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Notes -
Taps.
The.
Sign.
Alright, admittedly the internal systems at these entities sure seem better at catching and punishing their own, but I can see almost zero way they're held accountable to those outside the institution.
Part of this reads mostly like the natural outcome of people realizing they can (in theory) get wealthy by helping others exploit the U.S.'s overall ineptitude. Although a lot of them seem to be the cause of the apparent ineptitude. Right now the ability to influence the U.S. to take or withhold from taking a particular action on the international stage may be the single highest value service on the planet. There's no real hope of any other country militarily 'defeating' us but if you can get the U.S. to bomb another country or refuse to support one side of a civil war, then you can be relatively sure that other countries will go along without much complaint.
So intelligence and counter-intelligence are able to achieve outsize effects if they are successful.
I don't know precisely how you could balance out the interest of "we are a clandestine organization that needs to operate with minimal exposure to the public and maximal discretion to act without immediate accountability" and "there needs to be someone NOT beholden to the organization keeping an eye on us to jerk the reins when we misbehave."
I suppose the position of Royal Spymaster will always end up occupied by a figure who will use access to high level intelligence and intrigue to obfuscate his actions so as to avoid accountability. Seems like the question is mostly How do you filter candidates heavily enough that a guy like Beria to run things.
The US IC falls under the Executive Branch. There are various layers of internal overseers, but ultimately it is congressional and judicial oversight that checks the IC or any other Executive Branch entity. The agencies have consistent incentives to keep the president happy because he’s the boss, congress happy because they pass the budgets, the courts happy because they sign off on warrants, and the US public happy because they elect and influence the first two branches directly.
The post you link to focuses on elected officials, which is a very different kettle of fish from career civil servants, the uniformed services, and contractor worker bees.
The whole problem is the 'democratic' functions that are supposed to undergird the entire edifice of accountability are inadequate to the task of punishing misbehavior.
Nobody holds the bureaucrats accountable for screwups that harm the public because nobody holds the mangers accountable because nobody holds the appointed officials accountable because no nobody holds the elected officials who appointed them accountable and the system itself has become designed around diffusing 'responsibility' for screwups in such a way that no one layer has to ever admit blame and accept consequences.
There's very little evidence that screwups actually result in feedback which keeps the responsible party from ever screwing up again, and likewise puts others on notice that their own screwups won't be tolerated.
I assure you that in the IC some significant screw ups, eg 9/11, Iraq WMDs, and Snowden, did lead to significant changes in my previous job. Some of them were good, even.
You can argue those changes were insufficient, bad, or counterproductive, but they happened, and they were substantial at least in the sense that they caused real changes in day-to-day operations.
I fully agree about diffused responsibility and that demonstrated incompetence is not sufficiently punished, which is a major reason I switched careers. But outright malfeasance is typically dealt with.
Leaders who are associated with screw ups tend to have their career progress cut off, but that’s an organizational politics situation.
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