-tech resources they deploy, setting scenes in teeming souks and banks of shining computers.

By most journalistic and scholarly accounts, however, the reality is rather different. Studies like Tim Weiner’s A Legacy of Ashes and Christopher Andrew’s The Secret World depict an institution that has more in common with Office Space than with Sicario. A recent critique of sensationalized spy fiction notes that CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia resemble a “shabby post-office.”

Even if the mystique is false, though, the powers the CIA wields are very real. In a letter to CIA Director William Burns and Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines that was written in April 2021 but declassified last Thursday, Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) request information about a previously unknown program that collected bulk data on American citizens without a warrant or other due process. According to the senators, the program stands “entirely outside the statutory framework that Congress and the public believe govern this collection, and without any of the judicial, congressional, or even executive branch oversight that comes from FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] collection.”

In the wake of failures in Iraq (where inaccurate assessments were further hyped by the Bush administration), Afghanistan, and now, perhaps, Ukraine, the Wyden-Heinrich letter raises deeper questions about whether the intelligence community can be trusted to do its job within the law. After years of “Russiagate” controversy, public attitudes toward the CIA and its counterparts are still heavily influenced by opinions of former President Donald Trump — which means, among many Democrats, the intelligence establishment has accrued a certain deference not historically accorded from the left. But we shouldn’t let partisanship foreclose an opportunity for clearly necessary reform.

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