Central Intelligence: 

Origin and Evolution 

Editor

Michael Warner 

CIA History Staff 

Center for the Study of Intelligence 

Central Intelligence Agency 

Washington, DC 

2001 
ii 
iii 

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 international order and 

the ability of the Intelligence Community to respond to the national security challenges 

and opportunities of the 21st Century. 

After the panels present their findings, the Central Intelligence Agency’s Center 

for the Study of Intelligence, 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 directives and the 

National Security Act never fully occurred, 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 
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v 

CONTENTS 

Foreword......................................................................................................................... ii

Historical Perspective..................................................................................................... 1

Reference Documents 

1. 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 ............................................................................................... 33 

5. National Security Council Intelligence Directive 1, Duties and Responsibilities, 

7 July 1949 ........................................................................................................... 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 
vi 

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 

of the US Foreign Intelligence Community, 5 November 1971........................... 75 

15. National Security Council Intelligence Directive 1, Basic Duties and 

Responsibilities, 17 February 1972 ...................................................................... 83 

16. Gerald 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 of the Director of Central Intelligence as Head of the US 

Intelligence Community, 19 November 1998.....................................................145 
1 

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 of the Roman Empire, 

 Book III, 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 

Congressional 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.1 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 of large 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 of NSC 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) 
2 

Directives. In the wake of “the time of troubles” for the Intelligence Community in the 

mid-1970s—marked by investigations into questions about excesses and accountability—

three 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 Strategic Services (OSS) in 

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 of OSS’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 Army 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 of the United States, 1945-1950, Emergence of the Intelligence Establishment

(Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1996) [hereafter cited as FRUS], pp. 178-

179. 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 of intelligence to the President and not any to the secretaries of the military 

departments and the State Department, who had some responsibility to advise the President.” Quoted in 
3 

shared little in common except an interest in foreign secrets and a sense that both 

strategic warning and clandestine activities abroad required “central” coordination. 

Indeed, these two missions came together in CIG almost by accident. 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 Naval 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 called 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 Directive 5, issued on 8 July 1946, provided the DCI with the basic 

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 David F. 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 of Nation,” New 

York Times, 16 June 1946. For the Patterson-Forrestal accord in May 1946, see Walter Millis, 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. 
4 

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 of its 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 new Central Intelligence Group. 

Indeed, CIG had been established with no appropriations and authority of its 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 without a 

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.”8 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 of Trial 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. 
5 

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 have 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 policies accordingly.10

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 

 

10 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 of DCI and DDCI must not “be occupied simultaneously by 

commissioned officers of the armed services, whether in an active or retired status.” 
6 

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 

of the National Security Act. Foremost was NSCID 1, 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 size 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 intelligence 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 of Investigation, the Office of Intelligence Research 

(State), the Intelligence Division (Army), the Office of Naval Intelligence, the Directorate of Intelligence 

(Air Force), and associated military signals intelligence offices, principally the Army Security Agency and 

the Navy’s OP-20-G. 
7 

Responsibilities,” which replaced NIAD-5 and established the basic responsibilities of 

the DCI and the interagency workings of the Intelligence Community.15

NSCID 1 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 1 

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: they could 

coordinate intelligence, but they must not 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 of looser 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 Community, his Agency never won the power to “inspect” the departments’ 

 

15 All versions of NSCID 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 NSCID 3 (13 January 1948) defined national intelligence as “integrated departmental intelligence that 

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. 
8 

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. Indeed, 

presidents from Dwight Eisenhower through Richard Nixon sought to adjust 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 of NSCID 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 Intelligence shall 

coordinate the foreign intelligence activities of the United States....” 

The September 1958 version of NSCID 1 also added a section on “community 

responsibilities” that listed the duties of the DCI to foster an efficient Intelligence 

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 1 created 

the United States Intelligence Board (USIB), a panel chaired by the DCI—with the 

Deputy Director of Central Intelligence ( the DDCI) representing CIA—to coordinate a 

range of cooperative activities through a network of interagency committees. USIB soon 

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 NSCID 1 in over a decade. In the 

spirit of President Eisenhower’s earlier initiatives, Nixon authorized a full-dress study of 

Intelligence 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 Intelligence 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.19 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. 
9 

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 DCI’s 

hands on the collective purse strings. 

 The years that followed the issuance of the 1972 version of NSCID 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. 

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” to the DCI and the various members of the Intelligence 

Community. 

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 
10 

Community and head of CIA. It also revamped the old United States Intelligence Board, 

expanding the list of topics on which it was 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 of E.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 turn 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 NFIB 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 developing the budget, reviewing requests 

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 Democratic 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, Congress 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 appetite 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 “Committee on Foreign Intelligence”; it 

comprised the DCI (chairman), the Deputy Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, and the Deputy Assistant 

to the President for National Security Affairs. 
11 

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, 

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. 

22 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 of Intelligence Laws. 
12 

 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 time 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, commanders, 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 from 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 DCI’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 could 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 agency’s head). 

 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 

ensued 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 of National 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 Reorganize 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 of Tennessee 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 of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (Washington: Office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of 

Staff [Joint History Office], 1995), pp. 25-38. 
13 

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 Middle 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 

 

26 Commission on National Security/21st 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 for the 21st Century: An Appraisal of US 

Intelligence (Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1996); House Permanent Select 

Committee on Intelligence, “IC21: Intelligence Community in the 21st 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 of Intelligence, 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 of Diplomacy [John 

Hollister Hedley, author], Checklist for the Future of Intelligence (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 of centralization efforts can be seen as reflecting the reasonable needs of the 

various components of the 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.] 
14 

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.31 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 Community. 

 Congress did not, however, resist the shift of national means to tactical ends. The 

shift of intelligence 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. 

30 Commission on Roles and Missions, Preparing for 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 1 April 1992 at the Joint Hearing, Senate Select Committee on 

Intelligence and House Permanent 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 21st Century,” 104th 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 
15 

Contradictory Impulses 

The net effect of the changes made both by the White House 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 streamline 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 effect was 

ambiguous; the DCI and the CIA lost actual, day-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 and 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 National Imagery and Mapping Agency Act, which was passed as part of the 

National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1997; Compilation of Intelligence Laws (2000). 
16 

January 1946. The fact that a DCI felt the need to cite all those passages for the 

edification of Intelligence Community colleagues, however, suggests that his authority 

still had far to go. 

The blurring of the divide between “national” and “tactical” intelligence seemed 

at decade’s end to provide unclear portents for the future of the DCI’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 that 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 of highly 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 of reform 

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/21st

 

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 for the 21st Century, p. 47. 
17 

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.”38

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 of National 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 

DCIs 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.
18 

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.