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Changing American Intelligence

Six Episodes

Michael Warner
CIA History Staff

You cannot discuss reform without reference to form.

O.K. Chesterton

The American intelligence establishment may not be the world's largest, but it is
surely the costliest and it wields perhaps the broadest range of capabilities. For now it is
also arguably the most newsworthy. Its very prominence means that its accomplishments
and shortcomings, real or perceived, often appear in sharp relief. It also suggests that
some form of intelligence reform may be likely as the White House and Congress
demand that intelligence do more to support the war on terrorism and military
"transformation." Indeed, the press has reported on all manner of intelligence reform
proposals since the attacks of 11 September 2001.
While significant changes in the Intelligence Community seem possible, there is
no consensus about what must change and how. What complicates the discussion is the
difficulty of understanding how the intelligence agencies and capabilities fit together as a
whole—how they complement and compete with one another, as well as how they were
constructed and collectively developed. Few Americans—even those working in
intelligence—have a good grasp of the structure as a functioning system, and even fewer
have watched that system evolve. Theoretical models of how corporations and military
organizations function offer some insights, but these are usually models of single entities,
not of what the Intelligence Community is—a collection of offices and agencies with
different missions, cultures, and legal authorities.
The best way to understand how the American intelligence establishment can
change might be to learn how it has in fact changed in the past. Historical examples can
show policymakers the bounds of what is possible and beneficial for intelligence in our
constitutional order. While no official history of the Community exists, students of
intelligence can still glean insights from what has already been declassified and publicly
discussed.
The following six episodes were selected and arranged in the hope of illustrating
why American intelligence evolved as it did, what its major functions are, and how, at
times, its components have meshed in a totality greater than the sum of its parts. They
show the several disciplines of the Community, and how those disciplines provide
actionable, secret information to users, and support through clandestine activities the
implementation of US foreign and security policies. They were also chosen to illuminate
the variety of ways in which reforms of the Community have come to pass, and to show
different ways in which reform can be made to work.

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Defending the Homeland in World War I

The first mission of any nation's intelligence structure is to defend the nation, its
population, and its vital interests. Historically those nations with intelligence systems
created them in hopes of augmenting the efforts of their military and domestic security
organizations to protect the regime from threats, both internal and external. Indeed,
intelligence gradually emerged as a profession as much from the "domestic security"
field as from the military art. This was indeed the case in the United States, where the
events that caused the federal government to create a rudimentary but permanent
intelligence establishment came about as a result of the First World War.
That struggle tempted Germany and Britain to compromise American neutrality
during the 32 months in which the United States remained aloof from the conflict. Each
side wanted access to American goods and capital, and wanted to deny it to the other.
The Germans took the more dangerous and risky approach. Germany's noisy but
comparatively bloodless sabotage campaign in the United States reached its height in
1916, when agents resorted to desperate measures to slow the flow of war materiel to the
Allies. The most spectacular incident was the explosion at Black Tom pier in New York
harbor, which shook the city and caused millions of dollars worth of damage. The
campaign was costly to Berlin, however, because it—with Germany's waging of
unrestricted submarine warfare—convinced many Americans that the Kaiser was a
ruthless enemy of the United States.1
British diplomats and operatives had an easier task. They strove to confirm in
American minds the suspicion that German agents roamed the streets, and also to dampen
Washington's complaints about Britain's blockade of Central Europe and its aggressive
censorship of cable and mail traffic. America's reaction to the Zimmerman Telegram in
early 1917 was in part a triumph for British intelligence. Germany's famous overture to
Mexico was authentic enough, but its presentation to President Wilson was made more
convincing thanks to the efforts of Royal Navy codebreakers and some adroit espionage
by British agents. After America joined the Allies that April, US policymakers and
security services remained dependent upon the British for strategic intelligence and
counterintelligence leads—a situation that London could not help but to exploit to its own
advantage.2
The Germans and the British were able to affect public sentiment and policy
decisions in America in part because of the weakness of this nation's security and
intelligence statutes and services. In 1914 no federal law banned peacetime espionage
and sabotage, which meant that federal agencies had no warrant to investigate the
German campaign, and that bewildered local authorities were left to their own devices.
Congress redressed the first problem by passing the Espionage Act of 1917, the statute
that still undergirds American counterintelligence law. Passage of the Act also
empowered the Justice Department to tackle the second problem; its Bureau of

Michael Warner, "The Kaiser Sows Destruction: Protecting the Homeland the First Time
Around," Studies in Intelligence 46:1 (2002), pp. 3-9.
2 Christopher Andrew, For the President's Eyes Only: Secret Intelligence and the American
Presidency from Washington to Bush (New York: HarperCollins, 1996 [1995]), pp. 38-52.
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Investigation took the lead in the nation's counterattack on German operatives. The
Bureau (which was renamed the FBI in 1935) has been the premier American
counterintelligence service ever since, in part because of J. Edgar Hoover's determination
to professionalize it in order to ensure that foreign agents never again mounted another
sabotage campaign on American soil.
The larger effort against sabotage also prompted the military to establish
permanent codebreaking teams. Decrypting the coded messages of German agents
originally formed much of the early work of the US Army's codebreaking section, MI-8,
housed in a reconstituted Military Intelligence Division and headed by Herbert O.
Yardley. Yardley spent much of this career in the State Department, however, and he
grasped the potential to exploit his cryptologic prowess to garner positive intelligence
from diplomatic and military communications. Although Secretary of State Stimson in
1929 halted State's subsidy of the Yardley operation with the famous sentiment that
"Gentlemen do not read each other's mail," by that time the Army and Navy cryptologic
programs were permanently established and building the capability that would serve so
well in the next conflict.3
The widespread impression that Britain and Germany had taken advantage of
America in World War I had two more far-reaching effects on the public's view of
intelligence issues. A generation of Americans drew the lesson that enemy aliens in our
midst can cause great mischief in wartime, and therefore must be closely watched. This
sentiment lasted into World War II, when it colored public opinion against German- and
Japanese-Americans, and even into the Cold War, where it fueled allegations of
Communist influence and fears of a Soviet Fifth Column. The second effect was a
popular resentment against foreign intrigue that, until the fall of France and Pearl Harbor,
restrained America's response to the rise of the totalitarianism in Europe. This attitude in
Congress and to a lesser extent in the Executive Branch helped to ensure that American
intelligence capabilities—though professionalized and made more capable through the
efforts of their new codebreaking offices—would remain small and defensively oriented
through the inter-war years.
As a result of World War I and the violence on American soil, policymakers
quietly agreed that maintaining a permanent intelligence establishment—like a
professional, standing military—was cheaper and safer than building one from scratch in
wartime. Before the 20th Century the ways of conducting intelligence had not changed
much since Biblical times, but in the First World War the use of electronic signals,
overhead imagery, and air power had created new arenas for intelligence exploitation,
new demands for military and policy support, and new security challenges. Nevertheless,
the nation as a whole was still not ready to maintain either its military or its intelligence
capability at a size that would enable them to exercise much influence in policymaking,
or project more than a token presence overseas.

Creating an Offensive Intelligence Capability

3 G.J.A. O'Toole, Honorable Treachery: A History of US Intelligence, Espionage, and Covert

Action from the American Revolution to the CIA (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1991), pp.
330-343.
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The Second World War forced dramatic changes in America's national strategy
and the means employed by its military forces and its intelligence services. The United
States created and transformed whole intelligence organizations, doctrines, and skills to
fashion new tools for an emerging national security strategy.
American intelligence in 1939 was ready to win the last war. In the late 1930s
President Franklin D. Roosevelt had quietly ordered the FBI to monitor Communist and
Fascist sympathizers. When Hitler invaded Poland the White House authorized the FBI
to take more aggressive measures. The Army and Navy intelligence agencies soon joined
the FBI in a committee to coordinate their activities; it bears note that the focus of this
coordination—America's first true, civilian/military intelligence arrangement—was on
the prevention of another sabotage campaign. These combined efforts largely stymied
the work of Axis agents in America.
Spring 1940 marked the historic break in America's conception of its role in the
world. Hitler in one season conquered France, Norway, Denmark, and the Low
Countries. Suddenly the Nazis controlled the Continent from the Arctic Circle to the
Pyrenees, and seemed poised to swallow Spain, Gibraltar, and North Africa. Britain
stood alone, and if the Royal Navy were sunk or surrendered—either was possible—
Germany would own the entire eastern side of the Atlantic. Once that happened,
President Roosevelt believed, war would inevitably come to the New World, at a time
and place of Hitler's choosing.
One could hardly exaggerate the shock these events had on Washington. Driving
the sense of crisis was the growing recognition that technology had foreclosed even
America's latest defense plans. Long-range bombers could reach across oceans, and the
resources the United States needed to run its economy had to be imported from around
the world. An enemy with a monopoly on key supplies—or controlling devastating new
technologies—could attain a preponderance of power over the United States without a
shot being fired on American soil. Realizing that traditional defense planning was
suddenly obsolete, President Roosevelt concluded that America's first line of defense was
now the English Channel. If we missed this chance to stop Hitler in Europe, he
proclaimed, we would have to fight him here, or turn America into an armed camp and
lose our traditions of liberty in so doing. America might survive as "a lone island," he
suggested, but only by mortgaging its freedoms and prosperity.4
President Roosevelt and Congress spent the 18 months between the fall of France
and Pearl Harbor trying to prepare America for the coming conflict. Congress
quadrupled defense spending in one year, and authorized conscription for the first time in
peacetime. Roosevelt ran for an unprecedented third term, and drafted Republicans
Henry Stimson and Frank Knox to oversee the Army and Navy. He sent arms and ships
to Great Britain through Lend Lease and authorized work on an atomic bomb. The
British and American militaries shared an amazing quantity of technical and intelligence
data, inaugurating a strategic partnership that would endure for decades to come.

4 Roosevelt said on 10 June 1940 at Charlottesville, Virginia (in his famous "Stab in the Back"
speech) that it was a delusion to believe Americans "can safely permit the United States to
become a lone island in a world dominated by the philosophy offeree."
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The crisis of 1940 also caused significant changes in American intelligence.
Congress passed the draconian Smith Act, criminalizing conspiracy to overthrow the
government and requiring the periodic re-registration of aliens (and thus giving federal
law enforcement a powerful weapon to use against radicals of all stripes). An Army-
Navy-FBI intelligence committee, with FDR's intervention and blessing, worked out an
arrangement whereby the Bureau would create its own intelligence service in Latin
America—the first such organized, civilian organization in American history. Called the
Special Intelligence Service (SIS), this outfit would start slowly over the next year as
Hoover and his agents felt their way in an unfamiliar realm. The FBI gained new powers
at home as well when the President and Treasury Secretary Morgenthau secretly reversed
long-standing prohibitions on wiretapping and scrutiny of bank transactions. As
Raymond Batvinis has noted, these measures collectively made the Bureau a true
counterintelligence service and enabled it to stymie the work of Axis agents in America.5
Even if Lend Lease and US help could save England, however, Roosevelt and his
commanders still had to figure out how to defeat Hitler. American and British planners
secretly in March 1941 outlined a joint war plan for use if and when America entered the
conflict, which they assumed could be a two-front war with Japan as well. They agreed
to concentrate on defeating Germany first, and to employ, at least initially, the strategies
of naval blockade, aerial bombardment of German industry, and clandestine subversion
to spark rebellions in Nazi-occupied territory.6 The British were already implementing
all three parts of this strategy, and had created in their Special Operations Executive a
clandestine, offensive capability to "set Europe ablaze," in Prime Minister Churchill's
famous phrase.7
The joint war plan's secret call for an American "Fifth Column" office caused a
problem for the White House because the US government had no such thing at the time.
President Roosevelt could hardly have imagined using his existing intelligence bureaus,
as small and defensively focused as they were, in such a role. These organizations were
just beginning to collect intelligence by secret means abroad, mostly in Latin America.
They could not even settle inter-mural disputes about their tiny espionage units without
White House intervention. How, Roosevelt must have wondered, could these agencies
mount a clandestine campaign overseas?
William J. Donovan soon offered a solution. A New York corporate lawyer and
globe-trotting foreign affairs expert, Donovan in June 1941 proposed to the White House
a plan to use intelligence as an offensive weapon in an office to perform espionage,
propaganda, guerrilla warfare, and intelligence analysis. He offered to work with the
British, and the British told Roosevelt—on the very day Donovan submitted his plan—
that they wanted to work with him. Donovan also assured a White House weary of inter-

5 Raymond J. Batvinis, '"In the Beginning': An Examination of the Development of the Federal
Bureau of Investigation's Counterintelligence Program, 1936-1941," unpublished doctoral
dissertation, Department of History, Catholic University of America, 2001, pp. 81-83, 132, 326-
328.
6 Maurice Matloff and Edwin M. Snell, Strategic Planning for Coalition Warfare (Washington:
Department of the Army, 1953), pp. 44-46.
7 J.R.M Butler, Grand Strategy, Volume II, September 1939-June 1941, in United Kingdom
Military Series, History of the Second World War (London; Her Majesty's Stationery Office,
1964), pp. 215, 549-550.
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agency turf squabbles that he would leave domestic security to the FBI and technical
military reporting to armed services.8
President Roosevelt soon approved Donovan's plan. His outfit would become the
Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which embodied his vision of an intelligence and
special warfare capability to anticipate an enemy's moves and wage war behind his lines.
OSS grew to be both more and less than Donovan had envisioned. It eventually operated
spies and commandos on three continents, in the process building substantial capabilities
that would be revived in the latter day Central Intelligence Agency and US Special
Operations Command. On the other hand, it never became the President's premier
intelligence agency and clandestine arm, being shifted from the White House to the Joint
Chiefs of Staff in 1942 and always having to compete with so many other intelligence
sources for access to the Oval Office. In addition, it had to leave Latin America to the
FBI, and commanders like Douglas MacArthur and Chester Nimitz in the Pacific felt free
to ban OSS from their theaters, relegating it to a minor role in the war against Japan.
Part of the reason that Donovan and OSS did not win greater influence was that
the imperatives of technology proved almost as important as strategic considerations in
the development of wartime intelligence. Senior civilian and military leaders prized the
crucial contributions of the ULTRA and MAGIC codebreaking efforts to the Allied
victory, and they allowed no agency to compete with the codebreakers. Indeed, the
signals intelligence branches of the Army and Navy—which in 1939 were small adjuncts
of their respective services' communications bureaus—had grown large and won
substantial autonomy by 1945.9 Signals intelligence was the most important secret
source that the Allies possessed, and the armed services cited the need for the tightest
possible security in keeping Donovan and OSS from sharing in this bounty, as well as
ensuring that OSS would have little part in its combat exploitation.
As if to demonstrate what could have been if these decisions had gone otherwise,
OSS analysts played an important role in developing the inter-Allied capability to employ
another intelligence innovation. Imagery analysis won a place as its own discipline in
World War II. Allied bombers were growing so large and long-ranged that they
promised to make a reality of pre-war forecasts of the power of strategic bombing. In so
doing, aircraft technology briefly outstripped the crude reconnaissance capabilities of the
Allies to guide targeting and damage assessment. Aerial photography long predated
World War II, of course, and it was hardly clandestine, but what made it "intelligence"
was the tightly guarded sophistication of the analysis that interpreted the pictures in light
other sources to maximize the strategic impact of air power.
Britain out of necessity had pioneered this field, creating an inter-service photo
intelligence center in late 1940. The British taught their newly acquired skills to the

8 Thomas F. Troy, Wild Bill and Intrepid: Donovan, Stephenson, and the Origin of CIA (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 107, 121-127. See also Jay Jakub, Spies and
Saboteurs: Anglo-American Collaboration and Rivalry in Human Intelligence Collection and
Special Operations. 1940-45 (New York: St. Martin's, 1999), p. 26.
9 The Army's cryptologic service was transferred from Signal Corps to the Military Intelligence
Division in late 1944; the Navy's OP-20-G remained under the purview of the Chief of Naval
Communications through the war's end. Robert Louis Benson, "A History of US
Communications Intelligence during World War II: Policy and Administration," National
Security Agency Center for Cryptologic History Series IV, volume 8, 1997, pp. 45, 47, 147-148.
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Americans, who appreciated the value of integrating all available sources in an
organization employing teams of expert photo-interpreters supported by analysts like
those of OSS's Enemy Objectives Unit. Indeed, by the end of the war, imagery
processed by theater photo interpretation centers was providing large portions of the
tactical and strategic intelligence that Allied commanders employed against the Axis, and
was a key to the bombers' success in crippling the German economy.10 Victory in World
War II made strategic air power henceforth a cornerstone of American defense policy, but
it also showed for the observant few that strategic air operations depended for their
success on vast quantities of accurate and timely intelligence reports.11
World War II marked the second time in three decades that America had
significantly augmented its intelligence system in response to external threats. As was
the case with the signals intelligence capability growing out the initial emphasis on
counterintelligence after World War I, the innovations of the Second World War would
have far-reaching and unforeseen institutional consequences. At the end of the war, the
Truman Administration and Congress took stock of what had changed in America's
posture toward the world, and in its military and intelligence capabilities, and sought to
organize these capabilities in a lasting, peacetime configuration.

Modernizing the National Security Structure

America by 1945 had acquired global responsibilities, although neither Congress

nor the White House initially had a clear idea of how to meet them. There seemed to be
wide agreement with President Roosevelt that the United States must prevent any nation
from dominating a region from which to attack us, and that the best means for doing so
were the maintenance of a balance of power in Europe and East Asia, support for
international law and institutions, the liberalization of trade, and the spread of democracy.
Even before the surrender, American policymakers and diplomats were fashioning a
United Nations and an international monetary system to further these goals. As soon as
the fighting stopped, moreover, President Truman began pressing Congress and the
military to build a modern national security structure. As he later explained, "[o]ne of the
strongest convictions which I brought to the office of President was that the antiquated
defense setup of the United States had to be reorganized quickly as a step toward insuring
our future security and preserving world peace."12
A similar consensus prevailed on the need for intelligence reform. Indeed, the
Joint Chiefs of Staff advised in September 1945 that:

10 For more on imagery intelligence in World War II, see Alexander S. Cochran, Jr., Robert C.
Ehrhart, and John F. Kreis, in John F. Kreis, editor, Piercing the Fog: Intelligence and Army Air
Force Operations in World War II (Washington: Air Force History and Museums Program,
1996), pp. 85, 92-93.
11 See, for instance, former Treasury Department economic analyst and Amherst College
professor George S. Pettee's The Future of American Secret Intelligence (Washington: Infantry
Journal Press, 1946), p. 35.
12 Harry S. Truman, Memoirs, Volume II, Years of Trial and Hope (Garden City, NY,
Doubleday, 1956), p. 46.
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Recent developments in the field of new weapons have advanced the question of
an efficient intelligence service to a position of importance, vital to the security of
the nation in a degree never attained and never contemplated in the past. It is now
entirely possible that failure to provide such a system might bring national
disaster.13

The question was not whether to modernize intelligence but how. Each part of the
Truman Administration seemed to have its own ideas about the lessons of the war and the
proper way to support policymakers and commanders. Many of these ideas were
mutually contradictory, and few officials had the insight and the clearances to see the full
sweep of America's new capabilities. Nevertheless, the Truman Administration made
three crucial decisions shortly after the war. The National Security Act of 1947
ultimately established these decisions in statute, and collectively they set the course of
American intelligence for decades to come.
President Truman himself made the first decision. He wanted no repeat of Pearl
Harbor, and he believed that the Japanese attack might have been prevented "if there had
been something like co-ordination of information in the government." There certainly
was no such thing in 1941: "In those days the military did not know everything the State
Department knew, and the diplomats did not have access to all the Army and Navy
knew."14 Truman disliked General Donovan and had dissolved his office in September
1945, so he could not give the needed coordinating mission to OSS. Instead he approved
a plan offered by his Joint Chiefs of Staff for an independent "central" agency to affect
the "synthesis of departmental intelligence on the strategic and national policy level."15
This new intelligence system represented something original in Washington. At
its apex would be a capacity for channeling information toward senior civilian and
military decisionmakers and an analytical function to synthesize "national intelligence"
from the consequent mass of reports. Control over this synthesization would be wielded
by a Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), in a post that was nominally independent of
policymaking and hence (at least in theory) a guarantor of the quality of the intelligence
reaching the top. The DCI in turn would answer to a committee of Cabinet secretaries to
ensure, in the words of then-Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence Sidney Souers in
December 1945, that "no one department could unduly influence the type of intelligence
produced." Souers, who was then advising the White House on intelligence reform,
explained:

The evaluation of information is not an exact science and every safeguard should
be imposed to prevent any one department from having the opportunity to

13 Joint Chiefs of Staff to Secretary of War Henry Stimson and Secretary of the Navy James
Forrestal, "Establishment of a central intelligence agency upon liquidation of OSS," 19
September 1945, reprinted in Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1945-
1950, Emergence of the Intelligence Establishment (Washington, DC: Government Printing
Office, 1996) [hereinafter cited as FRUS], p. 41.
14 Truman, Years of Trial and Hope, p. 56.

15 Joint Chiefs of Staff to Stimson and Forrestal, "Establishment of a central intelligence

agency," FRUS, p. 41.
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interpret information in such as way as to make it seem to support previously
accepted policies or preconceived notions.16

By the time Souers penned these words, not a few senior Administration officials largely
agreed with his conception of the proposed intelligence agency's role.17 In essence, the
idea was that the President and his key advisers needed a control variable against which
to test the intelligence and policy advice corning from the departments. Only a free-
standing intelligence agency, they felt, could provide such a perspective. Objectivity was
valued, but independence from "policy" was the real desideratum.
In January 1946 President Truman appointed Souers the first Director of Central
Intelligence to "accomplish the correlation and evaluation of intelligence relating to the
national security, and the appropriate dissemination within the Government of the
resulting strategic and national policy intelligence."18 President Truman in effect made
Souers his personal intelligence advisor, assigning his small office the responsibility of
summarizing the daily flood of cables, memos, reports, and dispatches coming to the
White House.
Truman's lieutenants recognized the importance of this innovation, and at least
one of them resented it. Secretary of State James Byrnes complained that he should be
the one "responsible for reporting to the President on matters of foreign policy," and
furthermore that "it was his function to furnish the President with information on which
to base conclusions."19 Truman nevertheless rebuffed Byrnes' attempt to quash the
DCFs new Daily Summary, and he did not seem to mind whether its product was called
intelligence or information as long as it was useful to him.20 Nevertheless, Byrnes won
out in the end on a larger point; the military and the diplomats did not allow any DCI to
control information going to the Oval Office. They conceded that the DCI should offer
"factual" intelligence, but both the State Department and the armed services limited the
flow of information (such as communications intercepts) to the DCFs new Central
Intelligence Group (CIG). In addition, they refused to share "operational" details about
United States plans and capabilities—data that were essential to an informed assessment
of foreign activities and intentions.

16 Sidney Souers to Clark M. Clifford, "Central Intelligence Agency," 27 December 1945,

reprinted in FRUS, pp. 157-158.
17 Secretary of War Robert Patterson argued with State that "intelligence must be divorced from
policy making," Minutes of a 26 December 1945 meeting of the Acting Secretary of State with
the Secretaries of War and Navy, reprinted in FRUS, p. 153. Forrestars aides were making a
similar case with their Army and State counterparts, saying the director of the new central
intelligence agency should "not be identified with any of the departments concerned"; see
Mathias F. Correa, special assistant, to Forrestal, 27 December 1945, in ibid., p. 156.
18 Harry S. Truman to the Secretary of State, the Secretary of War, and the Secretary of the
Navy, 22 January' 1946, reprinted in FRUS, pp. 178-179.
19 National Intelligence Authority, "Minutes of the First Meeting of the National Intelligence
Authority," 5 February 1946, reprinted in FRUS, p. 328.
20 Arthur B. Darling, The Central Intelligence Agency: An Instrument of Government to 1950
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990), pp. 81-82.

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The second decision reached in early 1946 was that the clandestine operational
capabilities built in the course of the war needed a home and a leader. Once again, it
could not be General Donovan or his OSS, which had been partitioned between the State
and War Departments the preceding autumn. Few people in Washington understood the
scope of the secret campaigns launched by OSS and the military, but that handful of
officials wanted no repetition of wartime incidents in which the activities of one agency
jeopardized those of another.21 It was thought after the war that a coordinator could
reduce the chance of such conflicts, and as early as September 1945 the Joint Chiefs
proposed that the director of the new central agency should further the "coordination of
intelligence activities related to the national security."22
When President Truman approved the appointment of a DCI, the remnant of OSS'
operational branches residing in the War Department lobbied for a transfer to the Central
Intelligence Group. DCI Souers heard their plea, and enabled selected veterans, assets,
and files of OSS to became the CIG's Office of Special Operations before the end of
1946. By this point OSS' paramilitary and "psychological warfare" elements had been
demobilized, but CIG nonetheless gained a network of overseas stations and growing
espionage, liaison, and counterintelligence skills.23 Thus the DCI took command of a
substantial portion of all US clandestine activities abroad, as well as substantial clout to
use in coordinating those activities not under his direct control. Most of these activities
were not "covert action" per se, but they were nonetheless important in the day-to-day
conduct of American foreign relations. The active intelligence capability that William J.
Donovan had envisioned in 1941 thus found a permanent institutional base, and its quiet
assistance has benefited the nation's diplomats and commanders ever since.
Most nations do not combine executive intelligence synthesis and operational
coordination in one "central" office like that which President Truman authorized. Their
marriage in the new Central Intelligence Group was a response to a specific set of
historical circumstances immediately after World War II. It might never have happened
at all—or not in the same way—at another time. Nonetheless, the fact that it did makes

21 A notorious example was OSS' heist of material from the code room of the Japanese embassy
in Lisbon in June 1943. Tokyo instituted new security measures, and Allied codebreakers briefly
feared they would lose a vital window into Japanese communications. The head of US Army
intelligence, Maj. Gen. George Strong, condemned the "ill-advised and amateurish" activities of
OSS, calling Donovan's office "a menace to the security of the nation," and Assistant Secretary
of War Robert Lovett cited the caper in discussing intelligence reform in November 1945. See
Bradley F. Smith, The Shadow Warriors: OSS and the Origins of the CIA (New York: Basic
Books, 1983), pp. 220-221; and also "Meeting of the Secretaries of State, War, and Navy"
[meeting minutes], 14 November 1945, reprinted in FRUS, p. 110. The Secretaries of State, War,
and Navy later explained to Congress that central coordination of intelligence operations was
essential because, with "a multitude of espionage agencies," the agents in the field "tend to
uncover each other." National Intelligence Authority to Clare Hoffman (R-MI), Chairman,
House Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Departments, 26 June 1947, reprinted in
FRUS, p. 311.
22 Joint Chiefs of Staff to Stimson and Forrestal, "Establishment of a central intelligence
agency," FRUS, p. 41.
23 Michael Warner, "Prolonged Suspense: The Fortier Board and the Transformation of the
Office of Strategic Services," Journal of Intelligence History 2 (June 2002), pp. 74-76.
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the DCI the titular head of American intelligence, and means that that intelligence
establishment he oversees has two main missions: providing secret information and
running clandestine activities.
Other important intelligence missions, however, would soon be conspicuous by
their absence from this list. President Truman, while reviewing intelligence reform
proposals, agreed with the Army and Navy in late 1945 that "every department required
its own intelligence."24 His order establishing CIG in January 1946 accordingly
stipulated that the "existing intelligence agencies... shall continue to collect, evaluate,
correlate, and disseminate departmental intelligence."25 It also added a related provision
that CIG should exercise "no police, law enforcement or internal security functions," nor
should it make "investigations inside the continental limits of the United States." These
concessions, while necessary to win military and FBI assent to the creation of CIG,
marked the third major step taken by the Truman Administration. This step soon had
unintended consequences because President Truman—and in all likelihood his advisers
as well—lacked current knowledge of the true state of "departmental" intelligence.
By 1946 rapid demobilization was gutting American military intelligence. The
combat intelligence centers built during the war were all but gone. Sophisticated inter-
Allied systems to provide air targeting intelligence through exploiting imagery and all
available sources, to cite the most important example, were being dismantled, their
personnel demobilized and their equipment sold. Few of the Army Air Force's leaders
understood how dependent these efforts had been on British expertise, on signals
intelligence, and on inter-service coordination, and so little was done to preserve in Air
Force hands the capability that had been so painfully won in wartime. 26 As yet there
was no Secretary of Defense to coordinate a joint, all-source combat intelligence
capability, and DCI leadership had been barred. The Truman Administration's decision
to allow the "departments" to provide their own intelligence thus abetted, in practice, a
situation in which a single service through simple neglect could deprive the nation of a
valuable asset.
A similar gap opened in the field of "internal security." The FBI emerged from
World War II as the leader of a substantial counterintelligence capability that was already
redirecting its efforts against Soviet espionage in America. Part of that capability,
however, would not survive the end of the conflict. The military's counterintelligence
outfits at home and abroad were mostly demobilized. The X-2 branch of OSS—virtually
the only part of OSS to receive ULTRA decrypts of German communications—
languished when the ULTRA reports dried up. The FBI itself saw its well-regarded
Special Intelligence Service, which tracked leads on spies from embassies in Latin
America, handed to the new CIG (Director Hoover in pique dismantled the operation and
transferred only its furniture). The Truman Administration had erected a barrier between
the FBI and CIG by barring the DCFs officers from internal security functions, but the

24 Truman, Years of Trial and Hope, p. 57.

25 Truman to the Secretaries of State, War, and Navy, 22 January 1946, pp. 178-179.

26 Some air targeting intelligence continued, with fits and starts, to be shared between the British
and Americans as both nations exploited Luftwaffe imagery of the Soviet Union. Richard J.
Aldrich, The Hidden Hand: Britain, America, and Cold War Secret Intelligence (London: John
Murray, 2002), pp. 206-217.
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President and his advisers did not inquire about the details of what had happened since
1945, and thus probably did not understand that the wholesale loss of counterintelligence
assets after the war helped to ensure that the Bureau, the military, and new CIA would
have less information to share and fewer operations to coordinate.
The sweeping reform of American intelligence between 1945 and 1947 came
about because a determined President wanted to re-shape the national security
establishment and took full advantage of the opportunity provided him in the wake of the
largest war in history. President Truman received from Congress the statutory
ratification of his initiatives in the National Security Act of 1947, the intelligence section
of which essentially reiterated Truman's January 1946 directive. The Act unified (after a
fashion) the armed services, created an independent Air Force and CIA, as well as a new
council of advisers on security policy—the National Security Council (NSC). It laid a
firm legal and institutional foundation to implement many of the lessons learned during
World War II and is still (with many amendments) the charter of the national security
establishment. With it, Presidents since Truman have had tools they needed to
implement in peacetime the new national security strategy bequeathed to them by
President Roosevelt.

The Korean Emergency Fosters an Intelligence Community

The refashioned intelligence establishment was soon tested and found wanting.
Between 1945 and 1950 the Truman Administration and Congress had transformed the
national security structure into a durable instrument for waging the Cold War. With
Communism on the march in China and Europe, Americans once again feared that armed
tyranny—this time with nuclear weapons—could control the far shores of the Atlantic
and the Pacific. In this uncertain time, the new Central Intelligence Agency was not
performing as its makers had hoped. The Truman Administration drafted a list of
changes for CIA, but it took two disasters in Korea to bring about the appointment of a
new DCI and give him a mandate to change the Agency and make the "intelligence
community" work as a team.
An early warning of trouble came from a blue-ribbon study commission. The
NSC in early 1948 had asked three intelligence veterans—Allen Dulles, William Jackson,
and Matthias Correa—to evaluate what had changed since the war in order to determine
how the new NSC should supervise CIA.27 Their report, submitted on 1 January 1949,
had called CIA "a semi-autonomous highly centralized agency with a broad variety of
intelligence responsibilities," and noted that its very creation marked a departure "from
the general pattern followed by other countries." Such a degree of centralization entailed
certain disadvantages, but it could "be justified, provided that [CIA's] distinctive
functions.. .are handled according to their special requirements." The Agency should be
a coordinating service that increased the effectiveness of the whole intelligence
establishment, but unfortunately it was becoming just one more bureau "producing

27 Darling, The Central Intelligence Agency, p. 299. Ludwell Lee Montague, General Walter
Bedell Smith as Director of Central Intelligence: October 1950 - February 1953 (University
Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), pp. 39-40.
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intelligence in competition with older established agencies of the Government
departments." Dulles and his colleagues blamed CIA's drift on "inadequacies of
direction" provided by the current DCI, Roscoe Hillenkoetter.28
The Dulles Report added to sentiment in the Truman Administration that CIA
needed stronger leadership. The NSC soon endorsed many of the Dulles Report's
recommendations, but the question of DCI Hillenkoetter's replacement became tangled in
Administration debates over the direction of defense policy, and thus the reforms
mandated by the NSC were held in abeyance for the time being. 29
North Korea's lightning invasion of the South in June 1950 spurred the
Administration to complete its unfinished reform. The White House quickly named a
new DCI—Lt. Gen. Walter Bedell Smith, who had been General Eisenhower's chief of
staff in Europe (Churchill had dubbed him "the American bulldog"). After the war
President Truman made Smith ambassador to Moscow, and after the Korean invasion
ordered him to take the job of DCI. "I expect the worst and I am sure I won't be
disappointed," Smith told a friend.30 He took office on 7 October with the determination
and mandate to re-shape the organization and make US intelligence work as a team.
Within weeks of Smith's arrival, America suffered one of its worst battlefield
defeats when Chinese troops fell upon General MacArthur's overstretched forces.
Disaster was averted and the front stabilized in January 1951, but the rout marked the
second intelligence failure in six months. Neither the CIA nor other American
intelligence units foresaw the timing and skill of the Chinese counterattack. For
Washington and MacArthur to be surprised in battle leant a palpable urgency to the new
DCI's reforms.
Smith was already implementing the changes listed in NSC 50. He hired Agency
critics William Jackson and Allen Dulles as his deputies, and they set about to tighten
CIA's internal administration, reform its production of finished intelligence, and establish
a clear division of labor among the various components of the intelligence community.
By taking the recommendations of the Dulles Report (as expressed in NSC 50) as his
guide, Smith incidentally made it perhaps the most influential survey ever done of
American intelligence.
Smith followed the blueprint of NSC-50 to reform what was considered one of the
main weaknesses of CIA, its office for analyzing and disseminating intelligence. Under
Smith's predecessors, Agency products represented the judgments of CIA analysts but
had not truly reflected the range of views and information of other intelligence agencies.
He had been angered upon his arrival to find that CIA's Office of Reports and Estimates
had no current, coordinated estimate of the Korean situation, and he soon broke the office
into three pieces.31 Smith's new units comprised a board of experts and staff to draft and

28 Intelligence Survey Group, "The Central Intelligence Organization and National Organization
for Intelligence," 1 January 1949, National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group
59 (Department of State), Records of the Executive Secretariat, NSC Files: Lot 66 D 148, Box
1555, pp. 11, 23. The report's executive summary is reprinted in FRUS; see p. 909.
29 National Security Council, NSC 50, 1 July 1949, reprinted in FRUS, see pp. 978-979. (U)
3^ D.K.R. Crosswell, The Chief of Staff: The Military Career of General Walter Bedell Smith
(New York: Greenwood, 1991), pp. 122, 332. Montague, pp. 55-56. (U)
31 Montague, General Walter Bedell Smith, p. 151.

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coordinate truly national estimates, a "current intelligence" shop to produce the daily
bulletin for the President, and a research office to conduct analyses that exceeded the
scope of the established intelligence services. Those same "departmental" services would
be key to the success of Smith's reforms; upon them fell the duty to perform the basic
analysis of subjects in their designated fields, while the Agency would cease duplicating
their efforts and concentrate on integrating the whole effort of American intelligence
analysis.
The Korean conflict also forced a similar clarification of CIA's authority over
paramilitary operations. The NSC in its 1948 authorization of "covert action" had
specified that CIA's organizing of indigenous guerrilla forces behind enemy lines should
shift to the Joint Chiefs of Staff in a "time of war or national emergency." Such a shift
never occurred. In late 1950, as the Agency responded to high-level tasking to mount
such operations in support of UN forces in Korea, the NSC suspended this proviso at DCI
Smith's request. Smith believed such operations distracted CIA from its "primary
intelligence functions," and he hoped the JCS would take responsibility for them, but he
was soon to be disappointed. The NSC in April and October 1951 gave overall command
of paramilitary operations to the regional "American Theater Commander" but affirmed
the DCFs "responsibility and authority" for creating and running such activities.
Complaining about this solution in 1952, Smith conceded that it had advantages: "it
seems impracticable, for reasons of coordination and security, to divorce these from other
covert operations."32 This logic has endured through subsequent changes in legislation
and directives, and it is a reason why the CIA for the last half-century has been assigned
sensitive (and sometimes significant) paramilitary engagements on the margins of larger
US military deployments.
The improvement of "departmental" intelligence that DCI Smith had hoped to
spur saw limited progress during his tenure. Hitherto the armed services had maintained
separate cryptologic efforts under a loose confederation called the Armed Forces Security
Agency (AFSA, which reported to the Joint Chiefs of Staff). Complaints about signals
intelligence support for the Korean effort provoked Smith's ire, and at his urging the
NSC in 1952 replaced this system with a new National Security Agency (NSA)
subordinated to the Secretary of Defense.33 The change preserved the cryptologic arms
of the various services but recognized the "national" importance of their collective effort,
providing for tighter coordination and better support to the Secretary. Progress elsewhere
in the Defense Department, however, was uneven. In Korea a surprised US Air Force
had to reconstruct, almost from scratch, the sort of intelligence support for strategic air

32 Montague, General Walter Bedell Smith, pp. 206-208; Walter B. Smith to the National
Security Council, "Report by the Director of Central Intelligence," 23 April 1952, reprinted in
Michael Warner, editor, The CIA under Harry Truman (Washington: Central Intelligence
Agency, 1994), p. 460. Anne Karalekas, "History of the Central Intelligence Agency," in
William M. Leary, editor, The Central Intelligence Agency: History and Documents (University,
AL: University of Alabama Press. 1984), p. 48; see also National Security Council, NSC 10/2,
18 June 1948, reprinted in FRUS, p. 714; and National Security Council, NSC 10/5, 23 October
1951, reprinted in Warner, The CIA under Harry Truman, pp. 438-439.
33 Montague, General Walter Bedell Smith, pp. 253-254. See also David A. Hatch with Robert
Louis Benson, "The Korean War: The SIGINT Background," National Security Agency Center
for Cryptologic History, 2000, pp. 15-16.
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operations it had enjoyed in 1945. Indeed, one of the Air Force commanders there
complained "it appears that these lessons [of World War II] either were forgotten or
never were documented."34 By the end of the war imagery support was once again
competent and robust, but recouping that capability had been expensive in time, money,
and lives—and there was still little understanding that the job was perhaps too big for any
one service.
By the time Smith left the Central Intelligence Agency in early 1953 he had
consolidated its major functions and recast its place in the national intelligence system.
Although DCI Smith saw CIA as first and foremost an "intelligence" agency, and worried
that operations were crowding out this "primary" function, his deputy, Allen Dulles,
understood the importance of clandestine activities. Despite Dulles' shortcomings as an
administrator, he ensured that the Agency would also provide direct, clandestine support
to American diplomacy and military operations both during Smith's tenure and his own
years as DCI. The combination of a sound blueprint in the Dulles Report, the national
emergency in Korea, and forceful leadership by Smith, helped shape the disparate
agencies into something like an Intelligence Community. In fact, that very term began to
appear for the first time in descriptions of the intelligence system toward the close of his
tenure.35

Responding to Scandal: The Church Committee

America had acquired an intelligence community as a result of World War II.

During the Cold War the nation's Rooseveltian engagement with the world—a posture
that was at once concerned with the mechanics of the international balance of power and
with high democratic ideals—combined with the rapid evolution of technology to create
in the United States a permanent, global military and diplomatic presence. Maintaining
and guiding that world posture required vast quantities of intelligence information and a
capable clandestine operational arm for the Cold War. By the 1970s, however, the new
intelligence establishment seemed to cost the nation more than it could afford, both in
terms of sheer resources and in terms of America's reputation and self-image as a country
committed to open government and the rule of law. While the Cold War consensus that
had held since the Truman Administration came unraveled in Vietnam, Congressional
opponents of the White House used their subpoena power to investigate Nixon

34 Cited by Robert F. Futtrell in "A Case Study: USAF Intelligence in the Korean War," in
Walter T. Hitchcock, editor, The Intelligence Revolution: A Historical Perspective [Proceedings
of the Thirteenth Military History Symposium], (Washington. Office of Air Force History,
1991), p. 275. The report of another blue-ribbon panel headed by Ferdinand Eberstadt had
warned in 1948 that the military intelligence arms had lost most of the "skilled and experienced
personnel of wartime," and those who remained had seen "their organizations and their systems
ruined by superior officers with no experience, little capacity, and no imagination." The report on
intelligence was given to Congress in February 1949 as a chapter titled "The Central Intelligence
Agency: National and Service Intelligence" in the classified Volume II of the Hoover
Commission's national security organization report. Its pages are numbered 25 through 60, and
the best CIA copy is in Executive Registry Job 86B00269R, box 14, folder 22; see pp. 39-40.
35 Montague, General Walter Bedell Smith, p. 74.

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Administration wrongdoing and credible allegations of intelligence infringements upon
civil liberties. Such inquiries soon led to questions about the foreign activities of the
Intelligence Community, and its stewardship of public funds.
Years before the Watergate scandal, however, the Nixon Administration grew
concerned over the Intelligence Community's apparent inability to make the best use of
expensive and wondrous new collection methods. Since DCI Walter B. Smith's day the
Community that he had built had seen rapid technological innovation that had solved
some of the problems of collecting reliable data on the Soviet Union. Satellites and other
developments had given analysts precise details of Moscow's military and economic
capabilities, and President Nixon and his advisers could not fathom why the intelligence
analysts and their leaders in the Community sometimes seemed so passive and easily
surprised.
The Nixon Administration authorized a survey of the Intelligence Community in
late 1970. The job fell to James Schlesinger, the deputy head of the White House Office
of Management and Budget, who worked with Henry Kissinger's NSC staff on the
project. Their March 1971 report complained that the cost of intelligence had climbed
too steeply while, at the same time, it was "not at all clear that our hypotheses about
foreign intentions, capabilities, and activities have improved commensurately in scope
and quality as more data comes in from modern collection methods." In short, the
marvelous new collection systems had outstripped the community's ability—or
willingness—to analyze the data they gathered.36
President Nixon adopted a package of reforms based on the Schlesinger study and
issued them to the Community in November 1971. These included the appointment of a
Deputy to the DCI for Community affairs and of an Assistant Secretary of Defense for
Intelligence, and the creation of the Defense Mapping Agency and a unified Central
Security Service under NSA to combine the military's separate signals intelligence
services.37 The most influential steps augmented the DCI's powers over Community
tasking and resources. Indeed, every DCI since then has been expected to oversee the
preparation of the Intelligence Community's budget, to establish intelligence
requirements and priorities, and to ensure the quality of its products.
Before the Nixon Administration could fully implement its vision of a new
Intelligence Community, however, controversy over foreign policy and the Watergate
scandal distracted policymakers and intelligence officers. The initiative in examining
intelligence shifted to Capitol Hill and the proceedings of the Congressional select
committees probing the revelations that had accompanied Watergate. In January 1975
the Senate created a select committee to investigate foreign and domestic intelligence
activities, including but not limited to allegations of wrongdoing and the adequacy of the

36 Cited in Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with respect to

Intelligence Activities, "Final Report," Volume 1, "Foreign and Military Intelligence," 94th
Congress, Second Session, 1974, [hereinafter cited as "Final Report"], pp. 122, 257, 274. See
also Commission on the Roles and Missions of the United States Intelligence Community [the
Brown-Aspin commission], Preparing for the 21st Century: An Appraisal of US Intelligence
(Washington. Government Printing Office, 1996), p. A14.
37 Most of these changes were ordered by President Nixon in a 5 November 1971 letter to the
leaders of the Intelligence Community; it is reprinted in Michael Warner, editor, Central
Intelligence: Origin and Evolution (Washington: Central Intelligence Agency, 2001), pp. 77-80.

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laws and oversight mechanisms governing the Community. The panel, led by Sen. Frank
Church (D-ID), interpreted this charter as a mandate to "determine what secret
governmental activities are necessary and how they best can be conducted under the rule
of law."38 Senator Church and his colleagues spent fifteen months preparing one of the
most detailed public appraisals of any nation's intelligence structure.
The Church Committee's "Final Report" in April 1976 offered proposals on the
organization and management of the Community that were articulate and largely
congruent with Nixon and Ford Administration concerns. Like intelligence surveys
before and since, the Final Report assumed that the cure for lackluster performance was
re-organization. The Committee sought to bring order and efficiency to a system in
which "[t]he real executive authority over at least four-fifths of the total resources spent
on intelligence activities has resided with the Secretary of Defense" while "[t]he DCFs
influence over how these funds are allocated was limited, in effect, to that of an interested
critic." Recommendations centered on notion that the DCI needed enhanced authorities;
Congress should pass legislation to increase his power over Community coordination,
budgeting, and requirements, and give him a second Deputy Director of Central
Intelligence for Community affairs. Along these lines, the Final Report suggested that
Congress consider "removing the DCI from direct management responsibility" for CIA
and so free him "to concentrate on his responsibilities with regard to the entire
intelligence community."39
The breakthrough for the Church Committee came in its treatment of the
operational side of American intelligence. At issue here was not cost and efficiency, but
the powers and the very existence of clandestine activities. Would intelligence merely
collect data and produce information, or would it also help implement foreign and
security policy? The Church Committee said intelligence must do both, with proper
safeguards. With its focus on mistakes and misdeeds, the Committee's 'Final Report"
concentrated on clandestine activities, but it tempered its criticisms with a firm
conclusion that intelligence had "made important contributions" to national security and
become a "permanent and necessary component of our government." This conclusion
countered growing public and Congressional concern over "the integrity of our nation's
intelligence agencies."40
The "Final Report" painted a detailed portrait of clandestine activities, allowing a
careful reader to appreciate their several nuances. Espionage, counterintelligence,
foreign intelligence liaison, and domestic collection were all deemed necessary and
valuable, given proper oversight. Even covert action received a grudging endorsement.
The Committee had considered "proposing a total ban on all forms of covert action," but
concluded that America should retain a capability to react to extraordinary threats
through covert means.41
The Church Committee's success in crafting bipartisan conclusions and winning
executive branch assent to issuing a public report of this scope and detail stood in
contrast to the results of the other Congressional study of intelligence conducted at the

38 Senate Select Committee, "Final Report," pp. 11, 423.

39 Ibid., pp. 333, 434-435, 449.

40 Ibid., pp. 1-2,423-424.

41 Ibid., 159, 425, 437-439, 459; emphasis in original.

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time. The House's select committee, chaired by Rep. Otis Pike (D-NY), took an
adversarial approach to the Intelligence Community and complained that the Executive
Branch was stonewalling its inquiry. The full House in early 1976 declined to release its
finished report (which soon leaked anyway), in effect repudiating the work of its own
committee.42
The immediate impact of the Church and Pike inquiries was on Congress itself.
President Ford had signed Executive Order 11905 as the two committees were finishing
their work, thus implementing by decree some of their recommendations and lessening
the impetus for more sweeping reforms. Debates over intelligence reform on Capitol Hill
then shifted to the mechanics of adding permanent oversight panels to the delicately
balanced committee structures of Congress. Within two years both chambers established
permanent select committees to oversee intelligence activities. Although the powers of
these committees had distinct limits, thanks in part to their competition with the
established authorizing and appropriating committees, they gradually exerted discernible
and positive effects on operations and policymaker guidance of intelligence, tending to
make both more disciplined and accountable. Indeed, in later years Congress' oversight
of the Community budget has tended to make the committees view intelligence as a
corporate enterprise—as opposed to a collection of agencies—and to press the Executive
Branch also to view it that way.
In the 1970s both the Executive and the Legislative Branches had re-examined the
legal and policy foundations of the Intelligence Community and found them to be still
solid, though in need of maintenance. After the 1971 Schlesinger report, Presidents
Nixon and Ford had paid closer attention to monetary costs of intelligence. They granted
new powers to the DCI, enhancing his ability to lead the Community but not
fundamentally challenging the division of labor—or the powers of the Secretary of
Defense—established by the National Security Act of 1947. The detailed and public
findings of the Church Committee were soon viewed as a model for democratic oversight
of both the informational and the clandestine sides of intelligence. In effect, these steps
added legitimacy and purpose to the Intelligence Community, ensuring that its costs (in
all their forms) would be more clearly stated, better spent, and more willingly borne.

The First Persian Gulf War and a Revolution in Military Affairs

The 1991 Persian Gulf War suggested how changes in weaponry and doctrine
were fostering a "radical change in the nature of warfare," according to a study of the
Intelligence Community produced for the Congress in 1996.43 The incorporation of
precision weapons, microprocessing, and real-time global, secure communications in a
military structure that had been reformed and pushed by Congress into truly "joint"
operations had begun by 1991 to create a "Revolution in Military Affairs." This
revolution would, over the 1990s and beyond, transform the intelligence requirements of

42 For more on the Pike Committee and its troubles with the White House and the Intelligence
Community, see Gerald K. Haines, "The Pike Committee Investigations and the CIA," Studies in
Intelligence (Winter 1998-99).
43 Commission on Roles and Missions, Preparing for the 21st Century, p. 21.

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commanders and military personnel, placing strains on a Community built on lessons
from earlier wars.
The Gulf conflict was the first major war in which the military deployed and
fought along the lines laid down by the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986, which had
increased the power of the combat commands to employ their forces in a truly "joint"
manner.44 One of the tasks involved in deploying General H. Norman Schwarzkopf s
Central Command (CENTCOM) to the region was that of building its intelligence
capability. CENTCOM and the other combat commands did not fully staff their
intelligence, logistics, and other support functions in peacetime. Thus CENTCOM's
intelligence staff before the crisis "did not have the resources, equipment, or
organizational structure needed to deploy and support operations of the level and scope"
of Desert Storm, according to the Defense Department's 1992 report to Congress on the
conduct of the war. The difficulty of constructing an in-theater intelligence system was
compounded by the lack of a blueprint. Fortunately, DIA and the Pentagon's Military
Intelligence Board helped CENTCOM to establish a Joint Intelligence Center (JIC) in
Riyadh just weeks before the war began. The JIC proved a good mechanism to allocate
taskings among the collectors and analysts in the theater, to eliminate duplication, and to
sort the requirements of the combat units. It even incorporated British, Canadian, and
Australian liaison officers, as well as teams of officers from the Washington-based
intelligence agencies. 45
When Desert Shield became Desert Storm on 17 January 1991 CENTCOM and
its commanders who fought the war in Kuwait and Iraq found ways to get enough
intelligence to do their jobs, but there were problems. Perhaps the main shortfall came in
providing intelligence support to air operations. The Pentagon had learned and re-learned
in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam that strategic air campaigns require especially close
support from intelligence. To understand what ensued for the Community in the Gulf, it
is important to remember something that was not yet clear at the time. Strategic bombing
had first been tried in World War II, when the basic problem for commanders was
dropping enough inaccurate bombs near a target to ensure its destruction. Precision
weapons by 1991 were changing that dilemma to a new one: that of using just enough
weapons to destroy the target and then moving on as soon as possible to the next.
Intelligence was just as essential in choosing the right targets in 1991 as it had been in
1944, but now intelligence had to identify so many more targets more quickly and to
assess with greater urgency which, if any, needed to be struck again. As the Defense
Department explained to Congress in its report on the conduct of the war,

the revolutionary changes in the way American forces conducted combat

operations during Operation Desert Storm outstripped the abilities of the [battle

44 Roger R. Trask and Alfred Goldberg, The Department of Defense, 1947-1997: Organization
and Leaders (Washington: Office of the Secretary of Defense Historical Office, 1997), pp. 44-
45.
^Office of the Secretary of Defense, Conduct of the Persian Gulf War [Pursuant to Title V of the
Persian Gulf Supplemental Authorization and Personnel Benefits Act of 1991], (Washington:
Department of Defense, 1992), pp. 335, 337, 339.
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