Dr. Michael Warner of the Strategic Management Issues Office, ODDCI/CM, and Dr. J. Kenneth 

McDonald, former CIA Chief Historian working under contract with the ODDCI/CM, prepared this 

monograph. Dr. Warner conducted most of the research for it while serving with the CIA History 

Staff, Center for the Study of Intelligence. It has been reviewed by the Central Intelligence Agency, 

which determined it holds no classified information.

The authors wish to express their gratitude for the assistance of Douglas Garthoff, Richard Giza, 

Woodrow Kuhns, Mark Lowenthal, and Kevin Scheid, as well as the staff of CSI, which helped bring 

this monograph into its final form.

The Strategic Management Issues Office champions transformational change in US intelligence to 

serve the changing national security needs of the US Government. 

The Center for the Study of Intelligence (CSI) was founded in 1974 in response to Director of 

Central Intelligence James Schlesinger’s desire to create within CIA an organization that could 

“think through the functions of intelligence and bring the best intellects available to bear on 

intelligence problems.” The Center, comprising both professional historians and experienced 

practioners, attempts to document lessons learned from past operations, explore the needs and 

expectations of intelligence consumers, and stimulate serious debate on current and future 

intelligence challenges.

To support these activities, CSI publishes Studies in Intelligence, as well as books and monographs 

addressing historical, operational, doctrinal, and theoretical aspects of the intelligence profession. 

It also administers the CIA Museum and maintains the Agency’s Historical Intelligence Collection.

Cover: 9/11 Commission Chairman Thomas Kean swearing in Intelligence Community witnesses 

during the last of the commission’s public hearings, on 16 June 2004. Flanking him are commission 

member Jamie Gorelick and Vice Chairman Lee Hamilton.

(Photo: Larry Downing/Reuters/Corbis).

All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed in this monograph are those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect official positions or views of the Central Intelligence Agency or any

other US Government entity, past or present. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying US Government

endorsement of the study's factual statements and interpretations.
Center for the Study of Intelligence

Washington, DC 

April 2005

Strategic Management Issues Office

US INTELLIGENCE

COMMUNITY REFORM

STUDIES SINCE 1947

MICHAEL WARNER

J. KENNETH MCDONALD
iii

Executive Summary

The publication of The 9/11 Commission Report, the war in Iraq, and subsequent negotiation 

of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 have provoked the most 

intense debate over the future of American intelligence since the end of World War II. For 

observers of this national discussion—as well as of future debates that are all but inevitable—this paper offers a historical perspective on reform studies and proposals that have 

appeared over the course of the US Intelligence Community’s evolution into its present form. 

We have examined the origins, context, and results of 14 significant official studies that have 

surveyed the American intelligence system since 1947. We explore the reasons these studies 

were launched, the recommendations they made, and the principal results that they achieved. 

It should surprise no one that many of the issues involved—such as the institutional relationships between military and civilian intelligence leaders—remain controversial to the present 

time. For this reason, we have tried both to clarify the perennial issues that arise in intelligence 

reform efforts and to determine those factors that favor or frustrate their resolution. Of the 

14 reform surveys we examined, only the following achieved substantial success in promoting 

the changes they proposed: the Dulles Report (1949), the Schlesinger Report (1971), the 

Church Committee Report (1976), and the 9/11 Commission Report (2004). 

The earliest such study, the January 1949 Dulles Report, achieved its considerable influence 

only after a disastrous warning failure almost 18 months later at the outset of the Korean War. 

A new Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), Lt. Gen. Walter Bedell Smith, used this report 

to make major changes at the Central Intelligence Agency. While organizing the CIA into a 

durable internal structure, Smith also formed the Board of National Estimates to coordinate 

and produce National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs), created new offices for current intelligence and research, and took control of the Agency’s expanding covert action campaign. 

Most importantly, DCI Smith shaped the nation’s disparate intelligence agencies into something recognizable as an Intelligence Community—a term first used during his tenure. He 

maneuvered the Department of State and the Joint Chiefs of Staff out of clandestine operations, and pushed successfully to bring the signals intelligence capabilities of the armed services under civilian control. 

Almost 20 years later, as the Vietnam War wound down in 1971, James R. Schlesinger of 

the Office of Management and Budget (and later DCI) produced a review of the Intelligence 

Community for President Nixon and the National Security Council (NSC). While the cost of 

intelligence had exploded over the past decade, Schlesinger observed, the community had 

failed to achieve "a commensurate improvement in the scope and overall quantity of intelligence products.” A manager was needed to plan and rationalize intelligence collection 

and evaluate its product, both within the Defense Department and across the Intelligence 

Community. This manager, he explained, could be made anything from a new coordinator 

in the White House to a full-fledged ““Director of National Intelligence” controlling the bud-
iv

gets and personnel of the entire community. Since Schlesinger outlined the concept in 

1971, the need for a Director of National Intelligence has been a recurring theme in intelligence reform studies. 

The Watergate scandal and President Nixon’s 1974 resignation forestalled full adoption of 

Schlesinger’s recommendations, but his report nevertheless prompted significant changes. 

These included the creation of a staff to help the DCI manage “Community Affairs,” the 

appointment of an Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, and the merger of the 

armed services’ cryptologic organizations into a Central Security Service under the National 

Security Agency (NSA). In the years since President Nixon’s November 1971 response to 

Schlesinger’s Report, every DCI has been expected to oversee the preparation of the Intelligence Community’s budgets, to establish intelligence requirements and priorities, and to 

ensure the quality of its products. 

The investigation of US intelligence by Senator Frank Church’s committee in 1975, which 

focused largely on the CIA, marked another watershed. It concluded that the United States 

could be well served by its capability for clandestine activities overseas and covert action 

operations—with proper safeguards. More importantly, it altered the relationship of the Intelligence Community to Congress. The Senate and House soon formed permanent committees to oversee the Intelligence Community, which made it more accountable to the 

legislative branch. While these two committees have always operated within distinct limits, in 

part because of their competition with the established authorizing and appropriating committees, their oversight has had a clearly positive effect. By looking at the Intelligence Community more or less as a whole, they have tended to make it more coherent, disciplined, and 

accountable. 

The attacks of 11 September 2001 prompted new calls for high-level investigations and farreaching reforms. Indeed, the 9/11 Commission’s Report (published in July 2004) was 

almost certainly the most influential of any of the surveys examined here, in that it precipitated sweeping amendments to the National Security Act of 1947. Some of its suggestions 

echoed those of earlier surveys: the DCI’s duties, for instance, should be split between a 

chief of the Intelligence Community and a director of the CIA. President Bush quickly 

adopted several of the 9/11 Commission Report’s proposals, signing four Executive Orders 

on intelligence and related issues, but Congress soon went further still by enacting the “Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act” in December 2004. That Act incorporated the 

precept that American intelligence needed a new sort of coordinator: a “Director of National 

Intelligence” (DNI) who would manage the planning, policy, and budgets of the community 

across the full range of intelligence, foreign and domestic. This did away with the position of 

Director of Central Intelligence and—by bridging the old foreign-domestic divide—adjusted 

one of the compromises struck in drafting the original National Security Act in 1947. 
v

Having examined these and other surveys of the Intelligence Community, we recognize that 

much of the change since 1947 has been more ad hoc than systematically planned. The 

political impetus to commission a thorough study when contemplating change is nevertheless almost inexorable. Our investigation indicates that to bring about significant change, a 

study commission has had to get two things right: process and substance. 

With respect to process, political sponsorship is important. Two studies that had large and 

comparatively rapid effects—the 1949 Dulles Report and the 1971 Schlesinger Report—

were both sponsored by the National Security Council. The 9/11 Commission, with its public 

hearings in the midst of an election season, had even more impact, while the Church Committee’s effects were indirect but eventually powerful. It’s perhaps worth noting that a study 

commission whose chairman later became DCI, as in the case of Allen Dulles and James 

Schlesinger, is also likely to have a lasting influence. Finally, studies conducted on the eve of 

or during a war, or in a war’s immediate aftermath, are more likely to lead to change. The 

1947 National Security Act drew lessons from World War II, and it was the outbreak of the 

Korean War in 1950 that brought about the intelligence reforms the Dulles Report had proposed over a year earlier. The 1971 Schlesinger Report responded to President Nixon’s 

need to cut spending as he extracted the United States from the Vietnam War. The breakdown of the Cold War defense and foreign policy consensus during the Vietnam War set the 

scene for the Church Committee’s investigations during 1975–76, but the fact that US troops 

were not in combat at the time certainly diminished the influence of its conclusions. In contrast, the 9/11 Commission Report was published at the height of a national debate over the 

War on Terror and the operations in Iraq, which magnified its salience.

Finally, in the substance of these reports, one large trend is evident over the years. Studies 

whose recommendations have caused power in the Intelligence Community to gravitate 

toward either the Director of Central Intelligence or the Office of the Secretary of Defense—

or both—have generally had the most influence. This pattern of increasing concentration of 

intelligence power in the DCI and Secretary of Defense endured from the 1940s through the 

1990s, whether Democrats or Republicans controlled the White House or Congress. Now 

that a DNI has replaced the DCI, it is not clear whether a similar trend will continue as the 

mission of defending the homeland against terrorism grows in importance. The Intelligence 

Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 has changed the equation, making the new 

Director of National Intelligence institutionally almost equidistant between the Secretary of 

Defense and a new establishment coalescing around the homeland security mission. When 

a new pattern of influence and cooperation forms, we are confident that future reform surveys 

will not hesitate to propose ways to improve it.

vii

Contents Page

Introduction 1

From Victory to Cold War: Three Decisions 3

Construction of an Intelligence Community, 1948–53 7

The First Hoover Commission’s Eberstadt Report, 1948–49 7

The NSC’s Dulles Report, 1948–49 8

The Dulles Report and DCI Smith’s Reforms, 1950–53 11

The Collection Revolution, 1954–60 15

The Second Hoover Commission’s Clark Report, 1955 15

The Kirkpatrick Joint Study Group, 1960 17

The Schlesinger Report, 1971 21

Acting on the Report’s Recommendations 22

Three Studies in 1975 25

The Murphy Commission, June 1975 25

The Taylor Report, October 1975 25

The Ogilvie Report, November 1975 26

The Church and Pike Committee Investigations, 1975–76 29

The Church Committee, April 1976 29

The Pike Committee, early 1976 29

Congressional Oversight: Senate and House Intelligence Committees 30

Executive Orders and the Reform Hiatus: 1981–91 30

After the Cold War 33

The Persian Gulf War and a Revolution in Military Affairs 33

The Aspin-Brown Commission, 1995–96 33

HPSCI’s “IC21” Staff Study, 1996 35

The Scowcroft Review of Intelligence, 2001 36

The 9/11 Commission Report, 2004 37

Conclusions 41

Process 41

Substance 42

Reform and the Constitution 43

1

Introduction

Since the beginning of World War II, presidents, members of Congress, military 

commanders, and a host of officials have puzzled over the uncertain scope and uneven performance of the US intelligence establishment. Periodically, especially in 

times of crisis, Congress and the executive have undertaken to reorganize it or redirect the path of its development. Proposals for reorganization and reform, however, sometimes show little knowledge or understanding of how intelligence 

agencies’ capabilities have evolved over the years, how these agencies actually 

work, and how they fit together. To comprehend how the American intelligence 

structure functions as a system and how it has changed over time is a daunting task 

even for those who work in it. Inattention to the Intelligence Community’s historical 

and institutional context may help explain why past efforts to reform it have more 

often than not produced only limited and fragmentary change. 

To understand the Intelligence Community as it exists today thus requires some 

grounding in how it has evolved from World War II into its present complex, diffuse, and often bewildering form. It is this paper’s purpose to explain the evolution of today’s Intelligence Community by examining the principal reform 

efforts that various surveys, study commissions, and task forces have undertaken since 1947. Rather than offering a comprehensive history of the Intelligence Community’s development or of the various surveys themselves, we 

hope to identify the principal study initiatives that influenced intelligence reform 

and the forms these changes followed. 

From the initial proposals drafted at the end of World War II to the public reports 

after the Cold War’s end in the 1990s, teams enjoying broad access to intelligence secrets and a mandate to appraise the American intelligence system 

have produced over a dozen studies. While almost all of these reports are now 

available in some declassified form, they have hardly ever been assembled and 

read together, either in their original state or in their public versions.1 The importance of these studies does not rest solely on the effects they produced. Although a few—notably those spurred by a wartime crisis—have produced 

1 Richard A. Best, Jr., and Herbert A. Boerstling of the Congressional Research Service prepared one of the rare summaries 

of Intelligence Community studies. This work, “Proposals for Intelligence Reorganization, 1949–1996,” is available in two 

versions. The first was reprinted in House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, “IC21: Intelligence Community in 

the 21st Century,” 104th Congress, Second Session, 1996, 335ff. An updated revision was completed by CRS in July 2004; 

it summarized reform proposals since 1996. Appendix A of the Aspin-Brown Commission’s final report has a briefer 

summary; see Commission on the Roles and Capabilities of the United States Intelligence Community, Preparing for the 21st

Century: An Appraisal of US Intelligence, Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1996.

We shall attempt 

to explain why 

reform proposals 

recur so often, 

why they 

occasionally 

succeed, and why 

they often 

produce little 

change.
2

obvious results, the direct influence of others was much less.2 The 1949 Dulles 

Report, for example, had a broad impact on the Intelligence Community’s form 

and practice after the outbreak of the Korean War. Other similarly ambitious 

studies, however, have been largely ignored, because of either internal flaws or 

events beyond their authors’ control. We shall attempt to explain why reform 

proposals recur so often, why they occasionally succeed, and why they often 

produce little change. 

In a sense this monograph traces the history of the position of the Director of Central Intelligence. It begins with the challenges faced by the Truman administration 

and Congress when they struck the basic compromises that created the post of 

DCI, follows the evolution of the vision of centrally coordinated intelligence, and 

suggests why so many people at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue felt in 2004 

that a new system was needed. The debates have by no means ended with the 

passage of new legislation supplanting the DCI with a Director of National Intelligence. The issues that have been in play since 1946—and have been analyzed by 

virtually every survey of the intelligence establishment since then—will remain live 

ones for the foreseeable future. This study, by clarifying the past, may help inform 

discussions of how US intelligence can change to meet new challenges at a time 

when good intelligence has rarely been so important for our nation’s future. 

2 Scott Harris reflected on “the track record of previous commissions in an effort to identify those 

factors that contributed to their success or failure” in “Effective Advisory Commissions: Insights from 

Historical Experience,” RAND Project Memorandum 343-CRMAF, January 1995. 
3

From Victory to Cold War: 

Three Decisions

America acquired global responsibilities in 

World War II, but neither Congress nor the 

White House initially had a clear idea of how to 

discharge them. The ad hoc wartime measures that Franklin Roosevelt had undertaken 

before his death in April 1945 now needed to 

be evaluated with a critical eye. When he 

became President, Harry Truman reported 

later, one of his strongest convictions “was that 

the antiquated defense setup of the United 

States had to be reorganized quickly.”1 Similarly, in September 1945 the Joint Chiefs of 

Staff told Secretary of War Henry Stimson and 

Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal of the 

urgent need for intelligence reform:

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.2

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 for intelligence 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, in the beginning of 1946 the Truman 

administration made three crucial decisions for 

postwar intelligence. The National Security Act 

of 1947 ultimately codified these decisions, 

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. In 

his view, 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, 

Truman observed: “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.”3 Truman could 

not give the needed coordinating mission to 

William J. Donovan and his Office of Strategic 

Services (OSS), which he had disbanded on 1 

October 1945. He instead approved a plan that 

his Joint Chiefs of Staff had proposed for an 

independent “central” agency to accomplish 

the “synthesis of departmental intelligence on 

the strategic and national policy level.”4

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 mass of 

data available to the government. A Director of 

Central Intelligence (DCI) would exercise 

some significant degree of control over this 

synthesis. The DCI’s position was to be 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 that “no one department 

could unduly influence the type of intelligence 

produced,” according to the author of this plan, 

Deputy Chief of Naval Intelligence Sidney 

Souers. As a White House adviser on intelligence reform, Adm. Souers explained: 

1 Harry S. Truman, Memoirs, Vol. II, Years of Trial and Hope (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1956), 46. 2 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], 41.

3 Truman, Years of Trial and Hope, 56. 4 Joint Chiefs of Staff to Stimson and Forrestal, “Establishment of a Central Intelligence Agency,” FRUS, 41. The Joint Chiefs’ 

proposal had evolved since late 1944, when Gen. William J. Donovan’s proposals for a peacetime intelligence establishment 

had prompted several agencies to think about counter-proposals of their own.

Most nations do 

not combine 

intelligence 

functions in the 

way that 

President Truman 

did.
4

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 interpret 

information in such a way as to make it 

seem to support previously accepted 

policies or preconceived notions.5

By the time Souers penned these words in 

December 1945, many senior administration 

officials agreed with his conception of the proposed intelligence agency’s role.6 In essence, 

Souers held that the President and his key 

advisers needed a control variable against 

which to test the intelligence and policy advice 

coming from the departments. Only a freestanding intelligence agency could provide 

such a perspective. Objectivity was valued, but 

independence from departmental views on 

national security policy was the principal goal. 

In January 1946, President Truman appointed 

Adm. Souers as the first Director of Central 

Intelligence. As head of a small interdepartmental Central Intelligence Group (CIG), the 

DCI was 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.”7

President Truman in effect made Souers his 

personal intelligence adviser, assigning his 

office the responsibility of summarizing the 

daily flood of cables, memos, reports, and dispatches coming to the White House. 

The Truman administration’s second major decision, reached soon after the formation of CIG in 

early 1946, was to find a leader and a home for 

the clandestine operational capabilities built during the course of the war. Again, it could not be 

Gen. Donovan or his OSS. When OSS was dissolved the previous autumn, its research and 

analysis branch was transferred to the Department of State, while the War Department 

absorbed its surviving operational units, including its clandestine stations abroad. 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 secret activities of 

one agency jeopardized those of another.8 To 

reduce the chance of such conflicts, in September 1945 the Joint Chiefs proposed that the 

director of a new central agency should further 

the “coordination of intelligence activities related 

to the national security.”9

When President Truman approved the appointment of a DCI, the remnants of the OSS operational branches residing in the War Department 

lobbied for a transfer to the new Central Intelligence Group. DCI Souers heard their plea, and, 

by the end of 1946, selected OSS veterans, 

5 Sidney Souers to Clark M. Clifford, “Central Intelligence Agency,” 27 December 1945, reprinted in FRUS, 157–58.

6 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, 

153.) Forrestal’s 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., 156. 

7 Harry S. Truman to the Secretary of State, the Secretary of War, and the Secretary of the Navy, 22 January 1946, reprinted 

in FRUS, 178–79. 

8 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), 220–21; and also “Meeting of the Secretaries of State, War, and 

Navy” [meeting minutes], 14 November 1945, reprinted in FRUS, 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, 311. 

9 Joint Chiefs of Staff to Stimson and Forrestal, “Establishment of a Central Intelligence Agency,” 41.
5

assets, and files had formed the CIG’s Office of 

Special Operations. Although paramilitary and 

“psychological warfare” elements of OSS had 

been demobilized by then, CIG nonetheless 

gained a network of overseas stations and growing espionage, liaison, and counterintelligence 

skills.10 Thus the DCI took command of a substantial portion of all US clandestine activities 

abroad, as well as greater authority to coordinate 

those activities not under his direct control. The 

active operational intelligence capability that the 

United States had developed in the war had 

found a permanent institutional base. 

Most nations do not combine executive intelligence synthesis and operational coordination 

in one central office of the sort that President 

Truman authorized in January 1946. The marriage of these two functions in the new CIG 

was a response to a specific set of historical 

circumstances in the immediate aftermath of 

World War II. It might never have happened at 

all—or not in the same way—at another time. 

The fact that it did, however, made the DCI the 

titular head of American intelligence, who was 

to oversee an intelligence establishment with 

two main missions: providing strategic warning 

of threats to the nation and coordinating clandestine activities abroad. 

The Truman administration’s third key decision 

was to ensure that American intelligence 

remained a loose confederation of agencies with 

no strong direction from either civilian or military 

decisionmakers. In late 1945, while reviewing 

intelligence reform proposals, President Truman 

endorsed the Army and Navy view that “every 

department required its own intelligence.”11 His 

January 1946 order that appointed a DCI and 

established CIG accordingly stipulated that the 

“existing intelligence agencies...shall continue to 

collect, evaluate, correlate, and disseminate 

departmental intelligence.”12 This concession, 

while necessary to win military and FBI assent to 

the creation of CIG, soon had unintended consequences. President Truman—and in all likelihood his advisers as well—lacked current 

knowledge of the true state of “departmental” 

intelligence. They were unaware, for example, of 

how far the departmental boundaries that 

severely limited CIG’s ability to conduct investigations within the United States would complicate its counterintelligence work. Moreover, the 

sprawling but effective military intelligence capabilities built during World War II were being rapidly and inexorably demobilized in 1946, creating 

a chronic weakness in military intelligence that 

would last for decades and affect the development of the US Intelligence Community in the 

Cold War. 

The sweeping reform of American intelligence 

between 1945 and 1947 came about because a 

determined President who wanted to reshape 

the national security establishment took full 

advantage of the opportunity provided him in the 

wake of the largest war in history. President Truman’s initiatives received statutory ratification 

from Congress in the National Security Act of 

1947. Section 102 of this Act, which transformed 

CIG into the CIA, largely reiterated the missions 

that Truman had stated in his January 1946 

directive. The new Act unified (after a fashion) 

the armed services, created a Secretary of 

Defense, an independent Air Force, the CIA, and 

the National Security Council (NSC). It laid a firm 

legal and institutional foundation upon which to 

apply many of the lessons learned in World War 

II. It is still (with its many amendments) the charter of the US national security establishment. 

10 Michael Warner, “Prolonged Suspense: The Fortier Board and the Transformation of the Office of Strategic Services,” 

Journal of Intelligence History 2 (June 2002): 74–76. 11 Truman, Years of Trial and Hope, 57. 12 Truman to the Secretaries of State, War, and Navy, 22 January 1946, 178–179. The directive also included 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.” 

7

Construction of an Intelligence 

Community, 1948–53

As the shape of the new Cold War emerged 

more clearly in 1948, both Congress and the 

White House commissioned studies of the 

American intelligence establishment. These 

parallel studies, the Eberstadt Report and the 

Dulles Report, were the earliest independent 

appraisals of American intelligence as a system. The Eberstadt Report reinforced the prescriptions of the more ambitious Dulles Report, 

which played a major role in shaping the CIA 

and the Intelligence Community after the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950. 

The First Hoover Commission’s 

Eberstadt Report, 1948–49 

Just before the passage of the National Security Act in July 1947, the Republican Congress 

had appointed a commission, chaired by 

former President Herbert Hoover, to examine 

the functioning of the Executive Branch. This 

commission in turn created a task force under 

Ferdinand Eberstadt, a colleague of the new 

Secretary of Defense, James Forrestal, to 

study the national security structure, including 

intelligence.1 Eberstadt’s panel heard testimony from intelligence officials—particularly 

the leadership of CIA—in September 1948 and 

finished its draft late in the year. The Eberstadt 

task force’s published report to Congress concluded: “Intelligence is the first line of defense 

in the atomic age.” By creating the CIA directly 

under the NSC, the National Security Act had 

recognized CIA’s “preeminent role in defense 

planning.” The report found that CIA had unsatisfactory relationships with several of the individual departmental intelligence services, 

which had produced “too many disparate intelligence estimates” that were often subjective 

and biased. Although sound in principle, CIA 

needed improvement in practice. “It is not now 

properly organized,” the report noted, and the 

authors recommended vigorous efforts to 

improve CIA’s internal structure and the quality 

of its product, “especially in the fields of scientific and medical intelligence.”2 While “the 

basic framework for a sound intelligence organization now exists,” the report declared, “[t]hat 

framework must be fleshed out by proper personnel and sound administrative measures.” 3

The classified section of the Eberstadt Report 

offered a more extensive examination of the 

intelligence enterprise. CIA was “the apex of a 

pyramidal intelligence structure,” but it had not 

met the expectation that it would be the major 

source of intelligence “on which broad national 

policy could be soundly based.”4 Personnel represented the main problem for CIA and the other 

agencies. In the military intelligence arms especially, most of the “skilled and experienced personnel of wartime” had left government service 

since the war. Those that remained had seen 

“their organizations and systems ruined by 

superior officers with no experience, little 

capacity, and no imagination.”5 Although the 

task force members were briefed on CIA’s newly 

1 Eberstadt was a former chairman of the Army Munitions Board and former Vice Chairman of the War Production Board who 

had overseen the production of a report on the question of “unification” of the armed services for Forrestal in the summer of 

1945. 

2 The Committee on the National Security Organization, National Security Organization: A Report with Recommendations, 

prepared for the Commission on the Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government, 15 Nov. 1948, 76 and 16 

(hereinafter cited as “Unclassified Eberstadt Report”). This unclassified published Eberstadt Report can be found in 

Executive Registry Job 86B00269R, box 2, folder 1. Congress chartered the larger panel, the Hoover Commission, in July 

1947.

3 The unclassified Eberstadt Report’s findings and conclusions were largely based on the more extended classified report 

drafted by John Bross, an OSS veteran and later a senior CIA official. Ludwell Lee Montague, General Walter Bedell Smith 

as Director of Central Intelligence: October 1950—February 1953 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 

1992), 124. This report (hereinafter cited as “Classified Eberstadt Report”) formed the chapter, “The Central Intelligence 

Agency: National and Service Intelligence,” in the classified Volume II of the commission’s national security organization 

report. Its pages are numbered 25–60, and the best CIA copy is in Executive Registry Job 86B00269R, box 14, folder 132. 

For the “framework” quote, see pages 40–41. 

4 “Classified Eberstadt Report,” 31–32, 37–38, 44–45, 47, 59–60. 

5 Ibid., 39–40. 

The Dulles 

Report, the 

national emergency in Korea, 

and Smith’s 

forceful leadership, helped 

shape the 

nation’s disparate intelligence 

agencies into 

something recognizable as an 

Intelligence Community.
8

authorized covert action capability and were 

aware of the armed services’ signals intelligence programs, the Eberstadt Report said little 

about operational matters (the classified report 

was written at the Confidential level, too low in 

any event to permit discussion of these topics). 

In short, although the report’s authors had spotted weaknesses in military intelligence, they 

had not probed deeply enough into the problem 

to understand its causes or propose solutions. 

Unique among postwar surveys, the Eberstadt 

Report projected no organizational change in 

the Intelligence Community. Change is disruptive in itself, the report declared, and the intelligence services’ great present need was for “a 

relatively reorganization-free period in which to 

work out their problems.” Once action had been 

taken on those suggested reforms that were 

accepted, the report concluded, “CIA and other 

Government intelligence agencies should be 

permitted a period of internal development free 

from the disruption of continual examination and 

as free as possible from publicity.” 6

The NSC’s Dulles Report, 1948–49

The Eberstadt Report, completed on 15 

November 1948, got little attention when 

former President Hoover submitted it to a new 

Democratic Congress on 13 January 1949. It 

was in any case overshadowed by a long, 

detailed, and critical survey of the CIA and 

related intelligence activities prepared for the 

National Security Council (NSC). With a new 

intelligence system in place in the fall of 1947, 

NSC officials and DCI Roscoe Hillenkoetter 

had decided to review the intelligence system’s 

development since the war, to determine how 

the new NSC should exercise routine oversight 

of CIA.7 In early 1948 the NSC asked three 

intelligence veterans—Allen Dulles, William 

Jackson, and Matthias Correa—to report on 

the Agency. The team submitted its report to 

the NSC on 1 January 1949.8 Although 

focused on the CIA, the team had also 

received NSC permission to examine (as had 

the Eberstadt Report) “such intelligence activities of other Government Departments and 

Agencies as relate to the national security, in 

order to make recommendations for their effective operation and overall coordination.” 9

Dulles, Jackson, and Correa began from the 

insight that World War II had changed everything. Modern crises could be catastrophic: 

America was vulnerable to a “sudden and possibly devastating attack.” Compounding this 

peril were the tactics of potential adversaries. 

An “iron curtain” now veiled the workings of 

regimes from the Elbe to the Yangtze. Far-flung 

communist fifth-column activities both in the 

United States and abroad presented a new 

kind of threat to American security. Moreover, 

with the advent of the atomic bomb, science 

had opened an entirely new field that, while 

vital for US defense, also posed new problems 

for intelligence collection and coordination. As 

the first line of defense, intelligence had to be 

6 Ibid., 48, 59–60. 

7 Arthur B. Darling, The Central Intelligence Agency: An Instrument of Government, to 1950 (University Park: Pennsylvania 

State University Press, 1990), 299. Also see Montague, 39–40.

8 Dulles had won fame after the war when his exploits as OSS chief of station in Bern, Switzerland, emerged. Widely 

recognized as a leading civilian expert on intelligence, he had testified on the proposed National Security Act in 1947. 

Matthias F. Correa, a former New York District Attorney, had worked in OSS counterintelligence in Italy before becoming an 

aide to Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal dealing with intelligence reform in 1945. William H. Jackson, a New York 

lawyer and banker, who had been the Assistant Military Attaché for Air in London and Chief of the Secret Intelligence Branch, 

G-2, European Theater, in World War II, became DDCI in 1950. 

9 The formal citation for the Dulles Report is: Intelligence Report Group, “The Central Intelligence Organization and National 

Organization for Intelligence,” 1 January 1949, iv. It will be cited hereinafter as the Dulles Report. The Summary of the Dulles 

Report is reprinted in FRUS; see in particular page 903. Also see Darling, 302. To assist the authors in their task, the NSC 

on 13 January 1948 had authorized and directed the DCI and the departmental intelligence chiefs to give the team “access 

to all information and facilities required for their survey, except details concerning intelligence sources and methods.” 

“National Security Council Resolution,” 13 January 1948, reprinted in FRUS, 827. 

The key to an 

effective intelligence system 

was for CIA to 

perform its statutory coordinating 

role in operations 

and analysis.
9

a full-time pursuit, not just a wartime activity. It 

had both to warn of threats and to prepare to 

serve effectively in a conflict. America and its 

leaders, the Dulles Report contended, had 

overcome their suspicions of secret government and had tried to strike a balance between 

freedom of the press and the need “for silence 

on certain phases of intelligence.”10

The Dulles Report echoed several Eberstadt 

Report conclusions. The authors found that the 

National Security Act of 1947 had provided “a 

framework upon which a sound intelligence 

system can be built,” and that to accomplish its 

vital coordinating mission CIA had been “properly placed under the National Security Council.”11 But CIA had not yet effectively carried out 

its vital role of coordinating intelligence activities and judgments relating to the national 

security.12 Building an efficient intelligence 

structure would take time and would require 

the patient provision of “competent and highly 

trained men and women.”13

The Dulles Report’s authors were able to delve 

deeper than the Eberstadt Report into CIA’s 

situation and relationship with other intelligence activities. CIA’s creation (as “a semiautonomous highly centralized agency with a 

broad variety of intelligence responsibilities”) 

marked a departure from the general pattern 

that other countries had followed. Such a 

degree of centralization entailed certain disadvantages, the report conceded, but it could “be 

justified, provided that [CIA’s] distinctive functions...are handled according to their special 

requirements.”14

The key to an effective intelligence system was 

for CIA to perform its statutory coordinating 

role in operations and analysis. A properly 

functioning CIA “should be able more effectively to carry out the duties assigned to it by 

law and thus bring our over-all intelligence system closer to that point of efficiency which the 

national security demands.”15 The Agency 

should operate on clear principles:

Unless the Central Intelligence Agency 

performs an essential service for each of 

[the] departments and coordinates their 

intelligence activities, it will fail in its 

mission. The Central Intelligence Agency 

should not be merely another intelligence 

agency duplicating and rivalling [sic] the 

existing agencies of State, Army, Navy, 

and Air Force. It should not be a 

competitor of these agencies, but a 

contributor to them and should help to 

coordinate their intelligence activities. It 

must make maximum use of the 

resources of existing agencies; it must 

not duplicate their work but help to put an 

end to existing duplication by seeing to it 

that the best qualified agency in each 

phase of the intelligence field should 

assume and carry out its particular 

responsibility.16

Unfortunately, the report continued, the 

Agency was not operating along these lines:

The principal defect of the Central 

Intelligence Agency is that its direction, 

administrative organization and 

performance do not show sufficient 

appreciation of the Agency’s assigned 

functions, particularly in the fields of 

intelligence coordination and the 

production of intelligence estimates. The 

result has been that the Central 

Intelligence Agency has tended to 

10 Ibid., 15–18 11 Ibid., 1–5, see also 22–23. 12 Ibid., 2–5. 13 Ibid., 16–17, 147. 14 Ibid., 23. 15 Ibid., 14. 16 Ibid., 26–27. 
10

become just one more intelligence 

agency producing intelligence in 

competition with older established 

agencies of the Government 

departments.17

Here the Dulles Report implicitly differed from 

the Eberstadt Report, which had subtly suggested that the NSC needed to start providing 

positive guidance to CIA. In their report, 

Dulles, Jackson, and Correa conceded that 

decisionmakers needed to do a better job of 

communicating their needs to intelligence: 

It is, indeed, a fundamental failing of the 

American intelligence services that, in 

general, they are not advised of the 

current needs of policy-makers. 

Unfortunately, continuing effort is rarely 

made by intelligence consumers to guide 

intelligence activities toward the most 

meaningful targets.18

This problem notwithstanding, the Dulles 

Report suggested that the CIA was the weak 

link in the system, and that its weakness was 

the result not of a lack of authorities but of 

“inadequacies of direction” from the current 

Director of Central Intelligence, Roscoe Hillenkoetter.19 An effective DCI, the report declared, 

would have to 

show a much greater concern than 

hitherto with the general problem of 

coordination of intelligence activities[,] 

which is one of his essential statutory 

duties. His is a responsibility to all of the 

departments concerned with national 

security; it can be properly discharged by 

leadership, imagination, initiative and a 

realization that only a joining of efforts 

can achieve the desired results.20

While acknowledging that a measure of CIA’s 

and the DCI’s difficulties resulted from the 

older intelligence agencies’ “suspicion and distrust,” the Dulles Report nonetheless insisted 

that “what is needed today is for the Central 

Intelligence Agency to prove that it can and will 

carry out its assigned duties.”21

Among the assigned duties that the Dulles 

Report found CIA had neglected was the production of “national intelligence,” especially in 

the preparation of national intelligence estimates. The original CIG, the report explained, 

had envisioned a small organization limited 

strictly to national intelligence problems, which 

would base its work primarily on other departments’ reports and estimates rather than 

employ a large research and analysis organization of its own. The changed character of this 

organization and diffusion of its duties, however, 

had made its output of national intelligence now 

unimpressive. CIA had become “an independent producer of national intelligence, the quality of whose product is variable and the 

influence of which is questionable.”22 To remedy 

this, the report proposed the creation of an Estimates Division, “a small group of highly 

selected individuals whose task it would be to 

draw upon and review the specialized intelligence product of the departmental agencies in 

order to prepare...a finished national intelligence estimate.” Moreover, to make them the 

most authoritative estimates available to policymakers, all of the principal intelligence agencies 

were to participate in and approve them. This 

was one of the Dulles Report’s most significant 

recommendations, which Lt. Gen. Walter Bedell 

Smith promptly implemented by forming the 

Office and Board of National Estimates when he 

took office as DCI in October 1950.23

17 Ibid., 11. 18 Ibid., 127. 19 Ibid., 11. 20 Ibid., 60. 21 Ibid., 163. 22 Ibid., 72. 23 Ibid., 76–82, “Proposals for Improving the Production of National Estimates.” 
11

The Dulles Report also offered some insightful 

suggestions for ensuring tighter coordination 

between communications intelligence, operations, and diplomacy. Its authors were prohibited, however, from looking too closely at the 

functioning of the cryptologic services. The 

National Security Council did not allow the 

Dulles team to critique “departmental intelligence operations...in the collection of communications intelligence.”24 The report’s authors 

thus found themselves unable “to express a 

judgment upon the efficiency of the present 

arrangements for the production of communications intelligence through the separate 

establishments of the Army and the Navy.”25

The Dulles Report did a more thorough job with 

human intelligence, a field its authors knew 

well. The authors noted that since communist 

countries offered little open source information, the United States was forced to rely more 

on clandestine means.26 Although satisfied 

with the early progress of CIA’s clandestine 

collection office, they offered several constructive suggestions.27 The report also called for 

better management of counterintelligence 

activities, both within CIA and across the intelligence system, noting “the danger of foreign 

espionage and the menace of fifth-column 

activities does not stop or start at our national 

boundaries.” The Agency had not yet “adequately exploited” counterintelligence 

as a source of positive intelligence 

information, as a channel for deception, 

as a means of protecting espionage 

operations and as a basis for penetrating 

fifth-column operations abroad, which 

may be tied in with fifth-column 

operations here.28

The CIA and FBI had to maintain closer relations with each other. The NSC and CIA had to 

take the initiative in this field, both in inviting the 

Bureau to sit on interagency advisory bodies 

and in crafting and implementing firmer directives that would enable the Agency to serve the 

purpose set forth in the National Security Act, 

“of coordinating those phases of domestic 

intelligence and counter-intelligence which 

relate to the national security.”29

The Dulles Report and DCI Smith’s 

Reforms, 1950–53

The Dulles Report was one of the most influential outside evaluations in the history of the 

Intelligence Community. It owed its success in 

no small portion to its authors’ understanding 

that Congress and the White House had 

intended the Central Intelligence Agency to 

coordinate both operations and analysis—that 

the definition of “intelligence” in its title had to 

include both activities. The Dulles Report 

added to the sentiment in the Truman administration that the CIA needed stronger leadership. Although the NSC soon endorsed many 

of the Dulles Report’s recommendations, the 

question of replacing DCI Hillenkoetter 

became entangled in administration debates 

over the direction of defense policy. The 

reforms that the NSC had mandated were 

largely held in abeyance until June 1950, when 

the CIA’s failure to foresee the sudden North 

Korean invasion of South Korea spurred President Truman to appoint a new DCI, Lt. Gen. 

Walter Bedell Smith, USA. ‘Beetle’ Smith, who 

had been Gen. Dwight Eisenhower’s chief of 

staff in Europe and Truman’s ambassador to 

the Soviet Union, took office as DCI on 7 October 1950, with the determination and mandate 

24 Ibid., iv. 25 Ibid., 59; also cf 126. 26 Ibid., 108. 27 Ibid., cf 119 and 128. 28 Ibid., 125. 29 Ibid., 56–58, 125–126, and 144–145. 

The Dulles 

Report was one 

of the most influential outside 

evaluations in the 

history of the 

Intelligence Community.
12

to reshape the organization and make US intelligence work as a team.30

In November 1950, within weeks of Smith’s 

arrival, America suffered one of its worst battlefield defeats when Chinese troops fell upon 

Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s overstretched 

forces in North Korea. Disaster was averted 

and the front stabilized by January 1951, but 

the debacle marked the second major US intelligence warning failure in six months. Neither 

the CIA nor any other US intelligence body 

foresaw the size or effectiveness of communist 

China’s sudden massive intervention in the 

war. This lapse brought home the urgency of 

the new DCI’s reforms. 

Smith had gone to work with a will, hiring William Jackson as his Deputy Director of Central 

Intelligence (DDCI) and Allen Dulles as deputy 

director for operations. Working rapidly along 

the lines proposed in the Dulles Report, Smith, 

Jackson and Dulles tightened CIA’s internal 

administration, reformed its production of finished intelligence, and established a clear division of labor among the various components of 

the Intelligence Community. 

Smith followed the NSC’s blueprint to reform 

what he considered one of CIA’s main weaknesses, its office for analyzing and disseminating intelligence. Under Smith’s predecessors, 

Agency products represented the judgments of 

CIA analysts but had not always reflected the 

views and information of other intelligence 

agencies. Smith had been angered to discover 

on arriving that CIA’s Office of Reports and 

Estimates (ORE) had no current, coordinated 

estimate of the Korean situation. He soon 

broke ORE into three pieces.31 To make CIA 

the producer of “the most authoritative estimates available to policy makers,” the first of 

the three new units comprised a board of 

experts and staff to draft and coordinate 

national intelligence estimates—the Board and 

Office of National Estimates. In addition, Smith 

formed a new “current intelligence” office to 

produce the daily bulletin for the President, and 

a research office to conduct analyses that were 

beyond the scope of the established intelligence services. The success of Smith’s 

reforms depended upon departmental intelligence from other agencies. The members of 

the Intelligence Community were to perform 

the basic analysis of subjects in their designated fields, while CIA would cease duplicating 

their efforts and focus on integrating the whole 

effort of American intelligence analysis. 

The improvement of departmental intelligence 

that Smith desired also made progress during 

his tenure as DCI. The armed services had 

continued to maintain separate cryptologic 

efforts under a loose confederation called the 

Armed Forces Security Agency, which 

reported to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Complaints about signals intelligence support for 

the Korean effort provoked Smith’s anger, however, and at his urging the National Security 

Council in 1952 replaced this system with a 

new National Security Agency (NSA), subordinated to the Secretary of Defense.32 The 

change preserved the cryptologic arms of the 

various services but recognized the “national” 

importance of their collective effort to provide 

tighter coordination and better support for the 

Secretary of Defense. 

DCI Smith’s major contribution to the emergence of the Intelligence Community was that, 

for the first time, he realized and used the DCI’s 

latent authority to lead the intelligence estab30 Truman nominated and the Senate confirmed Smith as DCI in late August 1950, but major surgery prevented his taking 

office until 7 October. When informed of his appointment, Smith told a friend, “I expect the worst and I am sure I won’t be 

disappointed.” D. K. R. Crosswell, The Chief of Staff: The Military Career of General Walter Bedell Smith (New York: 

Greenwood, 1991), 122 and 332. Montague, 55–56. 

31 Montague, 151. 32 Montague, 253–54. See also David A. Hatch and Robert Louis Benson, “The Korean War: The SIGINT Background,” 

National Security Agency Center for Cryptologic History, 2000, 15–16.
13

lishment. Not everything turned out as he envisioned, but by the time he stepped down in 

early 1953, he had consolidated CIA’s major 

functions, recast its place in the overall intelligence structure, and set clear missions and 

roles for the departmental elements of that 

system. The Department of State and Joint 

Chiefs of Staff yielded their remaining operational roles to the CIA and the Secretary of 

Defense.33 At the same time, Smith’s reforms 

sought to keep the services and departments 

strong in intelligence analysis—an arrangement that would not work out so well (and 

would eventually prompt calls for new investigations of intelligence). The combination of the 

Dulles Report’s blueprint, the national emergency in Korea, and Smith’s forceful leadership, had thus helped shape the nation’s 

disparate intelligence agencies into something 

recognizable as an Intelligence Community.34

33 For more on State and JCS in the direction of operations, see Montague, 206–208; as well as Mark Stout, “The Pond: 

Running Agents for State, War, and the CIA,” Studies in Intelligence 48, no. 3 (2004), 77–78. 34 Indeed, the term “Intelligence Community” first began to appear in descriptions of the US intelligence system in 1952, 

toward the end of Gen. Smith’s tenure as DCI. Montague, 74.

15

The Collection Revolution, 

1954–60

The decade ending in 1960 saw two principal 

studies advocating further adjustments in the 

Intelligence Community, as it exploited new 

technological means of collecting data and the 

White House concentrated its powers to run 

the Cold War. The first study was commissioned by Congress and led by Gen. Mark 

Clark, USA (Ret). Although it identified a number of problem areas—such as the Intelligence 

Community’s management and accountability 

to Congress—its actual results were minimal. 

Indeed, before the congressional investigations of the mid-1970s, studies sponsored by 

Congress had very limited influence on the 

structure or work of CIA and the Intelligence 

Community. The second study, commissioned 

by President Eisenhower and led by CIA 

Inspector General Lyman Kirkpatrick, was 

more tightly focused than Gen. Clark’s and (as 

might be expected from its presidential sponsorship) produced significant results. 

The Second Hoover Commission’s 

Clark Report, 1955 

By the time the Republicans recaptured Congress and the White House in 1953, the issue 

of collection was becoming vital. When the 

new Congress gave a resurrected Hoover 

Commission another charter to examine the 

Executive Branch, the commission created 

another intelligence task force, under Gen. 

Mark Clark, to study and make recommendations on all intelligence activities of the Federal 

government.1 Clark’s panel began its work in 

October 1954 and first met early the next 

month. In May 1955 it submitted two reports: 

one Top Secret (with lengthy annexes) for the 

President, and another unclassified for the 

Hoover Commission and Congress.2

The Clark task force adopted assumptions concerning US national security similar to those of 

the Eberstadt and Dulles inquiries. Over the last 

generation Americans had had to set aside their 

once secure indifference to foreign affairs: 

“Technological developments and political 

realignments in modern times” had compelled 

American vigilance and action in the larger 

world. The United States had emerged from 

World War II as the greatest military power and 

the leader of the free world. The demands of 

global leadership and the advent of atomic 

bombs had now “intensified the need for adequate and timely intelligence so that we might 

fulfill our responsibilities in international affairs 

and ensure our own survival.”3

The Clark report’s results were to some extent 

predetermined by President Eisenhower’s 

reluctance to let the panel examine CIA’s clandestine operations. When the Hoover Commission named Mark Clark to investigate 

intelligence, the President asked the famous 

aviator, Lt. Gen. James H. Doolittle, USAFR, 

and a panel of consultants to undertake a quick 

study of CIA’s covert activities. To ensure that 

these matters remained outside the Clark task 

force’s purview, Eisenhower told Doolittle to 

confer with Clark “in order to avoid any unnecessary duplication of work.”4

1 Congress in July 1953 chartered the second Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government, 

which Herbert Hoover again chaired. The Hoover Commission’s final report was due on 31 May 1955, when the commission 

would go out of existence. Members of the Clark Task Force were Adm. Richard L. Conolly, USN (Ret), a former Deputy 

Chief of Naval Operations; Ernest F. Hollings, the speaker pro tempore of South Carolina’s House of Representatives; 

California businessman Henry Kearns; Edward V. Rickenbacker, World War I flying ace and president of Eastern Air Lines; 

and Donald S. Russell, a former Assistant Secretary of State. The staff director was Maj. Gen. James G. Christiansen, USA 

(Ret).

2 The unclassified report to Congress used much of the classified version’s text. Unless otherwise noted, this section cites 

the unclassified version. 

3 Clark Report, 11–12. 

4 Gen. Doolittle and his team submitted their report, “Covert Activities of the Central Intelligence Agency,” on 30 September 

1954, just as the Clark task force was starting its work. The quotation comes from President Eisenhower’s letter to James 

H. Doolittle, 26 July 1954, reprinted as Appendix A of the Doolittle Report, which has been declassified and released as CIA 

MORI document 627859. 

The Clark Task 

Force suggested 

the DCI needed to 

spend less time 

managing CIA 

and more on the 

entire intelligence effort.
16

President Eisenhower’s constraint perhaps 

explains why the Clark report, after struggling 

to define intelligence, arrived at the following: 

“Intelligence deals with all the things which 

should be known in advance of initiating a 

course of action.” This definition allowed the 

Clark report to sidestep secret activities not 

directly tied to the collection of intelligence. 

Nevertheless, intelligence as information for 

decisionmaking was still too broad a definition, 

for the task force had no writ or desire to comment on the overall management of information in the Executive Branch. It thus felt obliged 

to limit its inquiry to “foreign” intelligence, in 

which the adjective denoted “the target of information as distinct from the geographical 

source.”5

This clarification still left the task force with a 

“Herculean job” and the prospect of providing 

only sketchy results in the time allotted. The 

Clark task force seemed to feel that “the Intelligence Community”—its term for “the machinery for accomplishing our intelligence 

objectives”—was getting too complicated to 

understand. There were at least a dozen 

departments and agencies “engaged in intelligence in one form or another,” with another 10 

or so involved in minor ways.6 Faced with this 

profusion, the classified version of the Clark 

report hinted that the task force had thrown up 

its collective hands and rather arbitrarily narrowed its inquiry to “the departments and 

agencies whose entire or primary responsibilities lie in the field of positive foreign intelligence as it pertains to national defense and 

security, and in whose care vast amounts of 

money and unique authority have been 

entrusted.”7

These definitions and limitations meant that 

the Clark task force would not really judge the 

quality of intelligence support to foreign policy, 

either in improving decisionmaking or in executing policies. Instead, the Clark report confined itself largely to issues of management: 

how well the CIA and the Intelligence Community seemed to function and interact, and how 

those functions and interactions could be 

improved through leadership and oversight. 

The Clark report praised Allen Dulles—now 

serving as DCI—as “industrious, objective, 

selfless, enthusiastic, and imaginative.” The 

report’s authors nevertheless worried that in 

his enthusiasm Dulles had “taken upon himself 

too many burdensome duties and responsibilities on the operational side of CIA’s activities.” 

The report cautioned, “The glamour and 

excitement of some angles of our intelligence 

effort must not be permitted to overshadow 

other vital phases of the work or to cause 

neglect of primary functions.” Moreover, CIA 

needed to correct certain administrative flaws 

that had developed in it.8

Deeply concerned over the lack of adequate 

intelligence data from behind the Iron Curtain, 

the authors of the Clark report called for 

“greater concentration on the collection of intelligence information from our primary target[s]—Russia and her satellites, and 

Communist China.”9 This criticism of collection 

on key intelligence problems marked a turning 

point for surveys of the Intelligence Community. Hitherto such reports had stressed procedural problems and reforms, and had not 

focused on the quantity or sources of data collected. Henceforth they would scrutinize what 

was collected as well as the entities that collected it. 

What was to be done? The Clark report 

seemed to suggest that the remedy was both 

5 Ibid., 18, 26. 

6 Ibid., 13, 17–18. 

7 Ibid., xi, classified version. 

8 The task force also declared: “We discovered no valid ground for the suspicion that the CIA or any other element of the 

intelligence family was being effectively contaminated by any organized subversive or communistic clique.” Ibid., 13–14. 

9 Ibid., 14. 
17

organizational and technological. At CIA, reorganization was needed to ensure that each of 

its functions “gets adequate attention without 

diversionary interest.”10 The larger problem of 

collection against the communist powers 

demanded “greater boldness at the policy 

level, a willingness to accept certain calculated 

political and diplomatic risks, and full use of 

technological capabilities.” Immediately after 

this statement, the task force suggested that 

DCI Dulles needed to spend less time managing CIA and devote more attention to the 

“broad, overall direction of the Agency and the 

coordination of the entire intelligence effort.” In 

particular, the DCI should employ “an Executive Director, or ‘chief of staff,’ of the Agency” so 

that he might be relieved of “the chore of many 

day-to-day administrative and operational 

problems.”11

The task force also expressed concern “over 

the absence of satisfactory machinery for the 

surveillance of the stewardship of the Central 

Intelligence Agency.” This need for closer oversight prompted perhaps the most influential 

Clark task force suggestion: a “small, permanent commission” comprising “a bipartisan 

group including members of both Houses of 

Congress and distinguished private citizens 

appointed by the President.” The full Hoover 

Commission liked the idea but rejected the proposal for a hybrid private-congressional committee. It urged instead that the President 

appoint a distinguished private panel and suggested that Congress consider establishing its 

own joint committee on intelligence.12 The latter idea foundered amid competing congressional committee jurisdictions, but the former 

found a receptive audience at the White 

House. 

The Clark Task Force strengthened its case for 

a new watchdog panel through candid comments in the classified version of its report. It 

noted that Congress and the White House had 

created CIA to be “a new agency unique and in 

many ways strange to our democratic form of 

government.” The Agency “operates without 

the customary legislative restraints and reins 

under which other departments must function. 

Its work is veiled in secrecy, and it is virtually a 

law unto itself.” Secrecy made it difficult to 

judge how well the Intelligence Community 

functioned. Indeed, CIA’s cumbersome and 

time-consuming security restrictions had “seriously interfered” with the task force’s survey of 

the Agency’s activities. Moreover, the Intelligence Community itself did not know how 

much it spent. “Precise figures on the cost in 

money and manpower engaged in intelligence 

activities...are not a matter of record,” and the 

task force could only guess at the total. “Any 

attempt to compile such data would require the 

expenditure of money out of all proportion to 

the value of the findings.”13

President Eisenhower soon appointed a panel 

of wise men, called the President’s Board of 

Consultants for Foreign Intelligence Activities 

(PBCFIA). Although hardly the “machinery for 

surveillance” of CIA that the Clark report had 

recommended, the new board offered the 

President a source of experienced opinion and 

advice for improving CIA and the Intelligence 

Community. This was perhaps the only lasting 

result of the Clark report, which Congress, 

having returned to Democratic control in 1955, 

generally ignored. 

The Kirkpatrick Joint Study Group, 1960

Just after the May 1960 U-2 shoot down, President Eisenhower authorized a survey of the 

Intelligence Community, tasking an ad hoc 

team of senior intelligence officials from State, 

10 Ibid., 14. 11 Ibid., 69. 12 Clark Report, 1–2, 14–15 and 61. 13 Classified Clark Report, vi, viii, xvii, and xix. 

The study led by 

CIA Inspector 

General Lyman 

Kirkpatrick in 

1960 was tightly 

focused and produced significant 

results.
18

Defense, and CIA. This “Joint Study Group,” 

headed by CIA’s respected Inspector General, 

Lyman B. Kirkpatrick, Jr., worked efficiently to 

meet a tight deadline. Eisenhower wanted recommendations that he could act upon during 

his last month in office, which gave the group 

barely seven months to complete its report. 

Like the Clark Task Force, moreover, the Joint 

Study Group concentrated on the informational 

side of the intelligence business and did not 

report on covert action or related clandestine 

activities in support of US foreign policy.14

Indeed, the team’s terms of reference, which 

the members’ principals approved in mid-July, 

delimited the scope of the group’s inquiry to 

“the organizational and management aspects 

of the foreign intelligence community.”15

The final report of the Joint Study Group 

reflected both the authors’ intimate knowledge 

and their remarkable candor in appraising the 

strengths and weaknesses of their own home 

agencies and of the intelligence system itself. 

Where previous inquiries had only begun to 

notice the Intelligence Community’s main Cold 

War problem—its inability to collect key information on the Soviet Union—the Joint Study Group 

faced this issue forthrightly. The two roots of the 

problem were the Cold War itself and the pace 

of technological change. Prolonged SovietAmerican tension“[t]he continued threat from 

an implacable and powerful enemy”had 

forced the United States to sustain its intelligence effort “at close to wartime intensity.” Decisionmakers needed “the best possible flow of 

information” about Soviet intentions and capabilities, but were not getting it despite the labors 

of the Intelligence Community:

It cannot be said with any assurance, 

short of the actual event, that this flow of 

information is now sufficient to provide 

the desirable warning and security of 

command, or assuming that it is now 

sufficient, that it will not suddenly dry up 

sometime in the future.16

Technological change was further complicating the situation, producing new weapons and 

consequent dangers, along with collection 

opportunities and risks—and vast new 

expenses. Unfortunately, the agencies themselves were addressing new problems piecemeal instead of attacking them together in an 

integrated fashion.17 The intelligence system, 

the report counseled, “must be a community 

effort in fact as well as name.”18

The answer was not a quick organizational fix 

but a patient campaign to improve coordination. The majority of the Joint Study Group 

opposed the idea of detaching the DCI from 

the CIA so that he could concentrate on community affairs, fearing that he would become a 

mere figurehead if he lost the influence conferred by his ability to command an operating 

intelligence agency. The DCI instead needed a 

permanent staff drawn from across the community and devoted solely to community management and coordination issues.19 In 

14 This approach was in keeping with Kirkpatrick’s stated preference for defining intelligence as “a compilation and distillation 

of the total knowledge on any given area or subject.” Lyman B. Kirkpatrick, Jr., The US Intelligence Community: Foreign 

Policy and Domestic Activities (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1985 [1973]), 3. 15 Joint Study Group, “Report on Foreign Intelligence Activities of the United States Government,” 15 December 1960, 

Executive Registry Job 86B00269R, box 2, f. 6. The members were Lyman B. Kirkpatrick, Jr., the chairman and 

representative of the DCI; Allan Evans, representing the Secretary of State; Gen. Graves B. Erskine, USMC (Ret), 

representing the Secretary of Defense; Robert M. Macy, representing the director of the Bureau of the Budget; and James 

S. Lay, Jr., representing the special assistant for national security affairs and the National Security Council. Assisting the 

group were J. Patrick Coyne of the PBCFIA staff and Jesmond Balmer, the assistant to the DCI for interagency coordination. 

Kirkpatrick describes the genesis and work of the Joint Study Group in The Real CIA (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 206–

207, and 215–232.) 

16 Joint Study Group, “Report on Foreign Intelligence Activities,” 26–27. 17 Ibid., 19–21, 129–132. 18 Ibid., 23. 19 Ibid., 89–94, 103, 109–110. The group’s Defense Department representative dissented from this conclusion. 
19

addition, the United States Intelligence 

Board—the advisory body charged with coordinating community estimates and requirements—needed to streamline its own work 

(especially its cumbersome committee structure) and tailor the community’s voluminous list 

of intelligence questions to existing collection 

capabilities.20

Similarly, the Joint Study Group was the first 

survey to probe the Defense Department’s role 

and performance in the Intelligence Community. Its final report noted that defense intelligence needed a greater exercise of 

managerial and budgetary powers by the 

Office of the Secretary, the Joint Chiefs of 

Staff, and the Director of the National Security 

Agency. These combined efforts could measurably improve DoD intelligence and thus help 

integrate and streamline the entire national 

intelligence system.21

The Joint Study Group’s report is perhaps principally remembered today for recognizing the 

weakness of defense intelligence and for advocating several steps towards strengthening 

intelligence for commanders and decisionmakers. For example, it helped persuade the 

incoming Kennedy administration to create the 

Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). The 

group’s report had not actually called for a new 

intelligence office under the Secretary of 

Defense, but rather recommended a modest 

centralization and insisted that the services 

should retain their separate organizations.22

Nevertheless, Secretary of Defense Robert 

McNamara added some ideas of his own to the 

report’s suggestions, and DIA began operating 

on 1 October 1961. The individual services’ 

intelligence organizations continued to function, but they lost some of their autonomy and 

resources to DIA, the Secretary of Defense’s 

own intelligence service. The Joint Study 

Group, however, could claim paternity for the 

creation of the National Photographic Intelligence Center (NPIC), the joint CIA-Defense 

imagery analysis office. Following the group’s 

recommendation, President Eisenhower 

authorized the new center shortly before leaving office in January 1961. 

20 Ibid., 85–86. 21 Ibid., 23, 28, 32. 22 Ibid., 23. 

21

The Schlesinger Report, 1971

The 1960s saw rapid technological innovation 

and steeply rising costs for both military systems and intelligence collection. The use of 

satellites and computers for intelligence work 

brought new capabilities and drove organizational changes. By 1969, the incoming Nixon 

administration, glimpsing new challenges and 

opportunities for America in both fields, wondered why the Intelligence Community 

seemed so ambivalent in supporting White 

House initiatives. National Security Adviser 

Henry Kissinger perceived an institutional predisposition toward pessimism and naysaying 

among the analysts and their managers. President Nixon complained that CIA was infected 

with political biases and would not give him 

information on its past activities. Flawed analyses of events in Indochina further annoyed the 

White House: “What the hell do those clowns 

do out there in Langley?” the President asked 

after Washington was surprised by the 1970 

coup in Cambodia.1

The Nixon administration authorized its own 

survey of the Intelligence Community in late 

1970. The job fell to James Schlesinger, Assistant Director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, who worked closely with 

Kissinger’s NSC staff on the project. Their 

March 1971 report described a community 

adapting haphazardly to technological change, 

and recommended reforms that would eventually prove far reaching.2

As might be expected with a budget official in 

charge of the survey, the resulting report took 

a hard look at resources. The Schlesinger 

Report noted two “disturbing phenomena” in 

the Intelligence Community. The cost of intelligence had exploded over the last decade 

with “spectacular increases in collection activities.” At the same time, however, the community had failed to achieve “a commensurate 

improvement in the scope and overall quantity of intelligence products.” Improved collection technologies—satellite photography, 

telemetry, and electronic intelligence—had 

cast doubt on the once-clear lines between 

“national” and “tactical” intelligence. Uncertain of their missions, the intelligence agencies and armed services had expanded into 

costly and duplicative ventures while clinging 

to obsolescent collection systems.3

In addition, the vast new quantities of data 

had outstripped the community’s ability—or 

willingness—to analyze them.4 Analysts were 

not exploiting the “richness” of the new data. 

They had shown little initiative in offering 

explanations for foreign actions, and had 

demonstrated a “propensity to overlook...unpleasant possibilities.” The expense 

and impetus of technological developments 

thus had the perverse effect of worsening this 

problem, making the collectors more influential in their agencies than the analysts, so that 

collection guided production instead of vice 

versa. Consumers also tended to treat intelligence as “a free good, so that demand 

exceeds supply, priorities are not established, 

the system becomes overloaded, and the 

quality of the output suffers.”5 The community’s indiscipline and inertia could not be 

remedied without “a fundamental reform of 

[its] decisionmaking bodies and procedures.”6

Indeed, since new systems under development were making intelligence even more 

expensive, and since the President had no 

real hope of improving the community’s performance as it was presently constituted, one 

1 Richard Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon, Volume 1 (New York: Warner, 1979 [1978]), 553, 638. Henry Kissinger, 

White House Years (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), 11, 36, 1180–1181. 2 James R. Schlesinger, Assistant Director, Office of Management and Budget, “A Review of the Intelligence Community,” 10 

March 1971, (the original is still classified). The report was drafted by Arnold Donohue of OMB. Hereinafter cited as the 

Schlesinger Report. 

3 Ibid., 4–6 and 8–9. 

4 Ibid., 1–2. 

5 Ibid., 10–12. 

6 Ibid., 1–2. 

“What the hell do 

those clowns do 

out there in Langley?” the President asked after 

the surprise of 

the 1970 coup in 

Cambodia.
22

might “reasonably argue that, for current performance, he should at least obtain the benefit of lower costs.”7

The Schlesinger Report recommended a 

strong dose of management. It presented its 

advice as a range of options, listing potential 

advantages and drawbacks for each, and the 

options it tabled ranged from mild to radical 

degrees of centralization. The National Security Act of 1947 had granted the DCI authorities 

deemed sufficient to remedy the “defects in 

central processing, production, and dissemination” that had hampered the government 

before Pearl Harbor. The Act had not, however, anticipated the need to “plan and rationalize” the collection of intelligence or to evaluate 

the quality of its product.8 Someone had to 

manage all of these fields, both within the 

Defense Department and across the community as a whole. The report noted that the 

required Intelligence Community leader could 

be anything from a new coordinator in the 

White House to a full-fledged director of 

national intelligence, controlling the budgets 

and personnel of the entire community. 

The report offered a similar range of possibilities for a manager of defense intelligence 

functions, declaring, “changes within the 

Department of Defense alone could improve 

the allocation and management of resources 

and reduce the overall size of the intelligence 

budget.” The Department of Defense had 

never had an office to exercise “formal 

responsibility” over defense intelligence. 

There were two possible ways of devising 

such a position: a “Director of Defense Intelligence” with broad authorities to exercise on 

behalf of the secretary (but who would still be 

responsive to the Intelligence Community’s 

leader); or an Assistant Secretary of Defense 

for Intelligence to be the secretary’s principal 

staff assistant.9

Acting on the Report’s Recommendations

The Schlesinger Report’s more radical 

options would have required new legislation 

and were controversial even within the Nixon 

administration, but some of its milder options 

were nevertheless fully or partially implemented. These resulted in the appointment of 

a deputy to the DCI for community affairs and 

of an Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, the merger of the service cryptologic 

organizations in a Central Security Service 

under the National Security Agency, and the 

creation of the Defense Mapping Agency and 

an Intelligence Community Staff to support 

the DCI. Since the turmoil of Watergate and 

the congressional investigations of the mid1970s blunted the impact of President Nixon’s 

augmentation of the DCI’s powers, the implementation of these milder options was the 

Schlesinger Report’s most lasting legacy. 

Indeed, every DCI since the presidential decision of November 1971 was expected to oversee the preparation of the Intelligence 

Community’s budgets, to establish intelligence requirements and priorities, and to 

ensure the quality of community products. 

Before the Nixon administration could fully 

implement its vision of a new Intelligence 

Community, controversy over ending the 

Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal in 

the White House distracted policymakers 

and intelligence officials. The Cold War consensus that had held since the Truman 

administration was eroding by the early 

1970s, and responsible voices in Washington began questioning the legitimacy of two 

staples of postwar American foreign policy: 

military intervention in overseas conflicts, 

and the use of covert action against communists and their allies. Congressional critics 

used their subpoena power to investigate 

Nixon administration wrongdoing and credi7 Ibid., 40 and 44–45. 

8 Ibid., 13–14. 

9 Ibid., 34–38. 

The Schlesinger 

Report resulted 

in the appointment of a deputy 

to the DCI for 

community 

affairs and an 

Assistant Secretary of Defense 

for Intelligence.
23

ble allegations of serious intelligence misconduct, including infringements upon civil 

liberties. The Watergate investigations of 

1973 that brought about President Nixon’s 

resignation were followed in less than two 

years by the Rockefeller, Church, and Pike 

inquiries into the CIA and the Intelligence 

Community. By mid-decade, President Gerald Ford and his intelligence advisers, beleaguered by criticism, worried that Congress 

might overreact by mandating sweeping and 

counterproductive reforms. 

25

Three Studies in 1975

As Congress pressed forward with special 

House and Senate committee investigations of 

intelligence abuses and performance, three 

more studies—one from Congress and two from 

the executive branch—were undertaken and 

completed. None had the heft of the Schlesinger 

Report or of earlier surveys, and all three were 

overshadowed by the better-known congressional investigations. The first, the Murphy Commission Report of June 1975, treated intelligence 

only in passing, as a piece of the larger American 

foreign policy establishment. The second, the 

October 1975 Taylor Report, lacked persuasiveness partly because CIA produced it on its own at 

the request of its besieged DCI, William Colby. 

The third, the November 1975 Ogilvie Report, 

was drafted in the White House so quickly that its 

authors had little time to study the complexities of 

American intelligence. These reports’ assessments and conclusions nevertheless modestly 

influenced the continuing evolution of the Intelligence Community. 

The Murphy Commission, June 1975

Congress in July 1972 had authorized a study 

commission to recommend improvements in 

the organization and procedures of the government for conducting foreign policy. This blue-ribbon panel, led by retired Deputy Secretary of 

State Robert Murphy, included members of 

Congress along with distinguished citizens 

appointed by the White House. In this it was not 

unlike the 1947 and 1953 Hoover Commission 

panels that had examined intelligence years 

earlier. It began slowly, had its term extended a 

year, and did not finish until June 1975.1 The 

report’s brief chapter on intelligence defended it 

as essential to national security and effective 

foreign policy, and noted “considerable 

progress” in recent years in improving analysis, 

controlling costs, and raising professional standards of conduct. Nevertheless, various management changes were needed to provide 

“firmer direction and oversight.”2

The main remedy proposed was tighter presidential and congressional supervision. Since it 

was “neither possible nor desirable to give the 

DCI line authority” over the entire Intelligence 

Community, he would need a closer relationship 

with the President if he was to guide the community’s affairs. The DCI should move his desk 

closer to the White House and enjoy “direct 

access” to the Oval Office, while delegating dayto-day supervision of CIA to his deputy. As a 

symbol of this change, the Agency itself would 

be renamed the Foreign Intelligence Agency, 

and the DCI would become the Director of Foreign Intelligence. The President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (a revived version of 

Eisenhower’s PBCFIA) should also gain more 

access to the President, a bigger staff, and a 

stronger role in evaluating community performance as a whole. Covert action should have 

tighter NSC control. Finally, Congress should 

create a select, joint committee on “national 

security” to review and coordinate oversight of 

foreign and national security policies; the committee would supplement, not replace, the existing foreign relations and armed services 

committees, and would handle all congressional 

oversight of intelligence matters.3

The Taylor Report, October 1975

As the Murphy Report was reaching the desks 

of policymakers, a team of six CIA officers, quietly commissioned by DCI William Colby and 

led by CIA Deputy Comptroller James Taylor, 

1 The commission’s members were Robert D. Murphy, chairman; David M. Abshire; Anne Armstrong; Rep. William S. 

Broomfield; William J. Casey; Mrs. Charles E. Engelhard, Jr.; Rep. Peter Frelinghuysen; Arend D. Lubbers; Rep. William S. 

Mailliard; Sen. Mike Mansfield; Frank C.P. McGlinn; Sen. James B. Pearson; Vice President Nelson Rockefeller; Stanley P. 

Wagner; and Rep. Clement J. Zablocki.

2 Commission on the Organization of the Government for the Conduct of Foreign Policy, June 1975, [Final Report] 

(Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1975), 91–92.

3 Ibid., 99, 100–102 and 208.

The Murphy, Taylor, and Ogilivie 

Reports contributed to the 

administration’s 

response to congressional investigations and led 

to follow-up on 

the Schlesinger 

Report’s recommendations.
26

submitted its own appraisal of the Intelligence 

Community in September 1975. Colby passed 

the Taylor Report along to the President and the 

NSC without explicitly endorsing its recommendations. Its authors, senior Agency experts and 

managers, were relatively obscure compared 

with the congressmen and public figures who 

served on the Murphy Commission. Since they 

spoke with considerable candor, DCI Colby 

nevertheless believed their report worth forwarding despite what he acknowledged was its 

“CIA perspective.”4

Taylor’s CIA study group noted the dilemma 

that had confounded observers for years—that 

when the National Security Act had made the 

DCI responsible in some way for all intelligence, it had not anticipated the technological 

marvels and accompanying budgetary imperatives that had made the Defense Department 

the owner of most of America’s intelligence collection systems.5 Writing as the House and 

Senate investigations of intelligence progressed on Capitol Hill, the authors believed 

that “political developments” would soon lead 

Congress to rewrite the National Security Act 

of 1947. Agreeing that the Act needed revision, 

they urged their superiors to use this unique 

opportunity to propose changes that would 

ease the inefficiency and friction that the imbalance between the DCI’s mission and authority 

inflicted upon the community.6

In considering reforms, Taylor and his colleagues assumed that the government needed 

someone to be “the nation’s principal intelligence officer.”7 Such an officer could exist in 

one of only three forms: as a super-DCI controlling all significant intelligence activities and 

funds; as a Defense Department official commanding a transferred CIA and most other 

intelligence functions; or as a DCI speaking 

with a stronger voice in resource and personnel matters (while State and the Defense 

Department retained control over their own 

intelligence activities).8 They found only the 

third option feasible, given the “fundamental 

political and substantive problems” that would 

surely block the first two.9

The question then became one of how to 

enhance the DCI’s powers. Taylor and his colleagues proposed a new-model DCI (which 

they called a Director General of Intelligence or 

DGI), who would relinquish line management 

of CIA in order to concentrate on community 

affairs. To increase his stature vis-à-vis the 

Secretaries of State and Defense, this DGI, 

they suggested, should be made a statutory 

member of the NSC. While not proposing that 

the DGI have operational control over all Intelligence Community programs, the Taylor 

Report offered a way to greatly increase his 

authority over them. The report proposed that 

the bulk of the intelligence budget now appropriated to Defense and CIA should instead be 

appropriated directly to the DGI, for his allocation to the Intelligence Community’s program 

managers.10 

The Ogilvie Report, November 1975

The Taylor study had few readers, but it indirectly 

affected discussions in the White House, thanks 

to its influence on another survey completed that 

4 CIA Study Group, “American Intelligence: A Framework for the Future,” 13 October 1975. During 1970–1971, Taylor had 

worked at OMB and helped prepare the 1971 Schlesinger study [Harold P. Ford, William Colby as Director of Central 

Intelligence, 1973–1976 (Washington, DC: CIA History Staff, 1993), 19n; the original copy of this study is still classified]. 

Recollections of those involved identified the authors of the study as Taylor, Richard Lehman, George Carver, William Wells, 

Gail Donnelly, and Leslie Dirks.

5 Ibid., 7–8 and 33. 

6 Ibid., 93. 

7 Ibid., 53. 

8 Ibid., iv–v and 60. 

9 Ibid., 50–59. 

10 Ibid., vi–viii, 65–67, and 73. 

The Taylor Report 

urged changes to 

ease the imbalance between the 

DCI’s mission 

and authority.
27

autumn. In early November 1975 President Gerald Ford chose George H. W. Bush, then chief of 

the US Liaison Office in Beijing, to succeed William Colby as DCI, and a few days later the President directed his National Security Council to 

report in a month on the “organization and management of the foreign intelligence community.” 

Ford’s motive in commissioning a crash survey at 

this time is not clear. The Church and Pike Committees’ hearings on foreign intelligence begun 

the previous January were nearing completion, 

and for several weeks that autumn White House 

staffers had been drafting a new executive order 

to govern intelligence activities. A new study 

would presumably support this effort. The NSC 

and OMB staffs rapidly organized a team led by 

Donald G. Ogilvie of OMB and comprising members from across the intelligence and policy community—including James Taylor as its CIA 

representative.11

In keeping with its short deadline, the Ogilvie 

Report on the Intelligence Community bears 

marks of haste. National Security Adviser 

Brent Scowcroft had directed the team to “evaluate the need for changes in the current organization” and to “present options for a possible 

reorganization.”12 The finished study contended with a minimum of explanation that 

while the communist target would continue to 

absorb the bulk of the nation’s intelligence 

resources, in the years to come emerging technologies, international economic troubles, and 

the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction would complicate the tasks of collection 

and analysis.13 Ogilvie and his colleagues 

noted three areas for improvement: 

• Enhancing policy oversight to create proper 

safeguards against future intelligence 

abuses; 

• Providing better intelligence support to 

policymakers and military commanders; and

• Ensuring that intelligence activities (from 

budgeting to covert action) were “well 

directed.”14

In their brief treatment the authors made no 

compelling case for change, but rather listed a 

wide range of reorganization options and 

(mutually exclusive) premises about the 

urgency of intelligence reform. 

Having sounded an uncertain trumpet, the 

Ogilvie team offered no explicit recommendation among the four “major structural options” it 

described. The options themselves were centralizing in their tendency and ranged from creating a powerful “Director of Intelligence” with 

line and budget control over all national programs, to a modest modification of the status 

quo that would enhance the DCI’s existing 

powers.15 All four options, moreover, assumed 

that the DCI should relinquish day-to-day management of CIA to head the community with 

greater or lesser powers in directing its affairs, 

depending on the option. The report also recommended that the departments should continue to produce intelligence tailored to their 

own needs.16 

External events, limitations in the mandates 

and membership of the Murphy, Taylor, and 

Ogilvie teams, and their conflicting proposals 

for change, all served to circumscribe their 

11 Draft Report to the President on Organization and Management of the Foreign Intelligence Community, 16 December 

1975. The Ogilvie team was called the “Intelligence Organization Group.” 

12 Brent Scowcroft, National Security Adviser, to the Secretaries of State, Treasury, and Defense, the Attorney General, the 

Director, Office of Management and Budget, and the Director of Central Intelligence, “Organization and Management of the 

Foreign Intelligence Community,” 14 November 1975, Community Management Staff Job 79M00476A, box 18, folder 8 (the 

original of this memo is still classified).

13 “Organization and Management of the Foreign Intelligence Community,” 6–8. 14 Ibid., 10–21. 15 Ibid., 2–3. 16 Ibid., 31. 

The Ogilvie study 

contended that in 

the years to come 

emerging technologies, international economic 

troubles, and the 

proliferation of 

weapons of mass 

destruction 

would complicate 

the tasks of collection and analysis.
28

significance. Moreover, after allegations of 

serious CIA misconduct had erupted in late 

1974, a presidential commission and two congressional investigations of intelligence wrongdoing got under way in January 1975. All this 

made it hard for the Murphy, Taylor or Ogilvie 

reports to compete for attention. Still, the three 

reports contributed both to the Ford administration’s response to the congressional investigations and to its decision to follow up on the 

1971 Schlesinger Report’s recommendation to 

strengthen the DCI’s ability to provide firmer 

direction for the Intelligence Community. President Ford’s Executive Order 11905 of February 1976 moved in this direction by publicly 

clarifying the DCI’s role as community manager and by suggesting that the DCI, “to the 

extent consistent with his statutory duties, delegate the day-to-day operation of the Central 

Intelligence Agency” to his DDCI.17

17 Gerald R. Ford, Executive Order 11905, United States Intelligence Activities, 18 February 1976, section 3(d)3, reprinted 

in Michael Warner, ed., Central Intelligence: Origin and Evolution (Washington, DC: Central Intelligence Agency, 2001), 93. 
29

The Church and Pike Committee 

Investigations, 1975–76

The Church Committee, April 1976

The most significant studies of intelligence in 

the 1970s came from Capitol Hill. In 1975 and 

1976, two congressional select committees 

probed revelations of a host of CIA abuses that 

first emerged in Seymour Hersh’s New York 

Times articles in December 1974. In January 

1975 the Senate created a committee to investigate foreign and domestic intelligence activities, including but not limited to allegations of 

wrongdoing and the adequacy of the laws and 

oversight mechanisms governing the Intelligence Community. The panel, led by 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.”1

Church and his colleagues spent 15 months 

preparing one of the most detailed public 

appraisals of any nation’s intelligence structure. 

The Final Report’s proposals on the organization and management of the community were 

articulate and congruent with those of recent 

executive branch surveys, even down to the 

idea that the DCI should focus on community 

affairs and relinquish direct supervision of CIA 

to a deputy. As a creature of the legislative 

branch, the committee naturally insisted on 

greater congressional as well as policymaker 

oversight of intelligence, and did not hesitate to 

suggest amendments to the various statutes 

affecting the field.2

The breakthrough for the Church Committee 

came in its treatment of the operational side of 

American intelligence. Cost and efficiency, 

which had preoccupied recent surveys, were 

not at issue here, but rather the powers and 

accountability of clandestine activities. The 

committee suggested that intelligence should 

be both a collector of data and producer of 

information, and an instrument for implementing US foreign policy. With its focus on mistakes and misdeeds, the final report 

concentrated on clandestine activities, but it 

took a judicious approach that tempered criticisms with a firm conclusion that intelligence 

had “made important contributions” to national 

security and become a “permanent and necessary component of our government.”3 This conclusion countered growing public and 

congressional concern over “the integrity of our 

nation’s intelligence agencies.”4

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 deemed 

necessary and valuable, given proper oversight.5 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.6

The Pike Committee, early 1976

The Church Committee’s success in crafting 

bipartisan conclusions and winning executive 

branch assent to issuing a public report stands 

in contrast to the results of the other congressional study of intelligence conducted at the 

time. The House Select Committee, chaired by 

1 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, 11 and 423. (Cited hereinafter as 

Church Committee Final Report.)

2 Ibid., 449. The Final Report shied away from publicly proposing specific changes in the intricate structure of congressional 

committees to accommodate oversight of intelligence, merely implying that Congress should create one or more “intelligence 

oversight committee[s].” 

3 Ibid., 1–2 and 424. 

4 Ibid., 423. 

5 Ibid., 437–439 and 459. 

6 Ibid., 159 and 425; emphasis in original.

The Church Committee Final 

Report took a 

judicious 

approach that 

tempered criticism with a firm 

conclusion that 

intelligence had 

“made important 

contributions.”
30

Otis Pike (D-NY), took an adversarial approach 

to the Intelligence Community and then complained that the executive branch was stonewalling its inquiry. The full House in early 1976 

declined to release the finished report, in effect 

repudiating the work of its own committee.7

Portions of the Pike Committee report nevertheless soon leaked to the press, and the 

House published its 20-odd recommendations.8 Many of these recommendations proposed curbs on domestic and foreign 

operations, including a ban on assassinations 

and on all covert “paramilitary activities” except 

in time of war. Its brief proposals on Intelligence Community management included the 

now-standard suggestion that the DCI be separated from “any of the operating and analytic 

intelligence agencies” (i.e., from CIA) so he 

could “be responsible for the supervision and 

control of all agencies of the United States 

engaged in foreign intelligence.” Just what the 

DCI’s budgetary and administrative powers 

would be, especially over Defense Department 

agencies, was not specified. The Pike Committee did offer a detailed proposal for creating a 

House Permanent Select Committee to oversee domestic and foreign intelligence. The 

committee also recommended a restraint on 

the FBI’s powers to probe domestic groups 

suspected of terrorism, and harsh penalties for 

members of Congress and staffers caught 

leaking classified information. 9

Congressional Oversight: Senate and 

House Intelligence Committees 

The practical effects of the two congressional 

probes took several years to emerge. The most 

immediate impact was on Congress itself; both 

chambers soon 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 

Intelligence Community operations and on its 

executive branch guidance, tending to make 

both more disciplined and accountable. 

Through these committees Congress also 

began, in the 1980s, to use annual intelligence 

appropriations to force gradual changes in the 

Intelligence Community, in essence providing 

an ongoing reform mechanism that tended for 

a time to keep a lid on pressures for new surveys. Before the Church and Pike Committee 

investigations, the Intelligence Community, for 

practical purposes, was accountable only to 

the President and the executive branch of government. These investigations, and the formation of the two congressional oversight 

committees that they inspired, made the Intelligence Community much more accountable to 

both Congress and the President. 

Executive Orders and the Reform Hiatus: 

1981–91

In 1978 the Carter administration supplanted 

President Ford’s 1976 Executive Order 11905 

with its own Executive Order 12036, which 

also supported recent recommendations that 

the DCI take less part in managing the CIA 

and exert more influence on Intelligence 

Community affairs.10 President Carter nevertheless declined to give DCI Stansfield Turner 

the full scope of authorities he requested to 

7 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). 8 New York’s Village Voice published the leaked portions, which were gathered with commentary and the committee’s officially 

released recommendations as CIA: The Pike Report (Nottingham, England: Spokesman Books, 1977). The committee’s 

recommendations are on pages 257–63. The recommendations were also printed in House Select Committee on Intelligence, 

Recommendations of the Final Report of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, 94th Congress, 2d Session, 1976. 9 CIA: The Pike Report, 257–59 and 263. 10 Jimmy Carter, Executive Order 12036, United States Intelligence Activities, 24 January 1978, reprinted in Warner, Central 

Intelligence, 103ff.

The two investigations and the 

permanent committees they 

inspired made 

the community 

accountable to 

Congress as well 

as to the President.
31

implement this measure. The new Reagan 

administration sidestepped the issue, and its 

1981 Executive Order 12333 generally weakened the DCI’s community management powers.11

The Reagan and first Bush administrations 

produced no major surveys of the Intelligence 

Community. The rapid increase in military and 

intelligence spending in the Reagan years 

diminished the earlier interest in cost cutting. 

Debates over defense reorganization (which 

culminated in the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols 

Act), and covert action (which followed the 

eruption of the Iran-Contra scandal in late 

1986), also diverted attention for a time from 

the task of studying the missions and performance of American intelligence as a whole. 

11 Ronald Reagan, Executive Order 12333, United States Intelligence Activities, 4 December 1981, reprinted in Warner, 

Central Intelligence, 127ff.

33

After the Cold War

The Persian Gulf War and a Revolution in 

Military Affairs

The 1991 Persian Gulf war demonstrated how 

developments in weaponry and doctrine were 

fostering change in warfare and in the warfighters’ need for intelligence support. Precision 

weapons, microprocessing, and real-time, global secure communications were coming 

together in a military structure now truly capable 

of joint operations to create what some observers called a “Revolution in Military Affairs.”

The Gulf conflict helped to change American 

intelligence in several ways. First, it exposed 

weaknesses in the military’s and the Intelligence Community’s ability to support modern 

air campaigns. As the Defense Department 

explained to Congress:

[The] revolutionary changes in the way 

American forces conducted combat 

operations during Operation Desert Storm 

outstripped the abilities of the [battle 

damage assessment] system. Analysts 

were unable to meet the requirements for 

timely data on a variety of new types of 

targets or targets struck in new ways.1

Secure and computerized communications 

between operators in Central Command and 

analysts in the United States partially alleviated this problem; the analysts were able to 

use national collection resources that had 

been built for the Cold War to fill some of the 

tactical intelligence gaps. After the conflict, the 

White House, Congress, and the Pentagon 

resolved that battlefield commanders should 

receive better national and organic intelligence 

support in future conflicts. Secretary of 

Defense Richard Cheney took a step toward 

this goal in March 1991 when he ordered all of 

his combatant commanders to create “joint 

intelligence centers” like that built in Central 

Command just before the war. Secretary 

Cheney’s decree in effect recognized the military’s permanent need for intelligence support 

at the theater or “operational” level—a requirement that had been overlooked in the separation of “national” from “departmental” 

intelligence after World War II.2 The larger 

problem of how Intelligence Community elements originally formed to assist Washington 

decisionmakers could also support military 

operations in the field would prove difficult to 

resolve, however, and this question would drive 

many of the debates over intelligence reform in 

the 1990s and beyond. 

The Aspin-Brown Commission, 1995–96

The next full-dress surveys of intelligence did 

not come until the mid-1990s, some 20 years 

after the Church and Pike inquiries. By then, 

the collapse of the Soviet Union and the 1991 

war over Kuwait had prompted ongoing 

debates over national security policy, as well 

as over reforming (or eliminating) various intelligence functions. Spending cuts in defense 

and intelligence budgets during the 1990s 

renewed calls for greater efficiency and provoked arguments over which programs to trim. 

In the meantime, the continuing evolution of 

military doctrine after the Gulf war heightened 

the demand for better battlefield intelligence 

support. These events, plus the Aldrich Ames 

spy scandal and a flap over the cost of a new 

headquarters for the National Reconnaissance 

Office (NRO), persuaded many members of 

Congress that the Intelligence Community 

needed a thorough examination.3

1 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, DC: Department of Defense, 1992), 343. 

2 See Jim Marchio, “The Evolution and Relevance of Joint Intelligence Centers,” Studies in Intelligence 49, no. 1 (2005): 41–54. 3 Commission on Roles and Capabilities of the United States Intelligence Community, Preparing for the 21st Century: An 

Appraisal of U.S. Intelligence (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1996), 2. (Hereinafter cited as Preparing for the 

21st Century.) Loch Johnson has published an account of the work of the commission; see “The Aspin-Brown Intelligence 

Inquiry: Behind Closed Doors of Blue Ribbon Commission,” Studies in Intelligence 48, no 3 (2004).

The larger problem—how community elements 

formed to assist 

Washington decisionmakers 

could also support military 

operations—

would prove difficult to resolve.
34

In autumn 1994 Congress authorized a blueribbon panel to study the community. The new 

panel’s charter provided for President William 

J. Clinton to appoint a team of members of 

Congress and distinguished private citizens 

(this made the panel’s composition similar to 

the Murphy Commission in the 1970s). With 

former Defense Secretaries Les Aspin and 

Harold Brown as its successive chairmen, the 

“Aspin-Brown Commission” was arguably the 

highest-ranking group ever to scrutinize the 

Intelligence Community. This panel and its 

staff spent 1995 researching and writing a 

lengthy report, which was publicly released on 

1 March 1996.4

The Aspin-Brown Commission devoted much 

of its final report to justifying the continued 

need for intelligence, even in a post-Cold War 

world. The report explained that the United 

States found itself “in a predominant leadership role, whether sought or not.” Since the 

new global order was “likely to be as fraught 

with peril and uncertainty as the world left 

behind,” American leaders needed the best 

possible information to maximize the range of 

choices and the time in which to act.5 In the 

commission’s view, neither the collection nor 

the analytical functions of the Intelligence 

Community were broken, and it thus proposed 

no radical remedies. Its report nevertheless 

acknowledged that the community needed 

help and guidance. While post-Cold War budgets and staffing levels had declined somewhat, personnel costs had climbed to the point 

where they “crowded out investments in new 

technologies and limited operational flexibility.”6 What was needed, the report concluded, 

was an evolution toward a leaner and more 

responsive system. 

The final report echoed earlier studies in proposing enhanced powers for the Director of 

Central Intelligence. (These enhanced powers, 

however, were not to separate him formally 

from CIA or “to alter the fundamental relationship between the DCI and the Secretary of 

Defense”).7 As several earlier surveys had proposed, the DCI was to have two deputies: one 

for the Intelligence Community and one for the 

“day-to-day” management of CIA. Finally, the 

DCI should have a larger role in selecting and 

evaluating the heads of the large Defense 

Department intelligence agencies and new 

authority over intelligence personnel systems, 

as well as improved community budget data 

and a larger staff to evaluate them.8

The Aspin-Brown Commission intimated that 

important trends were changing the business 

of intelligence. It even did something that no 

intelligence survey since the 1948 Eberstadt 

study had done when it devoted a chapter to 

the connections between intelligence and law 

enforcement. The commission found that the 

two disciplines had different motivations and 

goals that complicated their dealings. For this 

reason, National Security Council guidance, as 

well as improved coordination, were needed to 

deal with global criminal activity by terrorists, 

drug traffickers, and others that posed a growing danger to the American public.9

The commission’s final report also discussed 

the “radical change in the nature of warfare” 

wrought by new developments in weaponry and 

doctrine. The report noted how new weapons 

4 Aspin died in May 1995; Brown succeeded him as chairman. Former Senator Warren B. Rudman served as vice chairman 

and briefly ran the commission in the interregnum before Brown’s appointment. The other members of the commission were: 

Lew Allen, Zoë Baird, Ann Z. Caracristi, Tony Coelho, David H. Dewhurst, Norman D. Dicks, J. James Exon, Wyche Fowler, 

Jr., Stephan Friedman, Porter J. Goss, Anthony S. Harrington, Robert J. Hermann, Robert E. Pursley, John W. Warner, and 

Paul D. Wolfowitz. Former Senate Select Committee on Intelligence counsel L. Britt Snider headed the staff. 

5 Preparing for the 21st Century, 9–15. 6 Ibid., 96 and 131. 

7 Ibid., xix and 53–54. 

8 Ibid., 54–57 and 80–81. 

9 Ibid., xviii. 
35

and tactics had increased the Pentagon’s 

demands for intelligence support and wondered 

whether these demands were really, as President Clinton had recently declared, “the highest 

priority for US intelligence agencies.”10 The 

commission nevertheless endorsed the idea of 

shifting imagery analysis from CIA to a new 

“National Imagery and Mapping Agency” in the 

Defense Department to facilitate closer combat 

support, and it applauded the recent creation of 

joint intelligence centers at the Unified Commands.11 The commissioners did not believe, 

however, that the Defense Department needed 

“a single authoritative leader for military intelligence.” Combining the department’s various 

responsibilities for intelligence “under a single 

manager would not improve the quality of intelligence support, but would only complicate the 

performance of the existing roles and responsibilities.”12

HPSCI’s “IC21” Staff Study, 1996

The staff of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence took a novel approach to 

intelligence reform in that same year. In January 1995 the 104th Congress opened, and the 

new Republican HPSCI chairman, Larry 

Combest of Texas, apparently wanted to 

ensure that the Aspin-Brown Commission—

most of whose members President Clinton had 

appointed—did not have the last word. “A key 

issue is opportunity, not reform,” declared the 

HPSCI staff’s April 1996 report (emphasis in 

original). The HPSCI staff study, “IC21: The 

Intelligence Community in the 21st Century,” 

thus examined the community with an eye to 

explaining where it “needs to be in the next 10-

to-15 years.” 13

How the community would get to such a point 

was problematic, given the problems it currently faced. Indeed, competition among disciplines and agencies had fragmented an 

intelligence system “that should be highly synergistic.”14 The IC21 Report concentrated on 

the intelligence collection disciplines, which 

were not only taking an increasing share of the 

intelligence budget at the expense of processing and analysis, but also creating an “imbalance in collection management priorities 

favoring near-term crises at the expense of 

baseline capabilities and future needs.”15 IC21 

argued that the community needed “corporateness” for its agencies and employees “to run, 

to function and to behave as part of a more 

closely integrated enterprise.”16 Stronger management, especially in collection, was required 

to force important cross-program and crossdiscipline tradeoffs.17 Like the Aspin-Brown 

Report, the IC21 study advocated enhancements in the DCI’s powers instead of the creation of a new intelligence coordinator. It 

wanted to let the existing deputy director of 

central intelligence run the CIA and to create a 

second DDCI by statute to handle “community 

management.” 

The IC21 study and the Aspin-Brown Report 

reached opposite conclusions on the issue of 

appointing a chief for all intelligence in the 

Defense Department:

Enhancing the DCI’s authority solves 

some, but not all, of the problems. It is 

important that the defense intelligence 

10 Ibid., 21–22. 11 Ibid., 109, 124. 12 Ibid., 111–112. 13 House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, “IC21: The Intelligence Community in the 21st Century,” 104th

Congress, Second Session, 1996, 1–2 (hereinafter cited as IC21). HPSCI Staff Director Mark M. Lowenthal led the IC21 

effort.

14 Ibid., 8–9 and 23. 15 Ibid., 97. 16 Ibid., 8. 17 Ibid., 97. 

The IC21 study 

and the AspinBrown Report 

reached opposite conclusions 

on the issue of 

appointing a 

chief for all intelligence in the 

Defense Department.
36

establishment also have a single official 

who is both responsible for and 

empowered to address [organizational] 

issues, or to advise the SECDEF about 

them.

The study’s authors therefore recommended 

that the director of the Defense Intelligence 

Agency should be given a new title as “Director 

of Military Intelligence” and new authority to 

coordinate Defense Department intelligence 

budgets, as well as an Assistant Secretary of 

Defense for Intelligence to advise the secretary 

on policy, planning, and oversight matters.18

The study also contained a host of other organizational adjustments, such as its proposal to 

lift the CIA’s Directorate of Operations out of 

the Agency and subordinate it directly to the 

DCI, and to merge the NSA, NRO, and various 

other collection organizations in a “Technical 

Collection Agency” under the Secretary of 

Defense and the proposed DDCI for community management.19

Congress merged divergent proposals from 

these two studies in crafting the Intelligence 

and Defense Authorization Acts for fiscal year 

1997, enacting them as amendments to the 

National Security Act of 1947. The revised Act 

now gave the DCI a new DDCI for Community 

Management, along with three “Assistant 

Directors of Central Intelligence” to coordinate 

collection, administration, and analysis and 

production. The community’s imagery interpretation offices were merged in a National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) under the 

Secretary of Defense. The DCI also received 

more clout over defense intelligence budgets 

as well as influence in the appointments of 

directors of the NSA, NRO, and DIA. 

The Scowcroft Review of Intelligence, 2001

While the Clinton administration had been content to allow these changes and its own 

restatement of intelligence priorities (in Presidential Decision Directive 35 of March 1995) to 

work their effects in its second term, the incoming administration felt a need to take a fresh 

look at the Intelligence Community. In part this 

impetus stemmed from Secretary of Defense 

Donald Rumsfeld’s initial efforts to transform 

the nation’s military; a survey of the challenges 

and opportunities facing intelligence seemed a 

logical complement to the work being done in 

the Pentagon. In May 2001 President George 

W. Bush authorized such a study in National 

Security Presidential Directive 5, tapping Brent 

Scowcroft (who had been his father’s national 

security adviser) to lead the blue-ribbon 

panel.20

The attacks of 11 September 2001 soon 

diverted the policymaker and community attention that the Scowcroft panel required to complete its work. The study that the panel drafted 

and signed has not been publicly released or 

circulated even within the Intelligence Community. Press accounts suggest that its final version called for creation of a collection 

management agency like that proposed in 

IC21, but placed under the DCI. Such a step, 

which would amount to the largest single 

enlargement of DCI authority since President 

Truman created the position in 1946, was 

reportedly strongly opposed by Secretary of 

18 Ibid., 16, 62–63. 19 Ibid., 20 and 23–24. 20 George W. Bush, National Security Presidential Directive (NSPD) 5, “Intelligence,” 9 May 2001. The other members of the 

panel were cochairman Adm. David Jeremiah, USN (Ret.), John S. Foster, Jamie Gorelick, Richard J. Kerr, Jeong Kim, Amb. 

J. Stapleton Roy, and William Schneider Jr. NSPD-5 also directed the DCI to appoint another panel of “members of the 

Intelligence Community and other senior United States Government officials” to conduct an “independent, but parallel” study. 

That panel, which suspended its work after 11 September, was headed by Deputy Director of Central Intelligence for 

Community Management Joan Dempsey and comprised the deputy directors of the major intelligence agencies. A single 

staff, headed by Kevin Scheid and Howard Schue, served both panels. One of the coauthors of this present monograph 

served on that staff.

A survey of the 

challenges and 

opportunities facing intelligence 

seemed a logical 

complement to 

work being done 

in the Pentagon.
37

Defense Donald Rumsfeld.21 The Scowcroft 

review may have had at least one indirect 

effect. In April 2003, Secretary Rumsfeld took 

a step to strengthen and consolidate the 

administration of the Defense Department’s 

intelligence capabilities, creating the statutory 

post of Under Secretary of Defense (Intelligence) to replace the Assistant Secretary of 

Defense for Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence (C3I) as the secretary’s 

principal adviser on intelligence matters. The 

new USD(I) resembled the overall defense 

intelligence secretaries proposed by IC21 and 

earlier by the 1971 Schlesinger Report. 

The 9/11 Commission Report, 2004

The events on 11 September also prompted 

calls for high-level investigations of what had 

happened to make such a catastrophe possible. Two such inquiries offered comprehensive 

reviews of the Intelligence Community’s performance and received widespread attention. By 

far the most important of these was the independent National Commission on Terrorist 

Attacks Upon the United States (better known 

as the 9/11 Commission), established by an 

act of Congress in late 2002.22 Indeed, in 

absolute terms the 9/11 Commission may have 

devoted more attention and resources to 

studying the community than had some of the 

blue-ribbon panels discussed earlier. In any 

event, its findings and proposals have proven 

more influential than any of them.

The 9/11 commissioners and staff built upon 

the findings of an earlier investigation, Congress’ “Joint Inquiry” into the Intelligence Community’s activities with regard to the 9/11 

attacks. That inquiry had presented a host of 

findings and recommendations in December 

2002, one of which was for the appointment of 

a Director of National Intelligence separated 

from the day-to-day management of the CIA, 

who would hold expanded budgetary and 

administrative authorities to run the Intelligence Community.23 While the 9/11 Commission conducted its work over the next 18 

months, several congressmen introduced bills 

to implement proposals similar to those drafted 

by the joint inquiry.24

From its inception, the 9/11 Commission 

worked in a glare of publicity that actually 

helped it gain access to senior officials and 

sensitive documentation. The commissioners 

took public testimony (some of it under oath) 

and heard briefings on a wide range of intelligence topics. Its well-written report, released 

on 22 July 2004, almost instantly became a 

bestseller, and thus its findings and recommendations on intelligence (themselves only a 

portion of the larger work) received a wide 

audience. The timing of the report’s release—

in the midst of a presidential election season—

only heightened the attention paid to the commission’s proposals, and gave both Congress 

and the White House further incentives to support some form of intelligence reform. 

21 Walter Pincus, “Intelligence Shakeup Would Boost CIA,” Washington Post, 8 November 2001; Walter Pincus, “Rumsfeld 

Casts Doubt on Intelligence Reform,” Washington Post, 9 April 2002. 22 The commission was established as an entity of the legislative branch by the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 

2003 (PL 107–306), which passed on 27 November 2002. It was chaired by former New Jersey Governor Thomas H. Kean, 

and its vice chairman was retired Congressman Lee H. Hamilton. Its members were Richard Ben-Veniste, Fred F. Fielding, 

Jamie S. Gorelick, Slade Gorton, Bob Kerrey, John F. Lehman, Timothy J. Roemer, and James R. Thompson. The staff 

director was Philip Zelikow. See The 9/11 Commission Report, (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2004). There 

was some overlap between the personnel of the 9/11 Commission and the earlier Scowcroft Commission; Jamie Gorelick, 

for instance, served on both panels, as did several members of the staff (most notably Kevin Scheid).

23 Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, “Joint Inquiry Into 

Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001,” 107th Congress, 2nd Session, 

December 2002; see Recommendation 1.

24 A good example of these was HR 4104, the “Intelligence Transformation Act of 2004,” offered by the minority members of 

the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on 1 April 2004.

The timing of the 

9/11 Report’s 

release—in the 

midst of a presidential election 

season—heightened the attention paid to its 

proposals, and 

gave Congress 

and the White 

House further 

incentives to support some form of 

intelligence 

reform.
38

The 9/11 Commission’s Report proposed sweeping change in the Intelligence Community. Some 

of its suggestions echoed those of earlier surveys. The DCI’s duties, for instance, should be 

split between a chief of the Intelligence Community (the National Intelligence Director, or NID) 

and a director of the CIA. Under the commission’s proposals, the new NID would wield full 

authority over the National Foreign Intelligence 

Program budget, which would come to him or her 

in a separate appropriation. Other recommendations were more novel. For instance, the NID 

would supervise three deputy NIDs for homeland 

security, defense intelligence, and foreign intelligence, each of whom would also hold joint 

appointments as senior deputies in the FBI, the 

Defense Department, and the CIA, respectively. 

Perhaps the commission’s most original proposal was for domestic and foreign terrorism 

analysis and “strategic planning” to be done by a 

National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), under 

the NID’s authority. The NCTC would be a hybrid 

organization to bridge—at least with regard to 

terrorism—the divides between foreign and 

domestic intelligence, and between intelligence 

and law enforcement, that had been decreed by 

the National Security Act in 1947.25

President Bush adopted several of the 9/11 

Commission Report’s proposals a month later, 

signing four Executive Orders on intelligence and 

related issues.26 Executive Order 13355, 

“Strengthened Management of the Intelligence 

Community,” gave the DCI marginally more 

authority than he had ever held. It did so by 

updating Executive Order 12333 (December 

1981) to reflect subsequent changes to the 

National Security Act and by emphasizing the 

DCI’s responsibility to exercise his powers to the 

maximum extent of the law. Executive Order 

13355 emphasized the director’s duty to provide 

intelligence against all threats to the United 

States (whether that intelligence originated from 

sources at home or abroad), to ensure the integration of Intelligence Community activities, and 

to create “national centers” to work on high-priority intelligence topics. The DCI received new 

authority to monitor the Defense Department’s 

spending on tactical intelligence and to concur in 

the appointments and tenure of the heads of 

other intelligence organizations. Executive Order 

13355, mild as it was, represented perhaps the 

most that any White House could unilaterally do 

toward empowering the DCI to manage the Intelligence Community. Indeed, the White House 

portrayed it as an interim step toward a true chief 

of national intelligence while Congress was considering legislation to amend the National Security Act.27

By early October 2004, the House and Senate 

had separately passed wholesale amendments to the National Security Act. Both of 

these lengthy bills included somewhat disparate elements for the purpose of garnering 

broad support in their respective chambers. 

The Senate’s bill hewed fairly closely to the 9/

11 Commission’s recommendations, especially in separating the new head of the community from day-to-day supervision of the CIA, 

but it created a more streamlined administrative apparatus for the new director than the 

commission had proposed, rejecting the idea 

of jointly appointed deputies and the commission’s suggestion that the director be part of 

the Executive Office of the President.28 The 

25 The 9/11 Commission Report, 403–406, 411–14. 26 The Executive Orders were “Establishing the President’s Board on Safeguarding Americans’ Civil Liberties” (EO 13353); 

“National Counterterrorism Center” (EO 13354); “Strengthened Management of the Intelligence Community” (EO 13355); 

and “Strengthening the Sharing of Terrorism Information to Protect Americans” (EO 13356). All were signed on 27 August 

2004.

27 A “senior administration official” on 27 August told reporters that the four Executive Orders made up a sort of “down 

payment on the President’s enduring commitment to work with Congress to establish the National Intelligence Director, 

which must be done by statute.” See the full text of the press conference at “White House Conference Call Background 

Briefing [on] President’s Executive Orders,” Federal News Service, 27 August 2004.

28 The Senate’s bill, S. 2845, was titled the “National Intelligence Reform Act of 2004.” The House’s HR 10 was known as 

the “9/11 Recommendations Implementation Act.”
39

House’s version also created a Director of 

National Intelligence, but reserved more powers for the Secretary of Defense and included 

a range of antiterror provisions not strictly 

related to intelligence reform. 

Once both bills had received affirmative votes, 

the House and Senate appointed conferees to 

reconcile the many differences between them 

in a single text for final passage. Negotiations 

were intense, and in some respects echoed 

the debates over the original National Security 

Act in 1947.29 They essentially pitted concerns 

over civil liberties and support to military operations against a broad desire to ensure that the 

overall coordinator of US intelligence—now 

called the Director of National Intelligence—

could prosecute the War on Terror and make 

the 15 intelligence agencies work as a team. A 

final text did not emerge until after President 

Bush won reelection in early November. The 

House and Senate worked into the final hours 

of the 108th Congress before passing the “Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act 

of 2004” on 8 December. President Bush 

signed it into law nine days later.

The new act marked the end of the road for the 

position of Director of Central Intelligence and 

a quiet revision of one of the fundamental compromises struck by the drafters of the original 

National Security Act. While reporters narrated 

the arguments between House and Senate 

over the precise budgetary and tasking authorities to give the Director of National Intelligence, other important issues were being 

settled with little fanfare. 

The Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act incorporated the 9/11 Commission’s notion that American intelligence 

needed a new sort of coordinator: one who 

would manage the community across the full 

range of intelligence, foreign and domestic. 

One key to this development was the act’s 

redefinition of “national” intelligence as “all 

intelligence, regardless of the source from 

which derived and including information gathered within and outside the United States.”30

The Truman administration and the 80th Congress in 1947 had made domestic and foreign 

intelligence into separate realms, but now the 

new DNI would bridge them. He or she would 

have better tools to use in building such a 

bridge, from new authority to establish common technology and security standards for 

community information systems to a National 

Counterterrorism Center—an idea initially 

lifted from the 9/11 Commission’s Report. The 

NCTC would work for the DNI to serve as the 

nation’s primary organization for analysis of 

foreign-sponsored terrorism and to plan and 

assign counterterrorism roles and responsibilities to the departments and agencies to perform under their own unique authorities.31

This shift in emphasis for the overall coordinator of intelligence appealed to lawmakers in 

part because it removed the DNI from day-today management of CIA and precluded any 

29 Perhaps the clearest echo was the concern among military officials and congressional allies that commanders would not 

be able to rely on a civilian intelligence agency or director for crucial battlefield support. A good summary of the background

and course of the congressional debates over intelligence reform is contained in Richard A. Best, Jr., “Intelligence 

Community Reorganization: Potential Effects on DOD Intelligence Agencies,” Library of Congress, Congressional Research 

Service, 6 December 2004, 14–17.

30 See Section 1012 of the Act. This language replaced the definition in Section 3(5) of the National Security Act (as 

amended), which had said that “national intelligence” by and large did “not refer to counterintelligence or law enforcement 

activities” conducted by the FBI.

31 See Section 102A(g) of the National Security Act of 1947 as amended by Section 1011 of the Intelligence Reform and 

Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, along with Section 1021 of that Act. Section 1011 was a large portion of the 2004 Act 

devoted to the DNI and his span of control over the Intelligence Community. 

Key to the new 

DNI’s power was 

the Intelligence 

Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act’s 

redefinition of 

national intelligence.
40

clandestine operating role for the DNI’s organization. Not a few members of Congress over 

the course of 2004 insisted that such a separation was a sine qua non of intelligence 

reform.32 The act split the DNI from CIA, which 

would ultimately be responsible to him but 

would keep its foreign intelligence collection 

and covert action duties.33 The DNI would have 

no unvouchered funds, however, and thus 

could not run clandestine operations of his own 

(or at least could not run them effectively).34 

The DNI’s operational role would thus be in 

supervising the planning, policy, and budgets 

of the Intelligence Community.

In the new intelligence structure, the President 

and Congress replaced the DCI with a DNI. 

Since 1947 the DCI had sought to provide strategic warning and to serve as a clearinghouse 

for overseas operations, while also overseeing 

the community. The DNI will now oversee the 

community and provide strategic warning, 

while delegating the conduct of operations to 

the executing agencies. The new law thus 

bridges the foreign-domestic divide from the 

1947 National Security Act. The divide, nevertheless, is likely to endure unless the nation’s 

strategic or political circumstances change 

dramatically. 

32 For example, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) complained in a July 2004 hearing that the CIA had “abused its unique 

position in the intelligence community” (during analytical debates over Iraq) and that the “two very different” jobs of director 

of the CIA and director of the Intelligence Community were too much for any single official and therefore must be split into 

two positions. “Even if one extraordinary person could manage the workload of both jobs,” she argued, “they are inherently 

incompatible.” See Federal News Service, “Hearing of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence,” 20 July 2004, 7.

33 For the issue of the DNI’s oversight of CIA, see, for instance, Sec. 102A(f)4; Sec. 102A(k); Sec. 102A(r); Sec. 104A(b), 

and Sec. 104A(d)4 of the National Security Act of 1947 as amended by Section 1011 of the Intelligence Reform and 

Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004.

34 See Sec. 102A(n) of the National Security Act of 1947 as amended by Section 1011 of the Intelligence Reform and 

Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004. 
41

Conclusions

Our survey of intelligence reform studies is neither a comprehensive summary of reorganization proposals nor a chronology of the 

Intelligence Community’s evolution since World 

War II. It rather examines some of the bestinformed and insightful thinking over almost 60 

years about how the community works as a system, and how it might be improved. It thus provides an opportunity to review the judgments of 

senior officials and experts who enjoyed broad 

access to sensitive information and files and 

searched diligently for ways to bolster America’s 

security. The sense of déjà vu that the knowledgeable reader may feel in reading this account 

is a hint of the importance of studying the reports 

of the reform commissions; by wrestling with the 

“eternal questions,” these surveys leave us better prepared to ponder similar questions today. 

When we examine why some intelligence surveys produced change while others did not, we 

have to conclude that it is by no means entirely 

a matter of their merit, whether judged at the 

time or in retrospect. Change can be deliberately planned or basically reactive. It is usually 

a little of both, since the best thought-out proposal for reform can be affected by such factors as personalities, timing, political influence, 

and events in the world at large. Indeed, 

change in the Intelligence Community 

emerges in many ways. Some changes come 

about by presidential order, congressional 

action, or interagency agreement, while others 

result from the demands of new technology or 

the need to accommodate allies. 

While a good deal of change in the Intelligence 

Community has been more random and ad hoc 

than systematically planned, the bureaucratic 

impetus to commission a thorough study when 

contemplating change is almost inexorable. To 

bring significant change to the Intelligence 

Community, a study commission has had to 

get two things right: process and substance. 

Process 

The studies that changed the community have 

usually shared some or all of the following 

characteristics:

• Sponsorship by the White House or 

Congress. Two studies that had large and 

comparatively rapid effects—the 1949 Dulles 

Report and the 1971 Schlesinger Report—

were both commissioned by the National 

Security Council at a time when it was 

dissatisfied with its intelligence support. Two 

surveys commissioned by Congress had 

major impacts: the reports of the Church 

Committee and the 9/11 Commission. 

Sponsorship by elected officials, of course, 

does not guarantee a high degree of 

influence: the Pike Committee worked at the 

same time as Senator Church’s panel but 

achieved little or nothing, and the NSC’s 

Scowcroft Commission saw its work eclipsed 

by the events of 11 September 2001. Reports 

and studies generated within the Intelligence 

Community itself, however, have uniformly 

had little effect.

• Undertaken in conjunction with a war.

Studies whose findings emerge while 

American troops are in combat, or just after, 

are more likely to result in change. Indeed, a 

war usually broadens the range of possible 

intelligence reforms. The drafters of the 

National Security Act in 1947 drew lessons 

from the greatest war in history to construct a 

new postwar security system. The outbreak 

of the Korean War in 1950 brought about the 

intelligence reforms proposed by the Dulles 

Report and tentatively approved by the NSC 

over a year earlier. The 1971 Schlesinger 

Report responded to the need to cut 

spending as President Nixon extracted the 

United States from the long and costly 

Vietnam War. The 9/11 Commission Report, 

of course, was prompted by the costliest 

attacks on American soil in living memory 

and written as the War on Terror and 

operations in Iraq ground on. 

Studies whose 

recommendations would 

cause power in 

the Intelligence 

Community to 

gravitate either 

towards the DCI 

or the Secretary 

of Defense—or 

both—have generally had the 

most influence 

and are the most 

likely to be implemented.
42

• Prepared concurrently with other studies.

Surveys conducted nearly simultaneously 

often amplify each other’s influence. There 

have been several such conjunctions: the 

Eberstadt Report arrived within weeks of the 

influential Dulles Report in early 1949. In 

1975, the Murphy Commission study and the 

Taylor and Ogilvie Reports affected 

President Ford’s response (especially in 

drafting Executive Order 11905) to the 

Church and Pike probes in Congress, which 

together prompted Congress to establish 

permanent intelligence oversight 

committees. The 9/11 Commission’s Report 

drew from the work of the recent Scowcroft 

Commission and Congressional probes into 

9/11 and Iraq.

• Well-informed, well-argued, and wellwritten. Reports prepared by knowledgeable 

parties with good access to data, a sound 

analytical framework, and clear prose have 

been more likely to find a favorable reception. 

James Schlesinger’s 1971 report to the NSC, 

for example, revealed formidable analytic 

power and a keen rhetorical edge; both 

undoubtedly enhanced its influence. The 

9/11 Commission’s compelling report was a 

national bestseller. On the other hand, the 

HPSCI staff’s long and rambling 1996 IC21 

study, while well-informed, would have 

profited from more rigorous editorial 

discipline. Of all the studies examined, the 

1955 Clark Task Force Report displays, in its 

leaden prose, the least insight into the 

Intelligence Community. (It is worth noting 

that studies prepared for short deadlines, 

such as the 1975 Ogilvie Report, suffer from 

their haste; the better studies usually take at 

least a year to generate.) 

• Led by future DCIs. The report of a study 

commission whose chairman later becomes 

DCI, as in the case of Allen Dulles and James 

Schlesinger (who was also later Secretary of 

Defense), is likely to have a lasting impact. 

The new DCI is likely to use his experience 

on the commission as a touchstone in 

evaluating community affairs, and as a 

template for making changes. 

Substance

In the substance of these reports, one large 

trend is evident over the years. Studies such as 

the Dulles and Schlesinger Reports, whose 

recommendations would cause power in the 

Intelligence Community to gravitate either 

towards the Director of Central Intelligence or 

the Office of the Secretary of Defense—or 

both—have generally had the most influence 

and are the most likely to be implemented. 

Studies tended to make a difference if they 

reinforced this long-term trend to increase the 

concentration of power over intelligence in the 

hands of both the DCI and—later and more 

slowly—the Secretary of Defense. This pattern 

endured from the late 1940s into 2004, regardless of whether Democrats or Republicans 

controlled the White House or Congress. The 

losers in this trend were the Department of 

State, the armed services, and, to a lesser 

extent, the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Until early in 

the Cold War, these institutions had dominated 

American intelligence; they soon did so no 

longer.

The 9/11 Commission Report and the legislation 

that it midwifed broke this pattern and established a new one that is likely to prove enduring. 

The double shock of 11 September 2001 and 

the community’s misestimate of Iraqi weapons 

programs had convinced Congress, the president, and the public that American intelligence 

had to be made both better integrated and more 

accountable. The answer to both requirements, 

it seemed, was to appoint one official—a Director of National Intelligence—to ensure that all 

three of the responsibilities that had accrued to 

the Director of Central Intelligence (i.e., providing strategic warning, coordinating clandestine 

activities, and managing the performance of the 

Intelligence Community) were performed effectively across both the foreign and domestic 
43

intelligence realms. The DNI, it was hoped, 

would have full authority to oversee all intelligence regarding the safety of the United States. 

The emphasis on integrating foreign and 

domestic intelligence work was the key to the 

change; it has set the DNI in a position metaphorically equidistant between the defense 

establishment and the less-defined federal 

capability to defend the American homeland. 

Where there were two main focuses of power in 

the Intelligence Community before 2004—the 

DCI and the Secretary of Defense—there are 

now three, including the homeland security mission.

Reform and the Constitution

What do these studies tell us about the larger 

course of intelligence transformation? Sweeping intelligence reform is rare because it is so 

difficult. To make more than incremental 

change, the US Constitution requires broad 

cooperation by two entire branches of government—Congress, which diffuses its two 

houses’ authority among their committees, and 

the Executive Branch, whose departments 

each respond to different political and institutional pressures. Within the Executive Branch, 

the Intelligence Community itself is a confederation of disparate agencies. The studies we 

have examined nonetheless reveal that, 

despite these systemic difficulties, reform is 

possible when most of the key political and 

bureaucratic actors agree that something must 

changeeven if they do not all agree on 

exactly what that change should be. Studies of 

the Intelligence Community can help create 

agreement on the need for change if they are 

seen as both timely and authoritative—i.e., 

representative, logical and judicious. Even a 

study that offers little new information can bolster intelligence reform if it shows policymakers a responsible alternative to what already 

exists.

Intelligence reform efforts and blue-ribbon 

studies of the Intelligence Community will 

resume, of course, perhaps soon after the 

President and Congress have implemented 

the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004. Intelligence is too large, too 

complicated, and too important either to fix at a 

stroke or to leave alone. What is new, however, 

is the changed institutional dynamic that has 

emerged since the 11 September 2001 attacks 

and the passage of the act. It remains to be 

seen which department or agency will take the 

lead in providing intelligence support for the 

homeland security mission, and how effective 

the new DNI will be in working with it. In the 

search for new solutions, perhaps some 

advanced by earlier intelligence reform studies 

will find new validity. While the shape of the 

2004 act’s new settlement remains uncertain, 

the DNI clearly will need a host of imaginative 

solutions to cope with old problems and new 

tensions as he balances traditional intelligence 

needs against the unprecedented and competing requirements of homeland security.

Intelligence is too 

large, too complicated, and too 

important either 

to fix at a stroke 

or to leave alone.