www.crs.gov | 7-5700
June 11, 2018
CIA Ethics Education: Background and Perspectives
Baseline Approaches to Ethics Education
In the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), there are two
distinct categories of ethics education: One applies to all
government agencies and the other to the conduct of
activities in the intelligence community specifically.
The Ethics in Government Act (EIGA) (P.L. 95-521),
enacted in 1978, established financial disclosure
guidelines and restrictions on outside earned income for
employees of all government agencies. The EIGA also
established the Office of Government Ethics (OGE)
whose mission is to provide overall leadership and
oversight of the executive branch ethics program
designed to prevent and resolve conflicts of interest.
OGE oversees government departments and agencies
including the CIA. Its focus is generally on records
administration and training related to potential conflicts-
of-interest, outside employment, interpersonal
relationships, and gifts. The CIA’s ethics program,
mandated through the EIGA, includes ethics orientation
for new employees and mandatory annual ethics
refresher training for the entire workforce. The most
recent OGE assessment of the CIA’s ethics program was
completed in November 2017. OGE does not have
jurisdiction over the CIA’s intelligence activities.
CIA officers also receive extensive ethics training
specific to intelligence, which includes case studies of
ethically challenging operational scenarios, to prepare
them for the operational side of their jobs. This training
includes familiarization with the legal authorities for the
conduct of intelligence activities, principally Executive
Order 12333, The Intelligence Community, as amended,
and CIA’s AR 2-2, Law and Policy Governing the
Conduct of Intelligence Activities. However, while these
baseline references spell out dos and don’ts from a legal
standpoint, there is little mention of ethics per se.
Section 2.1, of E.O. 12333, for example, merely requires
intelligence collection be done in a manner that is
“respectful of the principles upon which the United
States was founded.”
Perspectives on Intelligence Ethics
Some former employees and others with experience at the
agency have been critical of CIA’s ethics program as
focusing too much on legal compliance in a reactive, ad hoc
manner that falls short of a comprehensive approach to
ethics education at the CIA. Legalism, or “an ethical
attitude that holds moral conduct to be a matter of rule
following” characterizes the ethical culture of the
intelligence community, these critics have noted.
Arguing that CIA’s formal ethics program falls short of a
more comprehensive approach to ethics education, former
CIA officer Paul Ericson, in his essay, The Need for Ethical
Norms, advocates for an established set of ethical norms or
code of conduct:
Although many of us have discussed the ethics of
our profession, little has been done
organizationally to capture these thoughts. Rather
than possibly hamstringing future options by
formalizing Agency dos and don'ts, we seem to
prefer risking a repetition of behaviors which have
jeopardized our organizational standing and
credibility in the past. We can ill afford to allow
this trade-off to continue.
Others are skeptical of introducing training on morality into
what is often viewed as the inherently amoral environment
of covert action or clandestine foreign intelligence. As
former Director of Central Intelligence William Webster
once put it, "In the United States, we obey the laws of the
United States. Abroad we uphold the national security
interests of the United States."
This viewpoint conforms to the realist perspective of
international relations, which holds a state’s interests to be
the preeminent driver of foreign policy, as a frame of
reference for individual conduct. Subscribers to the realist
perspective do not so much ignore personal morality as
believe that it is not particularly relevant to relations
between states. In the international context, the national
interests of the United States provide a moral imperative of
their own, they argue.
The realists, or those skeptical of introducing personal
morality into training on ethics and into the practice of
intelligence, have also observed that an evolution of legal
standards—such as those governing the treatment of
detained combatants engaged in terrorism—while still short
of a comprehensive approach to ethical considerations, has
resulted in a demonstrable improvement in ethical behavior.
They cite the Detainee Treatment Act (2005), the landmark
Supreme Court decision Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006), and
Executive Order 13491 (2009), Ensuring Lawful
Interrogations as examples of policy that has come to
define improved standards for the ethical treatment of
detainees.
Yet critics of realism and the legalistic approach to the
practice of intelligence maintain that this approach
contributes to an ends justify the means mentality that
leaves intelligence professionals susceptible to making
regrettable decisions in the midst of morally ambiguous
situations. They also counter that the post 9/11 conflict with
terrorism is distinguished in part by its adversaries:
collections of individuals, rather than a state, who are
