Episode 69: An Introduction to Intelligence Oversight with Dr. Loch K. Johnson

The Precision-Guided Podcast

In this episode of the Precision-Guided Podcast, University of Georgia and Georgetown University alumna Stephanie Cannon interviews Dr. Loch K. Johnson, Regents Professor Emeritus of Public and International Affairs at the University of Georgia, to discuss the relationship between Congress and the intelligence community.

Loch K. Johnson is Regents Professor Emeritus of Public and International Affairs in the School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA) at the University of Georgia. He received the Ph.D. degree in Political Science at the University of California, Riverside. The author of over thirty books, among his most recent are The Third Option: Covert Action and American Foreign Policy (Oxford, 2022); Advanced Introduction to American Foreign Policy (Elgar, 2021); Spy Watching: Intelligence Accountability in the United States (Oxford, 2018); National Security Intelligence: Secret Operations in the Defense of the Democracies (Polity, 2017); and A Season of Inquiry Revisited: The Church Committee Confronts America’s Spy Agencies (University Press of Kansas, 2015). He has been an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow; a Visiting Fellow at Yale and Oxford Universities; a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar; and, for eighteen years (2001-2019), editor-in-chief of the international journal Intelligence and National Security. He also served in the U.S. government as the senior aide to the chairman of the Church Committee on Intelligence in the Senate, as well as the chairman of the Aspin-Brown Commission on Intelligence in the White House. He was the first staff director of the Subcommittee on Oversight in the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. At the University of Georgia he led the founding of SPIA, established in 2001. The consortium of universities that comprise the Southeast Conference (SEC) in the United States selected Professor Johnson as its inaugural “Professor of the Year” in 2012; and the University presented him with its Presidential Medal in 2022.