C0 5453695 Central Intelligence Origin and Evolution Editor Michael Warner CIA History Sta ff Center for the Study ofIntelligence Central Intelligence Agency Washington DC 2001 APPROVED FOR RELEASEL DATE 25-April-2012 CQ5jl53695 l l ii C05453695 Foreword In May 2001 President George W Bush directed that the Director of Central Intelligence commission the first in-depth study of the nation's Intelligence Community in three decades The panels appointed by DCI George Tenet will soon provide him and the President with their findings about the shape of the changing internatiop al order and the ability of the Intelligence Community to respond to the national security challenges and opportunities of the 21 st Century After the panels present their findings the Central Intelligence Agency's Center for the Study oflntelligence in conjunction with the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University intends to sponsor a conference to examine the transition required of the Intelligence Community Panelists and attendees will strive to gain a clearer idea of what in our new era constitutes intelligence to policymakers diplomats commanders and law enforcement officials Conferees will also examine the ways in which the components of the Intelligence Community have adapted since the Cold War and the areas where change is still needed What is the future of central intelligence The creators of the CIA in Congress and the White House believed that the reforms accomplished by the National Security Act of 1947 would minimize problems that had lulled the nation's vigilance before Pearl Harbor The centralization implied in the Truman administration's directive s__an--------d_th----e_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _------l National Security Act never fully occm red however mainly because of the limits on DCI powers codified in that very Act As the Cold War recedes into the past and a new world order emerges it is important to understand why intelligence was centralized in the form it was and to explore differing views about its future The assault on New York's World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon in Washington bring this question into very sharp focus Michael Warner of the CIA History Staff in the Center for the Study of Intelligence has compiled a set of key declassified laws executive orders NSCIDs DCIDs and policy documents guiding the role and growth of the central intelligence function from 1945 to 2000 As a member of the staff that assisted in the preparation of the NSPD-5 report Dr Warner observed at close hand the ways in which the assumptions and charters of the Intelligence Community have endured over the decades and the fates of various attempts to modify them His draft introduction to this volume informed the work of the NSPD-5 staff and I commend it to students of the Intelligence Community for its scope and its insight Admiral David E Jeremiah United States Navy Retired September 2001 iii C05453695 l ' l iv C05453695 CONTENTS Foreword ii ffistorical Perspective 1 Reference Documents I Harry S Truman to the Secretaries of State War and Navy 22 January1946 19 2 National Intelligence Authority Directive 5 8 July 1946 23 3 The National Security Act of 1947 Section 102 26 July 1947 27 4 National Security Council Intelligence Directive 1 Duties and Responsibilities 12 December 1947 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 1 5 National Security Council Intelligence Directive I Duties and Responsibilities 7 July 1949 i 37 · 6 National Security Council Intelligence Directive 1 Duties and Responsibilities 19 January 1950 · 41 7 National Security Council Intelligence Directive 1 Duties and Responsibilities 28 March 1952 45 8 Dwight D Eisenhower to the National Security Council and the Director of Central Intelligence Allen W Dulles 5 August 1957 49 9 National Security Council Intelligence Directive 1 Basic Duties and Responsibilities 21 April 1958 51 V C05453695 10 National Security Council Intelligence Directive 1 Basic Duties and Responsibilities 15 September 1958 • 55 11 National Security Council Intelligence Directive 1 Basic Duties and Responsibilities 18 January 1961 61 12 John F Kennedy Memorandum for the Director of Central Intelligence John A McCone 16 January 1962 67 13 National Security Council Intelligence Directive 1 Basic Duties and Responsibilities 4 March 1964 69 14 Richard M Nixon to the Secretary of State et al Organization and Management ofthe US Foreign Intelligence Community 5 November 19 1 75 15 National Security Council Intelligence Directive 1 Basic Duties and Responsibilities 17 February 1972 83 16 Geralo R Ford Executive Order 11905 United States Foreign Intelligence Activities 18 February 1976 89 17 Jimmy Carter Executive Order 12036 United States Intelligence Activities 24 January 1978 ·········································· ······················· 103 18 Ronald Reagan Executive Order 12333 United States Intelligence Activities 4 December 1981 127 19 George J Tenet Director of Central Intelligence Directive 1 1 The Authorities and Responsibilities ofthe Director ofCentral Intelligence as Head ofthe US Intelligence Community 19 November 1998 • 145 vi C05453695 Historical Perspective what have appeared to be the most striking successes have often if they are not rightly used brought the most overwhelming disasters in their train and conversely the most terrible calamities have if bravely endured actually turned out to benefit the sufferers Polybius The Rise ofthe Roman Empire BookIII 7 The explosions at Pearl Harbor still echoed in Washington when President Harry Truman and Congressional leaders passed the National Security Act of 1947 A joint Congresi ional investigation just a year earlier had concluded that the Pearl Harbor disaster illustrated America's need for a unified command structure and a better intelligence system I Indeed the President and many of his aides rightly believed that the surprise attack could have been blunted if the various commanders and departments had coordinated their actions and shared their intelligence With that thought in mind the creators of the National Security Act attempted to implement the principles of unity of command and unity of intelligence fashioning a National Security Council a Secretary -- --------- of Defense a statutory Joint Chiefs of Staff and a Central Intelligence Agency In almost the next breath however the National Security Act made important concessions to the traditional American distrust oflarge military establishments and centralized power The Act among other qualifications ensured that the Joint Chiefs would not become a Prussian-style General Staff created an independent air force and insisted that the new Central Intelligence Agency CIA would have no law enforcement powers The Act also decreed that the intelligence divisions in the armed services and the civilian departments what came to be called the Intelligence Community'' would remain independent of the CIA Since 1947 Directors of Central Intelligence DCis have served within the bounds of this ambiguous mandate They have had the responsibility of coordinating national intelligence collection and production without a full measure of the authority they needed to do so Many Presidents and Congresses-not to mention DCis-have expressed their frustration with this ambiguity and have assumed that the solution to the dilemmas it created lay in concentrating more power in the office of the Director of Central Intelligence This centralizing impulse has prompted various reforms to increase the Director's ability to lead the Intelligence Community For years these attempts were made by the National Security Council NSC through a series ofNSC Intelligence 1 Joint Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack 79th Congress 2nd Session 1946 pp 252-253 U 1 C05453695 t I Directives In the wake of ''the time of troubles for the Intelligence Community in the mid-l 970s-marked by investigations into questions about excesses and accountabilitythree Presidents issued successive executive orders aimed at one goal rationalizing American intelligence and increasing the DCI' s power Since the end of the Cold War Congress itself has taken up the task repeatedly amending the intelligence sections of the National Security Act The various regulations and amendments however have not fundamentally altered the federalist intelligence structure created in 1947 Strong centrifugal forces remain particularly in the Department of Defense and its Congressional allies Indeed the case for centralization seems to be countered by historical illustrations of the perils of excessive concentration In actual practice the successful end to the Cold War and the lack of any national intelligence disasters since then seem to militate in favor of keeping the existing structure until some crisis proves it to be in dire need of repair Reform After World War II The Agency began its statutory existence in September 1947-its creation ratifying in a sense a series of decisions taken soon after the end of the Second World War 2 That conflict ended in the summer of 1945 with Washington decisionmakers in broad agreement that the United States needed to reform the intelligence establishment that had grown so rapidly and haphazardly during the national emergency Nevertheless when President Truman dissolved the wartime Office of Sttategic Ser vices f- 'o l-' H--n· - - - - - - - - - - - - - - j September 1945 he had no clear plan for constructing the peacetime intelligence structure that he and his advisers believed they needed in an atomic age President Truman wanted the reforms to be part and parcel of the unification of the armed services but the overhaul of the military that the President wanted would take time to push through Congress 3 In the interim he created a Central Intelligence Group CIG to screen his incoming cables and supervise activities left over from the former OSS · In early 1946 the White House authorized CIG to evaluate intelligence from all parts of the government and to absorb the remnants ofOSS's espionage and counterintelligence operations 4 Initially these disparate components of the new CIG 2 Shorthand reference to ''the Agency is commonly used and is used herein as synonymous with CIA Community has long been used and is herein to denote the totality of US executive branch organizations that produce and provide foreign intelligence to US policymakers and military commanders 3 Text of the President's Message to Congress Asking Unification of the Anny and Navy New York Times 20 December 1945 p 14 4 President Truman's 22 January 1946 directive establishing CIG is reprinted in US Department of State Foreign Relations ofthe United States 1945-1950 Emergence ofthe Intelligence Establishment Washington DC United States Government Printing Office 1996 hereafter cited as FRUSJ pp 178179 The first DCI Sidney Souers recalled in 1954 that he had been part of the collective effort leading to CIG's establishment to create a central intelligence agency that would ensure that national security policymakers all would get the same intelligence-in contrast to the system that had prevailed where the OSS would give one bit ofintelligence to the President and not any to the secretaries of the military dep rtments and the State Department who had some responsibility to advise the President Quoted in 2 C05453695 I I shared little in common except an interest in foreign secrets and a sense that both strategic warning and clandestine tctivities abroad required central coordination Indeed these two missions came together in CIG almost by acddent Under the first two Directors of Central Intelligence however CIG and the Truman administration came to realize how strategic warning and clandestine activities complemented one another Meanwhile the military unification issue overshadowed intelligence reform in Congressional and White House deliberations In mid-1946 President Truman called again on Congress to unify the armed services That April the Senate's Military Affairs committee had approved a unification bill that provided for a central intelligence agency but the draft legislation had snagged in the hostile Nava Affairs committee 5 Perhaps with that bill in mind Secretary of War Robert Patterson and Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal in May agreed among themselves that a defense reorganization bill should also provide for a central intelligence agency President Truman the following month sent Congress the result of the Secretaries' accord with modifications of his own repeating his call for lawmakers to send him a unification bill to sign 6 · The administration's judgment that a central intelligence agency was needed soon firmed into a consensus that the new Central Intelligence Group ought to form the basis of this new intelligence agency Indeed CIG continued to accrue missions and capabilities Oversight of the CIG was performed by a committee cal1ed the National Intelligence Authority NIA comprising the Secretaries of State War and Navy joined by the President's chief military adviser Admiral William Leahy National Intelligence Authority Dire tive 5 issued on 8 July 1946 provided the DCI with the bas1 c-------------1 implementation plan for the broad scope of powers envisioned in President Truman's charter for CIG Indeed it was NIAD-5 that created the real difference between OSS-an operations office with a sophisticated analytical capability-and CIG a truly albeit fledgling national intelligence service authorized to perform strategic analysis and to conduct coordinate and control clandestine activities abroad NIAD-5 represented perhaps the most expansive charter ever granted to a Director of Central Intelligence It allowed CIG to centralize research and analysis in fields of national security intelligence that are not being presently performed or are not being adequately performed 7 NIAD-5 also directed the DCI to coordinate all US foreign intelligence activities ''to ensure that the over-all policies and objectives established by this Authority are properly implemented and executed The National Intelligence Authority through this directive ordered the DCI to conduct all organized Federal espionage and counter-espionage operations outside the United States and its Ralph E Weber ed Spymasters Ten CIA Officers in Their Own Words Wilmington DE Scholarly Resources 1999 p 3 5 DavidF Rudgers Creating the Secret State The Origins of the Central Intelligence Agency 1943-1947 Lawrence KS University of Kansas Press 2000 p 107 6 Anthony Leviero Truman Offers Congress 12-Point Program to Unify Armed Services ofNation New York Times 16 June 1946 For the Patterson-Forrestal accord in May 1946 see WalterMillis ed The Forrestal Diaries New York Viking 1951 p 163 7 National Intelligence Authority Directive number 5 8 July 1946 reprinted in FRUS pp 391-392 3 co5453695 I I possessions for the collection of foreign intelligence information required for the national security In NIAD-5 the National Intelligence Authority determined that many foreign intelligence missions could be more efficiently accomplished centrally'' and gave CIG he authority to accomplish them This in effect elevated CIG to the status of being the primary foreign intelligence arm of the US government This mandate did not however give CIG the controlling role in intelligence analysis that DCI Hoyt Vandenberg had sought The NIA' s authorization was carefully phrased to allay fears that the DCI would take control of departmental intelligence offices the Cabinet departments were not about to subordinate their own limited analytical capabilities to an upstart organization In addition NIAD-5 did not force a consolidation of clandestine activities under CIG control Indeed the Army defended the independence ofits Intelligence Division's own collection operations by arguing that NIAD-5 gave CIG control only over organized foreign intelligence operations National Security Act of 1947 Congress initially paid scant attention to the n w Central Intelligence Group Indeed CIG had been established with no appropriations and authority of jts own precisely to keep it beneath Congressional scrutiny As CIG gained new authority in 1946 and-the White House gained confidence in its potential however a consensus emerged in Congress that postwar military reforms would not be complete l - h - n t - - - - - - - - - - - - - 1 simultaneous modernization of American intelligence capabilities The budding consensus even survived the death of the Truman administration's cherished unification bill in 1946 Ironically prospects for unification only brightened when the opposition Republicans subsequently swept into control of the Congress in that year's elections taking over the committee chairmanships and displacing powerful Democrats who had made themselves in Harry Truman's words ''the principal stumbling blocks to unification With the President's goal of military modernization suddenly in sight the White House firmly_told DCI Vandenberg that enabling legislation for CIG would remain a small part of the defense reform bill then being re-drafted by the President's aides and that the intelligence section would be kept as brief as possible in order to ensure that none of its details hampered the prospects for unification 9 8 Harry S Truman Memoirs Volume II ·Years ofTrial and Hope Garden City NY Doubleday 1956 pp 46-47 9 Admiral Forrest Sherman a member of the White House team that drafted the bill later told the House Committee on Expenditures that he and his colleagues feared that a detailed CIA section would prompt Congress to seek similar levels of detail in the armed services' sections of the bill forcing a re-opening of the drafting process and possibly encumbering the draft with controversial specifics See Lyle Miller's declassified draft Legislative History of the Central Intelligence Agency- -National Security Act of 1947 Central Intelligence Agency Office of Legislative Council 25 July 1967 p 72 4 lcos4s369s l ' _ I This tactic almost backfired When President Truman sent his new bill forward in February 1947 the brevity of its intelligence provisions had the effect of attracting-not deflecting-Congressional scrutiny Members of Congress eventually debated almost every word of the intelligence section and made various adjustments Ultimately however Congress passed what was essentially the White House's draft with important sections transferred and clarified in the process from Truman's 22 January 1946 directive establishing CIG-thus ratifying the major provisions of that directive Thus the Central Intelligence Agency would be an independent agency under the supervision of the National Security Council it would conduct both analysis and clandestine activities but would hav no policymaking role and no law enforcement powers its Director would be confirmed by the Senate and could be either a civilian or a military officer What did Congress believe the new CIA would do Testimony and debates over the draft bill unmistakably show that the lawmakers above all wanted CIA to provide the proposed National Security Council-the new organization that would coordinate and guide American foreign and defense policies-with the best possible information on developments abroad Members of Congress described the information they expected CIA to provide as full accurate and skillfully analyzed coordinated adequate and sound Senior military commanders testifying on the bill's behalf used similar· adjectives saying the CIA's information should be authenticated and evaluated correct'' and based on complete coverage '' When CIA provided such information it was believed the NSC would be able to assess accurately the relative strengths and weaknesses of America's overseas posture and adJust pohc1es accordmgly IA---------------1 Congress guaranteed CIA's independence and its access to departmental files in order to give it the best chance to produce authoritative information for the nation's · policymakers CIA was to stand outside the policymaking departments of the government the better to correlate and evaluate intelligence relating to the national security 11 Although other departments and agencies would continue to handle intelligence of national importance the Agency was the only entity specifically charged by the Act with the duty of producing it To assist in the performance of this duty the DCI had the right to inspect'' all foreign intelligence held by other agencies as well as the right to disseminate it as appropriate If the DCI happened to be a military officer then he was to be outside the chain of command of his home service this would help him resist any temptation to shade his reports to please his superiors 12 Finally the Agency was to provide for the US Government such services of common concern that the NSC would determine could more efficiently be conducted centrally In practice this meant lO Quoted in Miller Legislative History pp 40 45 47 48 50 11 Sec 102 d 3 The phrase came from President Truman's 22 January 1946 directive establishing CIG see FRUS p 178 The original pages of the intelligence section of the National Security Act of 1947 are reproduced in Michael Warner ed The CIA under Harry Truman Washington Central Intelligence Agency 1994 pp 131-135 12 The Act was amended in 1953 to provide for a Deputy Director of Central Intelligence DDCI with the stipulation since removed that the positions ofDCI and DDCI must not be occupied simultaneously by commissioned officers of the armed services whether in an active or retired status 5 co5453695 ' espionage and other clandestine activities as well as the collection of valuable information from open sources and American citizens Having approved the placement of these authorities and activities under one head Congress in 1947 expected that CIA would provide the best possible intelligence and would coordinate clandestine operations abroad Congress also implicitly assumed that the executive branch would manage CIA and the Intelligence Community with these purposes in mind 13 After fixing this course in the statute books Congress stepped back and left the White House and CIA to meet these expectations This was how Congress resolved the apparent contradiction of creating central intelligence that was not centrally controlled The institution of central intelligence would henceforth steer between the two poles of centralization and departmental autonomy Not Only National But Central Congress passed the National Security Act on 26 July 1947 and President Truman immediately signed it into law The act gave America something new in the annals of intelligence history no other nation had structured its foreign intelligence establishment in quite the same way CIA would be an independent central agency but not a controlling one it would both rival and complement the efforts of the departmental intelligence organizations 14 This prescription of coordination without control guaranteed friction and duplication of intelligence efforts as the CIA and the· departmental agencies pursued common targets but it also fostered a potentially healthy competition of views and abilities · The National Security Council guided the Intelligence Community by means of a series of directives dubbed NSCIDs the acronym stands for National Security Council Intelligence Directive The original NSCIDs were issued in the months after the passage ofihe National Security Act Foremost was NSCID I titled Duties and 13 Ludwell Montague believed the term Intelligence Community made its earliest documented appearance in the minutes of a 1952 meeting of the Intelligence Advisory Committee For the sake of consistency the term Intelligence Community is used throughout this essay even though the siz e and composition of the community has changed and now includes several large entities that did not exist when the National Security Act was passed in 1947 For example of today's 13 intelligence organizations in the community the National Security Agency the Defense Intelligence Agency the National Reconnaissance Office and the National Imagery and Mapping Agency are among the eight intelJigence organizations that come under the Department of Defense The only independent agency that is not part of a policy department is CIA For the 1952 usage of the term see Ludwell Lee Montague General Walter Bedell Smith as Director of Central Intelligence October 1950-February 1953 University Park PA Pennsylvania State University Press 1992 p 74 14 At the time the Act went into effect the intelligence agencies of the US government comprised the Central Intelligence Agency the Federal Bureau oflnvestigation the Office oflntelligence Research State the Intelligence Division Army the Office ofNaval Intelligence the Directorate oflntelligence Air Force and associated military signals intelligence offices principally the Army Security Agency and the Navy's OP-20-G 6 C05453695 I Responsibilities which replaced NIAD-5 and established the basic responsibilities of the DCI and the interagency workings of the Intelligence Community IS NSCID I did not re-write NIAD-5 but instead started afresh in the light of the debate over the National Security Act and the experience recently gained by the new CIA Where the earlier document had authorized the DCI to coordinate all Federal foreign intelligence activities and sketched the initial outlines of his powers NSCID I had to work within the lines already drawn by Congress and precedent The Director who emerged from NSCID 1 was more circumscribed in his role and authority than previously He was now to make such surveys and inspections as he needed in giving the NSC his recommendations for the coordination of intelligence activities Nonetheless the DCI was-in keeping with Congress' implicit intent in the National Security Act-a substantial presence in the intelligence establishment NSCID 1 gave the DCI an advisory committee comprising the heads of the departmental intelligence offices and told him to produce intelligence but to avoid duplicating departmental functions in doing so The type of intelligence expected of him and his Agency was national intelligence a new term for the information that the National Security Act called intelligence relating to the national security 16 The DCI was also to perform for the benefit of the existing agencies such services of common concern as the NSC deemed could best be provided centrally The NSC left the particulars of these responsibilities to be specified in accompanying NSCIDs which eventually numbered 2 through 15 by the end of the Truman administration in 1953 17 Under this regime DCis were faced with contradictory mandates iliey cou coordinate intelligence but they must n ot control it Since the prohibitions in the statute and the NSCIDs were so much clearer than the permissions every DCI naturally tended to steer on the side oflooser rather than tighter oversight of common Intelligence Community issues Because of this tendency to emphasize coordination instead of control CIA never quite became the integrator of US intelligence·that its presidential and congressional parents had envisioned The DCI never became the manager of the Intelligence Comm Jn ty his Agency ver ' ¥On h pgv er t ins ece he _departments' 15 All versions ofNSCID 1 have been declassified and are available at the National Archives and Records Administration Record Group 263 CIA NN3-263-91-004 box 4 HS HC-500 16 NSClD 3 13 January 1948 defined national intelligence as integrated departmental intelligence iliat covers the broad aspects of national policy and national security is of concern to more than one Department or Agency and transcends the exclusive competence of a single Department or Agency or the Military Establishment Its opposite was departmental intelligence which NSCID 3 defined as intelligence needed by a department or agency ''to execute its mission and discharge its lawful responsibilities see FRUS p 1109 Executive Order 11905 in 1976 retained national intelligence but changed its opposite to a phrase used in President Nixon's 1971 letter tactical intelligence which the executive order did not further define apart from saying that the DCI shall not have responsibility for it E O 11905 also added the overarching term foreign intelligence defining it as information on the capabilities intentions and activities of foreign powers organizations or their agents 17 It bears noting that the NSCIDs endorsed the NIA's 1946 assignment of the two main missions strategic warning and the coordination of clandestine activities abroad to the DCI and his Central Intelligence Group In particular NSCID 5 12 December 1947 reaffirmed NIAD-5 in directing that the DCI shall conduct all organized Federal espionage operations outside the United States except for certain agreed activities by other Departments and Agencies See FRUS p 1106 7 C05453695 ' ' operational plans or to extract community-wide consensus on disputed analytical issues and CIA never had authority over all clandestine operations of the US Government Revisions and Oversight · This federalized intelligence structure did not satisfy the White House fudeed presidents from Dwight Eisenhower through Richard Nixon sought to adjus_t the NSCIDs to improve the functioning of the Intelligence Community primarily by pushing successive DCis to exert more control over common community issues and programs President Eisenhower paid particular attention to this issue approving in 1958 the first major revisions ofNSCID 1 The September 1958 version of the revised directive added a preamble stressing the need for efficiency across the entire national intelligence effort and began its first section by declaring The Director of Central futelligence shall coordinate the foreign intelligence activities of the United States · The September 1958 version ofNSCID 1 also added a section on community responsibilities that listed the duties of the DCI to foster an efficient futelligence Community and to ensure the quality of the intelligence information available to the US Government It also emphasized to the existing departments and agencies their responsibilities to assist the DCI in these tasks To this end the new NSCID I created the United States Intelligence Board USIB a panel chaired by the DCI-with the Deputy Director of Central futelligence the DDCI representing CIA-to coordinate a range of cooperative activities through a network of interagency committees·- m - n - - - - - - - - - - - 1 built a sophisticated set of procedures prompting former CIA Executive Director Lyman Kirkpatrick in 1973 to declare that the USIB structure provides the community with probably the broadest and most comprehensive coordinating mechanism in the history of any nation's intelligence activities 18 In 1971 President Nixon turned to the topic of intelligence reform and issued a directive that precipitated the first major revision of NS CID 1 in over a decade In the spirit of President Eisenhower's-earlier fo itiatives Nixon-authorized-a full-dress study ofIntelligence Community cooperation with an emphasis on cutting its costs and increasing its effectiveness A committee headed by James Schlesinger of the Office of Management and Budget recommended major reforms among them a greater role for the DCI in managing the futelligence Community President Nixon directed the adoption of many of these recommendations in a 5 November 1971 letter to the cabinet secretaries and senior policymakers who oversaw the community's far-flung components I 9 The NSC issued a revised NSCID 1 in February 1972 to disseminate the new guidance to the community 18 Lyman B Kirkpatrick Jr The US Intelligence Community Foreign Policy and Domestic Activities New York Hill Wang 1973 p 39 19 Richard Nixon to the Secretary of State et al Organization and Management of the US Foreign Intelligence Community 5 November 1971 8 C05453695 'i l l ' The new version retained much of the earlier text while adding that the DCI had four major responsibilities He was to plan and review all intelligence activities and spending submitting annually to the White House the community's overall program budget to produce national intelligence for the President and policymakers to chair all community-wide advisory panels and to establish intelligence requirements and priorities In addition the 1972 NSCID 1 established several objectives to guide the DCI in discharging these responsibilities He was to seek the attainment of greater efficiency better and more timely intelligence and perhaps most of all authoritative and responsible leadership for the community The provision for DCI authority albeit limited over the Intelligence Community budget was new and significant henceforth all subsequent directives governing the community would place at least one of the DCl's hands on the collective purse strings The years that followed the issuance of the 1972 version ofNSCID 1 witnessed dramatic changes in the policy dynamic surrounding the Intelligence Community For· several reasons-many of them related to the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal but including Agency misdeeds under earlier administrations as well-Congress began to impose itself directly on CIA and other parts of the Intelligence Community_ in the mid1970s The White House responded to the new mood in Congress by acting to protect what it defended as the exclusive prerogatives of the executive branch Republican and Democratic Presidents had long been content to delegate the chore of overseeing the community to the National Security Council but President Gerald Ford concerned that Congress would re-write the statutes undergirding the Intelligence Community intervened with an executive order that supplanted the earlier NSCIDs ----------------1 Executive Order 11905 18 February 1976 retained much of the language of the 1972 NSCID 1 but added much else as well Most prominently it established a lengthy list of restrictions on intelligence activities which ran the gamut from a prohibition on the perusal of federal tax returns to a ban on political assassination E O 11905 also revisited the traditional ground covered by the now-obsolete NSCID 1 series assigning duties and responsibilities Intelligence Community - - to the - DCI and the- various ·•-members of - the - President Ford's executive order did not diverge noticeably however from the earlier listings of the DCI's duties These were now to be acting as executive head of the CIA and Intelligence Community staff preparing the community's budget requirements and priorities serving as primary adviser on foreign intelligence '_' and implementing special activities i e covert action Indeed E O 11905 encouraged the DCI to devote more energy to ''the supervision and direction of the Intelligence Community In this spirit it revived an Eisenhower administration idea and urged the DCI to delegate the day-to-day operation of CIA to his Deputy Director for Central Intelligence President Jimmy Carter superseded E O 11905 with his own Executive Order 12036 barely two years later The new order retained basically the same albeit reordered list of duties for the DCI in his dual role as manager of the Intelligence 9 954 695 I I Community and head of CIA It also revamped the old United States Intelligence Board expanding the list of topics on which it w s to advise the DCI and renaming it the National Foreign Intelligence Board NFIB Where E O 12036 differed from preceding directives was in tasking the DCI to oversee the Intelligence Community budget President Ford's executive order had created a three-member committee chaired by the DCI to· prepare the budget and when necessary to reprogram funding 20 Under the new provisions ofE O 12036 however the DCI now had full and exclusive responsibility for approval of the National Foreign Intelligence Program budget These combined powers were somewhat less sweeping than under E O 11905 but more concentrated in now being vested in the DCI alone He would issue guidance to the community for program and budget development evaluate the submissions of the various agencies justify them before Congress monitor implementation and he could after due consultation reprogram funds President Ronald Reagan in his tum replaced the Carter directive with Executive Order 12333 4 December 1981 which remains in effect today The new order deleted provisions for the NFIB and other boards allowing the DCI to arrange interagency advisory panels as he needed DCI William Casey quickly reinstated the NFffi on his own authority This was however almost the only enhancement of the DCI's power in an executive order that otherwise stepped back slightly from the centralization decreed by President Carter Specifically E O 12333 diluted DCI authority over the National Foreign Intelligence Program budget that E O 12036 had briefly strengthened Where Carter had explicitly made the DCI the manager of the NFIP budgeting process Reagan instead outlined a leading role for the DCI in developmg the budget rev1ew m g r eq u e s_ _ _ _ _ _ __ for the reprogramming of funds and monitoring implementation The change was not dramatic but it was significant Management of the Intelligence Community by executive order during this period did not forestall increased Congressional oversight In the 1970s both houses of Congress had created permanent intelligence oversight committees and passed legislation to tighten control of covert action With the renewed polarization of foreign policy debates in the 1980s both Republican and n·eniocratic officials and-lawmakers sought to protect intelligence from allegedly unprincipled forces that might somehow co-opt and abuse it to the detriment of the community and the nation's security Responding to these concerns C_ongress further toughened the new regulatory oversight and accountability regime to check the powers and potential for abuses at CIA and other agencies Congress ensured permanence for these changes by codifying them as amendments to law particularly to the National Security Act of 1947 By the late 1980s Congress's increased oversight role and its new appe tite for finished intelligence prompted then-DDCI Robert Gates to comment publicly that CIA now finds itself in a remarkable position involuntarily poised nearly equidistant 20 The panel had been created by E O 11905 which titled it the Commi e on Foreign Intelligence it comprised the DCI chairman the Deputy Secretary ofDefense for Intelligence and the Deputy Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs 10 C05453695 n l J between the executive and legislative branches 21 Not until the 1990s however did these changes significantly affect the duties and responsibilities of the DCI and the Intelligence Community Into a New Era For the duration of the Cold War the White House kept nudging successive Directors of Central Intelligence to do more to lead the Intelligence Community DCis more or less tried to comply The statutory and institutional obstacles to centralization however proved daunting Each DCI held budgetary and administrative sway only over the Central Intelligence Agency the much larger budgets and staffs of the intelligence agencies in the Department of Defense and their smaller cousins in other departments remained firmly under cabinet-level officials who saw no reason to cede power to a DCI Faced with this reality DCis had tended to let their community coordination duties suffer and to concentrate on the management of the CIA Congress had intended a different course however and in the 1990s the legislative branch began its own campaign to · encourage greater coordination in the Intelligence Community The end of the Cold War saw a subtle shift in Congressional attitudes toward intelligence With the political need for a peace dividend acutely felt Congress and the White House oversaw a gradual decline in real defense spending that affected the Intelligence Community as well Declining defense budgets soon meant relatively declining intelligence budgets which in turn put-a-premium on cost-cutting ---------------1 consolidation and efficiency Similar concerns had surfaced during the debate over the creation of CIA when demobilization not the incipient Cold War was still the primary consideration in defense budgeting 22 To many members of Congress in 1992-as in 1947-the answer seemed to lie in increased authority for the DCI who in turn could motivate a leaner more agile_Intelligence Community Congress in the 1990s partially supplanted E O 12333 with a series of amendments to the National Security Act Those amendments were occasionally proscriptive like the prohibitions added in the 1980s but often they mandated various acts by the DCI The intelligence-related passages of the National Security Act-which had hardly been amended at all before 1980-grew from 22 pages of text in the 1990 edition of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence's Compilation of Intelligence Laws to 48 pages in the 2000 version 23 21 Robert M Gates The CIA and American Foreign Policy Foreign Affairs 66 Winter 1987 88 p 225 Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones Why Was the CIA Established in 1947 Intelligence and National Security 12 January 1997 p 30 23 Unless otherwise noted all amendments to the National Security Act cited herein are published in the several editions 1993 1998 or 2000 of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence's Compilation ofIntelligence Laws 22 ·11 C05453695 I l Foremost among these amendments was the Intelligence Organization Act of 1992 24 Inspired by the reforms of the Joint Chiefs of Staff accomplished in the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act the legislation-for the first tinie in a statute-specified the roles as opposed to the duties of the Director of Central Intelligence 25 The DCI was to serve as head of the Intelligence Community as principal intelligence adviser to the president and as head of the CIA As principal intelligence adviser he was to provide the nation's senior policymakers coinmanders and lawmakers with national intelligence that was ''timely objective independent of political considerations and based on all sources As head of the Agency he was to collect and evaluate intelligence particularly frqm human sources and to perform services of common concern and such other functions and duties as had been suggested since 1947 As head of the Intelligence Community he was to develop the Community's budget to advise the Secretary of Defense in the appointments of chiefs for the military' s joint intelligence agencies to set collection requirements and priorities to eliminate unneeded duplication and to coordinate the community's relationships with foreign intelligence services The Intelligence Organization Act also codified the DCl's budgetary powers as described in E O 12333 considerably strengthening their provisions The act decreed that the budgets of the various components of the Intelligence Community coul_d not be incorporated into the annual National Foreign Intelligence Program until approved by the DCI and required all agencies to obtain DCI approval before reprogramming any NFIP funds In addition the Act gave the Director something new a carefully limited authority to shift funds and personnel from one NFIP project to another provided he obtained approvals from the White House Congress and the affected agenc-y s_ _e_a-r - ------------l Events at mid-decade lent new urgency to the unfinished task of modernizing the Intelligence Community At CIA the arrest of Aldrich Ames and the spy scandal that ensµed led to bipartisan calls for reform of the Agency The subsequent Republican takeover of Congress in the 1994 elections seemed to provide an opportunity for sweeping changes in the community as a whole Finally the re ordering of national priorities after the end of the Cold War had meant substantial budget cuts for the US 24 The Intelligence Organization Act was passed as part of the Intelligence Authorization Act for FY 1993 Much of its text came from S 2198 introduced by Sen David L Boren D-OK and titled the Intelligence Reorganization Act of 1992 S 2198 proposed a Director ofNational Intelligence to head the Intelligence Community subordinate to this new officer would be the newly-styled Director of the Central Intelligence Agency Senate Select Committee on Intelligence S 2198 and S 421 to Reorganiz e the United States Intelligence Community 102d Congress 2d Session 1992 p 2 The companion bill in the House of Representatives was HR 4165 which offered a milder version of the DNI proposal See also Frank J Smist Jr Congress Oversees the United States Intelligence Community 1947-1994 Knoxville University ofTennessee Press 1994 2d ed pp 286-287 25 The Goldwater-Nichols Act is widely credited with adding coherence to the Joint Chiefs of Staff structure-another creation of the National Security Act of 1947--'-which had long been viewed as fragmented and less effective than it should have been in advising the commander-in-chief - Among other reforms Goldwater Nichols strengthened the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs naming him as opposed to the Joint Chiefs as a body the principal military adviser to the President clarifying his place in the national chain of command giving him a Vice Chairman and improving the Joint Staff See Ronald H Cole et al The Chairmanship ofthe Joint Chiefs ofStaff Washington Office of the Chairman the Joint Chiefs of Staff Joint History Office 1995 pp 25-38 of 12 C05453695 -i f T j military resulting in reduced budgets and lower personnel ceilings for the Intelligence Community 26 While military and intelligence resources had been reduced in early 1990s however Washington committed American forces to several major overseas deployments in Africa the Balkans the Mi_ddle East and the Caribbean The White House responded to the new situation by re-ordering intelligence priorities The burgeoning military deployments demanded ever more tactical intelligence support and President William Clinton issued a 1995 presidential order PDD-35 instructing the Intelligence Community to provide it Explaining his directive at CIA headquarters a few months later he emphasized that the Community's first priority was to support the intelligence needs of our military during an operation Commanders in the field needed ''prompt thorough intelligence to fully inform their decisions and maximize the security of our troops 27 Since the military spent most of the 1990s deployed in one peacekeeping operation after another often with more than one taking place at a time the result of the commitment in PDD-35 was a diversion of shrinking national strategic intelligence resources to growing tactical missions Congress took a little longer to respond In 1995 Congressional and outside critics coalesced in no fewer than six separate panels to study the US intelligence effort and recommend reforms 28 Almost all of the reports published by these groups endorsed a greater degree of centralization and enhanced authority for the Director of Central Intelligence 29 The wide variance in the size and scope of the study groups-which Commission on National Security 21 st Century Road Map for National Security Imperative for Change Washington United States Government Printing Office 2001 p 82 27 President William J Clinton address to the US Intelligence Community delivered at the Central Intelligence Agency's headquarters 14 July 1995 28 The six panels' reports were Commission on the Roles and Missions of the United States Intelligence Community the Brown Aspin commission Preparing or the 21s1 Century An Appraisal of US Intelligence Washington United States Government Printing Office 1996 House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence IC21 Intelligence Community in the 21 st Century 104th Cong 2d Sess 1996 Richard N Haass Project Director for the Independent Task Force Making Intelligence Smarter The Future of US Intelligence New York Council on Foreign Relations 1996 Working Group on Intelligence Reform Abram Shulsky and Gary Schmitt authors The Future of US Intelligence Washington Consortium for the Study oflntelligence 1996 the Twentieth Century Fund Task Force on the Future of US Intelligence Stephen Bosworth chairman In From the Cold New York Twentieth Century Fund Press 1996 and Georgetown University's Institute for the Study ofDiplomacy Jo4n Hollister Hedley author Checklist for the Future ofIntelligence Washington Institute for the Study of Diplomacy 1995 29 The lone dissenter was the Consortium for the Study of Intelligence's report overseen by Georgetown political scientist Roy Godson and Harvard historian Ernest May Its authors concluded the failure ofcentralization efforts can be seen as reflecting the reasonable needs ofthe various components ofthe national security bureaucracy In any case the centralized model was probably better suited to the Cold War with its emphasis on national level intelligence about the Soviet strategic nuclear threat than to the present period when departmental regional and tactical intelligence requirements have exploded and gained new urgency See pp xiv-xv 26 13 C05453695 ' f ' ranged in stature from academic colloquia to the presidentially-appointed Brown-Aspin commission-seemed to highlight their basic agreement on this issue The Brown-Aspin commission report perhaps expressed the feeling best After considering arguments for decentralization the report cited President Truman's disgust with the·bureaucratic rivalry that contributed to the disaster at ·Pearl Harbor'' and concluded that returning to a more decentralized system would be a step in the wrong direction The report declined to suggest alterations in ''the fundamental relationship between the DCI and the Secretary of Defense but nonetheless urged a strengthening of''the DCI's ability to provide centralized management of the Intelligence Community 30 Congress heeded the conclusions and the recommendations of these several reports when it drafted the Intelligence Renewal and Reform Act of 1996 That Act among its other provisions required the Secretary of Defense to win the concurrence of the DCI in appointing directors for the National Security Agency the new National Imagery and Mapping Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office Under the Act the DCI would also write for the NSC annual performance appraisals of these three agencies 3 1 The Act also gave the DCI several new aides nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate to assist in managing the Intelligence Community a Deputy Director of Central Intelligence for Community Management as well as Assistant Directors of Central Intelligence for Collection Analysis and Production and · Administration It also enhanced the DCI's role as an adviser to the Pentagon's tactical and inter-service intelligence programs strengthened his limited ability to reprogram money and personnel between national intelligence programs and created a subcommittee of the NSC to establish annual priorities for the Intelligence Co rrr t ----------- Congress did not however resist the shift of national mearis to tactical ends The shift of inteliigence resources toward support for military operations worried officials and observers of the Intelligence Community Indeed DCI Robert Gates complained as early as 1992 that cuts in the defense budget were forcing the military to trim tactical intelligence programs and pass their work on to the ''national intelligence services 32 PDD-35 seemed to make the situation even more acute More than one appraisal in the year after its issuance warned that support to the warfighter could demand a disproportionate share of intelligence efforts a Congressional study even blamed PDD35 in part for this development 33 Nevertheless these worries remained on the margins of the debate for several more years The Twentieth Century Fund's report did not discuss the DCI's responsibilities or the centralization issue although a Background Paper'' by Allan E Goodman bound with the report implicitly endorsed greater powers for the DCI see p 78 3 Commission on Roles and Missions Preparing or the 21st Century pp xix 51-52 31 See Sections 808 and 815 of the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1997 Compilation of Intelligence Laws 1998 32 Testimony of Robert Gates on I April 1992 at the Joint Hearing Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and House Pennanent Select Committee on Intelligence S 2198 and S 421 to Reorganize the United States Intelligence Community 102nd Cong 2nd Sess 1992 p 108 33 For expressions of official and outside concern see House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence IC21 Intelligence Community in the 21•t Century 104til Cong 2d Sess 1996 p 245 See also the joint comment by Morton I Abramowitz and Richard Kerr in Richard N Haass Project Director for the ° 14 C05453695 ii f I l ' _ii Contradictory Impulses The net effect of the changes made both by the White Hou e and by Congress under both Republican and Democratic majorities was to urge the DCI to exercise more control· over the Intelligence Community while limiting his freedom to allocate ·'national intelligence resources among competing priorities Members of Congress collectively seemed impatient with executive branch implementation of reforms to strea mline and motivate the community during a long decade of shrinking real defense budgets At the same time however no Congress seriously considered forcing the various civilian and military agencies into a unitary system with a Director of Central Intelligence or whatever the title transformed into a true intelligence czar The executive branch neither assisted nor resisted this congressional impulse to enhance the DCI's authority and the centralization of the Intelligence Community In effect however the White House's aforementioned actions with regard to intelligence were anything but neutral The contradictory impulses affecting the Intelligence Community showed in the way the executive and legislative branches together crafted a 1996 law the National Imagery and Mapping Agency NIMA Act which created the Department of Defense agency_of that name out of components from CIA and Defense While this marked a diminution of the DCI' s direct control ·over imagery analysis the NIMA Act took pains to preserve DCI authority to prioritize assignments for national imagery collection assets and to resolve conflicts among competing priorities 34 The net effcfTH --------------i ambiguous the DCI and the CIA lost actual d y-to-day control over an important component of the Intelligence Community but gained a statutory voice in the nation's employment of that component In 1998 DCI George Tenet issued a reconstituted series of Director of Central Intelligence Directives DCIDs led by a new DCID-1 1 titled The Authorities and Responsibilities of the Director of Central Intelligence as Head of the US Intelligence Community DCIDs had traditionally not been issued as policy statements they had essentially been implementing documents for the policies established in the NSCIDs and later in the executive orders DCID 1 1 stayed well within this tradition but provided an important reference for the entire community by arranging arid citing in one document the key passages of Executive Order 12333 and the amended National Security Act The preface to DCID 1 1 stated that it was only intended to be illustrative Indeed readers were directed to the citations for controlling language This spare format perhaps conveyed a message more powerful than its authors realized The DCI' s new-found ability to cite so many passages of the United States Code to buttress his authority meant that his powers had grown substantially since its meager beginnings in Independent Task Force Making Intelligence Smarter The Future of US Intelligence New York Council on Foreign Relations 1996 p 38 34 See Section 1112 of the Nati9nal Imagery and Mapping Agency Act which was passed as part of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1997 Compilation ofIntelligence Laws 2000 15 January 1946 The fact that a DCI felt the need to cite all those passages for the edification oflntelligence Community colleagues however suggests that his authority still had far to go The blurring of the divide between nationaF' and tactical intelligence seemed at decade's end to provide unclear portents for the future of the DCl's authority By 2000 the earlier warnings were widely seen to have been accurate A high-level study commission recently has complained that declining intelligence resources combined with increased demands for warning and crisis management have resulted in an Intelligence Community thpt is more demand-driven That demand is also more driven by military consumers and therefore what the Intelligence Community is doing is narrower and more short-term than it was two decades ago 35 Another commission reporting its findings on the National Reconnaissance Office found in PDD-35 a lightning rod for its criticism There appears to be no effective mechanism to alert policy-makers to the negative impact on strategic requirements that may result from strict adherence to the current Presidential Decision Directive PDD-35 assigning top priority to military force protection That Directive has not been reviewed recently to determine whether it has been properly applied and should remain in effect 36 The Elusive Vision of Central Intelligence Today intelligence remains the only area ofhighly complex government activity where overall management across departmental and agency lines is seriously attempted 37 Ten years past the end of the Cold War and five since the spate ofreform proposals in 1996 this observation by the Brown-Aspin commission seems to remain valid The Director of Central Intelligence is nominally stronger now new laws and amendments have augmented his power to lead the Intelligence Community Nevertheless the community remains a confederated system in which the DCI has leadership responsibilities greater than his responsibilities The system seems roughly balanced between the need for central direction and the imperative to preserve departmental intelligence autonomy If that balance perhaps appears to be less than optimal there nevertheless is no obvious imperative to correct it in any fundamental way Indeed the 2001 report of the blue-ribbon Commission on National Security 21 st 35 Commission on National Security Road Map for National Security p 82 36 National Commission for the Review of the National Reconnaissance Office Final Report Washington United States Government Printing Office 2000 p 51 37 Commission on Roles and Missions Preparing or the 21st Century p 47 16 C05453695 i 'c f '-# Century the Hart-Rudman commission recommended no major structural changes in the management of the Intelligence Community and noted that current efforts to strengthen community management while maintaining the ongoing relationship between · the DCI and the Secretary of Defense are bearing fruit 3 8 The members of Congress who passed the National Security Act of 1947 had wanted the new Central Intelligence Agency to provide policymakers the best possible information and to coordinate clandestine operations They assumed that the President's intelligence officer-the Director of Central Intelligence-would accomplish these objectives and left the executive branch to its own initiative for the next four decades This was how Congress resolved the dilemma of having a national intelligence system that was not centrally controlled Succeeding presidents oversaw the Intelligence Community through a series ofNational Security Council Intelligence Directives and executive orders which recognized the gap between coordination and control and encouraged DCis to do more to bridge it and to manage America's intelligence efforts After the Cold War ended however Democratic and Republican Congresses grew impatient with the executive branch and urged that intelligence be done centrally Nonetheless no Congress grasped the nettle of sweeping reform either to decentralize the system or to give the DCI command authority over military intelligence and the departmental intelligence offices At the same time the executive branch's insistence on using declining resources first and foremost to support military operations effectively blunted the Congressional emphasis on centralization by limiting the wherewithal that DCls and agency heads could devote to national and strategic objectives This ambiguity is likely to endure for the same reasons it arose in the first place no one can agree on what should replace it Reform faces the same obstacles that Harry Truman and his aides encountered in 1945 Everyone has a notion of how reform should be implemented but everyone also has a specific list of changes they will not tolerate The mix of preferences and objections produces a veto to almost every proposal until the one that survives is the one policymakers and legislators dislike the least Ambiguity is also likely to keep alive the durable idea-born from the Pearl Harbor disaster-that the axiomatic principles of unity of command and unity of intelligence can best be served through an increased centralization of US intelligence efforts America's national security framework forces such ambiguities on policymakers and commanders for good reasons as well as bad The great economic and military strength of America and the comparative material wealth of its Intelligence Community has provided a certain latitude for experimentation-and even duplication of effort-in the service of higher political goals In such a context a decentralized Intelligence Community may be the only kind of system that can maintain public and military support for an independent civilian foreign intelligence arm in America's non-parliamentary form of government where it is possible for the two major political ·parties to split control over the executive and legislative branches of government Decentralization assures the Pentagon of military control over its tactical and joint intelligence programs It also 38 Commission on National Security Road Map for National Security p 83 17 C05453695 J _ rt ' Jli 1 assures members of Congress of both parties that the President's chief intelligence adviser cannot acquire a dangerous concentration of domestic political power or monopolize the foreign policy advice flowing into the White House Thus we are likely to live with the de-centralized intelligence system-and the impulse toward centralization-until a crisis re-aligns the political and bureaucratic players or compels them to cooperate in new ways 18