Amy Zegart is an Associate Professor of Public Policy at UCLA's School of Public Affairs, where she teaches courses on U.S. intelligence agencies, national security policy, global studies, public management, and anything scary. She is also a fellow at UCLA’s Burkle Center on International Relations and a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. She has been featured by The National Journal as one of the ten most influential experts in intelligence reform. She worked on the Clinton Administration's National Security Council staff in 1993 and served as a foreign policy adviser to the Bush-Cheney 2000 presidential campaign. Her first book, Flawed by Design: The Evolution of the CIA, JCS and NSC (Stanford Univ. Press) received a prestigious political science dissertation prize, which means it was read by dozens. Her new book, Spying Blind: The CIA, the FBI, and the Origins of 9/11 (Princeton Univ. Press, 2007), examines why intelligence agencies adapted poorly to terrorism before 9/11 and won the 2008 Louis Brownlow Book Award. A proud native of Kentucky, she received an A.B. in East Asian Studies from Harvard and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford. When not combating her own household insurgency of three kids, she hikes and watches bad reality television.
There’s a “Casablanca” quality to the Pelosi-CIA dustup: Suddenly, legislators are shocked, shocked! that Congress lacks strong oversight powers in intelligence. At her press conference last week, Speaker Pelosi seemed to suggest that intelligence oversight had become both hapless and hopeless in the Bush Administration: “Well, they [the Bush administration] didn’t tell us everything that they were doing. And the fact is that anything we would say doesn’t matter anyway. We had to change the majority in Congress, we had to get a new president to change the policy. And that’s what we have done.” When the only workable intelligence… Read more
Does the global economic crisis have security implications for the United States? You bet. But the Obama Administration's approach is strange: declaring economics more dangerous than terrorists and driving the Intelligence Community to generate a second, special daily brief to the President focusing exclusively on economic issues. What exactly can this new intelligence report tell the White House? These kinds of products are designed to alert the President to the most pressing issues and developments that threaten American lives and interests NOW. Intelligence nuggets about al Qaeda's capabilities or Iran's latest nuclear enrichment activities clearly fall into that category. Today's… Read more
President Obama faces two types of intelligence challenges: Policy problems in the dark corner of the room (Guantanamo Bay, interrogation techniques, extraordinary renditions) and plumbing problems in the bowels of the bureaucracy. Politically, he has been under tremendous pressure to focus on dark-corner-of-the-room issues. Already, President Obama has reversed the Bush Administration's most controversial policies: Guantanamo Bay will be closed; Interrogations will be kinder and gentler; And if Leon Panetta is confirmed, the CIA will be run by a man whose chief intelligence credential is that he was far, far away from Langley's taint during the past eight years. These… Read more
Biography provided by participant
