John Lisle

So it's like, how can you expect Congress to give oversight of the executive if they are completely unwilling to even know what the executive is doing?

So fortunately, in the aftermath of these revelations, there have been some

some programs or committees that are set up within Congress to provide that external check.

However, it's not even clear how effective those are.

One check on the executive after this is that the president now has to sign off basically on covert operations so that eliminates the president's plausible deniability.

One of the main themes throughout this book is just...

is what I call the vicious cycle of secrecy.

So an organization like the CIA that has secrecy, that kind of leads to what I see as this vicious cycle.

Secrecy leads to plausible deniability because if it's secret, nobody can know that I'm doing this.

Therefore, I'm not going to be blamed for it.

So secrecy leads to plausible deniability.

Plausible deniability leads to reckless behavior, like MKUltra.

If nobody's gonna find out what I'm doing, therefore I'm incentivized to do some crazy stuff because I'm not gonna be held accountable for it.

So secrecy to plausible deniability, plausible deniability to reckless behavior.

Reckless behavior in many instances leads to embarrassment.

It's almost inevitable for many of these projects that they get found out.

Someone leaked something to the press.

This is how the family jewels that the CIA had that was like a compilation of all the illegal stuff that it had done over the past couple of decades.

It eventually got leaked to Seymour Hersh who published it on the front page of the New York Times.

So, reckless behavior leads to embarrassment, but embarrassment leads to secrecy.