Amy Zegart

• Stanford University

Roberta Wohlstetter’s Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision is probably the most influential book in the field of intelligence studies. As David Sherman explains, however, government officials attempted to block its publication due to security concerns that seemed to focus on Wohlstetter’s passing reference to World War II SIGINT. Because Sherman’s hi...

Amy B. Zegart examines the roots of weak congressional intelligence oversight and challenges the view that ineffectual oversight stems from executive branch secrecy. Instead, she finds that Congress has tied its own hands by failing to consolidate its budgetary power or to develop robust expertise in intelligence.

International Security 30.4 (2006) 196-208 Amy Zegart argues that the U.S. intelligence community suffered an "adaptation failure" that left it unprepared to deal with the terrorist threat after the Cold War. The core of this apparent failure was its inability to reorganize in response to a radically changed international setting, despite recommend...

AMY B. ZEGART examines the failures to reform U.S. intelligence agencies before the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks. She finds that during the 1990s, intelligence officials and policy makers understood the rising terrorist threat and the urgent need for reform, but failed to address critical organizational deficiencies.

International Security 29.4 (2005) 78-111 In January 2000, al-Qaida operatives gathered secretly in Malaysia for a planning meeting. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was watching. Among the participants was Khalid al-Mihdhar, one of the hijackers who would later help to crash American Airlines flight 77 into the Pentagon. By the time the meeti...

Presidential commissions usually are thought to tackle domestic policy issues, with little effect. This essay challenges the conventional view by finding greater commission variety and systematic differences in the ways presidents utilize commissions in domestic and foreign affairs. The essay classifies commissions into three ideal types: agenda co...

Although scholars have been dissecting the Cuban missile crisis for almost half a century, this paper argues that we have learned the wrong intelligence lessons and neglected many important ones. Organizations explain why. Ever since Graham Allison’s Essence of Decision, scholars have concentrated on the pitfalls of individual perception and cognit...