The Director of Central Intelligence heads up several interagency groups which were created to aid him in the management and operation of the intelligence community. The DCI's two principal tools for managing intelligence are the Intelligence Resources Advisory Committee (IRAC) and the United States Intelligence Board (USIB). The IRAC's members include representatives from the State Department, Defense, the Office of Management and Budget, and the CIA itself. (Since the agency's Director chairs the group in his role as DCI, or head of the intelligence community, the CIA is also given a seat.) IRAC was formed in November 1971, and it is supposed to prepare a consolidated budget for the whole community and generally assure that intelligence resources are used as efficiently as possible. However, it has not been in existence long enough for its performance to be judged, especially since three different DCIs have already headed it.
The USIB's main tasks are the issuance of National Intelligence Estimates and the setting of collection requirements and priorities. Under it are fifteen permanent inter-agency committees and a variety of ad hoc groups for special problems. Working through these committees and groups, the USIB, among other things, lists the targets for American intelligence and the priority attached to each one, * coordinates within the intelligence community the estimates of future events and enemy strengths, controls the classification and security systems for most of the U.S. government, directs research in the various fields of technical intelligence, and decides what classified information will be passed on to foreign friends and allies. *
The USIB meets every Thursday morning in a conference room on the seventh floor of CIA headquarters. At a typical meeting there are three or four subjects on the agenda, itself a classified document which the USIB secretariat circulates to each member a few days before the meeting. The first item of business is always the approval of the minutes of the last session; in the interest of security, the minutes are purposely made incomplete. Then the USIB turns to the Watch Report, which has been prepared earlier in the week by an inter-agency USIB committee responsible for keeping an eye out for any indication that armed conflict, particularly one which might threaten the United States or any of its allies, may break out anywhere in the world. A typical Watch Report might, in effect, say something like: War between the United States and the Soviet Union does not seem imminent this week, but the Soviets are going ahead with the development of their latest missile and have moved two new divisions into position along the Chinese border; North Vietnamese infiltration along the Ho Chi Minh trail (as monitored by sensors and radio intercepts) indicates that the level of violence will probably rise in the northern half of South Vietnam; and satellite photos of the Suez Canal (DELETED) point to a higher level of tension between Israel and Egypt.
Once the USIB gives its routine assent, the Watch Report is forwarded to the nation's top policy-makers, who normally do not even glance at it, since they know that everything in it of any consequence has already been distributed to them in other intelligence reports. If some apocalyptic sign that war might break out were ever picked up by any agency of the community, the President and his top aides would be notified immediately, and the USIB would not be consulted; but as long as nothing of particular note is occurring, every Thursday morning the USIB spends an average of about thirty seconds discussing the Watch Report (which actually takes several man-weeks to prepare) before it is forwarded to the White House.
Next on the USIB agenda is the consideration and, almost always, the approval of the one or two National Intelligence Estimates which have been completed that week. These estimates of enemy capabilities and future events are drafted in advance by the CIA's National Intelligence Officers and then coordinated at the staff level with the various USIB-member agencies. By the time the estimates come before the USIB itself, all differences have normally been compromised in the inter-agency coordination meetings, or, failing in that accommodation, a dissenting member has already prepared a footnote stating his agency's disagreement with the conclusions or text of the NIE.
Once the USIB has approved the estimates before it (now certified as the best judgments of the intelligence community on the particular subject), the board turns to any special items which all the members have the prerogative of placing on the agenda. One Thursday in 1969 the chief of Naval Intelligence asked the USIJ~ to reconsider a proposal, which had earlier been turned down at the USIB subcommittee level, to furnish the Brazilian navy with relatively advanced American cryptological equipment. Because of the sensitivity of U.S. codes and encrypting devices, exports-- even to friendly countries-need the USIB's approval; the board turned down this particular request. At another meeting in 1970 the special discussion was on whether or not a very sophisticated satellite should be targeted against the (DELETED) part of the (DELETED) instead of (DELETED). The Air Force's request to (DELETED) its satellite came to the USIB under its responsibility for setting intelligence-collection priorities; citing the great cost of the satellite and the possibility that the (DELETED) might lead to a malfunction, the USIB said no to the (DELETED). In another 1970 meeting the USIB considered a Pentagon proposal to lower the U.S. government's research goals for the detection of underground nuclear explosions. Again the USIB said no. *
On occasion, when extremely sensitive matters are to be discussed, the USIB goes into executive session-the practical effect of which is that all staff members leave the room and no minutes at all are kept. The USIB operated in this atmosphere of total privacy for a 1969 discussion of the Green Beret murder case and again in 1970 for a briefing of the Fitzhugh panel's recommendations on the reorganization of Pentagon intelligence (see p. 100).
Under DCI Helms, most USIB meetings were finished within forty-five minutes. Since almost all of the substantive work had been taken care of in preparatory sessions at the staff level; the USIB rarely did anything more than ratify already determined decisions, and thus the board, the highest-level substantive committee of the U.S. intelligence community, had very little work to do on its own.
The USIB and its fifteen committees deal exclusively with what is called national intelligence-intelligence needed, in theory, by the country's policy-makers. But there is a second kind of intelligence-"departmental"-which is, again in theory, solely for the use of a particular agency or military service. The Army, Navy, and Air Force collect great amounts of departmental intelligence to support their tactical missions. For example, an American commander in Germany may desire data on the enemy forces that would oppose his troops if hostilities broke out, but the day-to-day movements of Soviet troops along the East German border are of little interest to high officials back in Washington (unless, of course, the Soviets are massing for an invasion, in which case the information would be upgraded to national intelligence). The dividing line between national and departmental intelligence, however, is often quite faint, and the military have frequently branded as departmental a number of wasteful collection programs that they know would not be approved on the national level.
Although the CIA has had since its creation exclusive responsibility for carrying out overseas espionage operations for the collection of national intelligence, the various military intelligence agencies and the intelligence units of American forces stationed abroad have retained the right to seek out tactical information for their own departmental requirements. During the Korean and Vietnamese wars, field commanders understandably needed data of enemy troop movements, and one way of obtaining it was through the hiring of foreign agents. But even in peacetime, with U.S. forces permanently stationed in countries like England, Germany, Italy, Morocco, Turkey, Panama, Japan, and Australia, the military intelligence services have consistently sought to acquire information through their own secret agents-the justification, of course, always being the need for departmental or tactical intelligence. To avoid duplication and proliferation of agents, all of these espionage missions are supposed to be coordinated with the CIA. But the military often fail to do this because they know the CIA would not give its approval, or because an arrangement has been previously worked out to the effect that as long as the military stay out of CIA's areas of interest, they can operate on their own. Every military unit has an intelligence section, and few commanders wish to see their personnel remain idle. Therefore, if for no other reasons than to keep their soldiers occupied, American military intelligence units overseas are usually involved in the espionage game.
For example, a military intelligence unit assigned to Bangkok, Thailand, as late as 1971 was trying to entrap Soviet KGB officers, recruit local spies, and even was attempting to run its own agents into China through Hong Kong. Little or none of this activity was being cleared with the CIA. Similarly, in (DELETED) at virtually every level.
The tribalism that plagues the intelligence community is at its worst in the military intelligence agencies, and most of the personnel working for these organizations feel their first loyalty is to their parent service. The men who run military intelligence are almost all career officers who look to the Army, Navy, and Air Force for promotion and other advancement. They serve only a tour or two in intelligence before they return to conventional military life. Very few are willing to do anything in their intelligence assignments which will damage their careers, and they know all too well that analysis on their part which contradicts the views or the policies of the leadership of their parent service will not be well received. Thus, their intelligence judgments tend to be clouded by the prejudices and budgetary needs of the military service whose uniform they wear.
The Army, the Navy, and the Air Force traditionally maintained their own independent intelligence agencies-ostensibly to support their tactical responsibilities and to maintain an enemy "order of battle." Each service collected its own information and quite often was less than forthcoming to the others. The result was a large amount of duplication and an extremely parochial approach in each service's analysis of enemy capabilities.
This self-serving approach of the military services toward intelligence led to the formation in 1961 of the Defense Intelligence Agency, which was supposed to coordinate and consolidate the views and, to some extent, the functions of the three service agencies. It was planned that the DIA would replace the Army, Navy, and Air Force at the USIB meetings, but Allen Dulles and successive DCIs have balked at leaving total responsibility for representing the Pentagon to the DIA, which has subsequently developed its own brand of parochialism as the intelligence arm of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Thus, while only the DIA is an official USIB member, the heads of the three service agencies remain at the table for the weekly sessions, push their pet theories, and demand that footnotes be included in intelligence estimates that run contrary to their views of their service.
Aside from operating the overt system of military attaches working out of American embassies overseas, the DIA does little information collection on its own. It is largely dependent on the service intelligence agencies for its raw data, and its 5,000 employees process and analyze this material and turn it into finished intelligence reports which are circulated within the Pentagon and to the rest of the intelligence community. The DIA also prepares daily and weekly intelligence digests that are similar in form and content to the CIA publications, and makes up its own estimates of enemy capabilities. This latter function did not take on much significance in the DIA until November 1970, when the agency was reorganized and Major General Daniel Graham was given a mandate by DIA chief Lieutenant General Donald Bennett to improve the agency's estimating capability. Graham had served two earlier tours of duty in CIA's Office of National Estimates, and he quickly established the DIA office as a serious rival to the agency's estimative function. *
Although the DIA was originally intended to take over many of their functions, the service intelligence agencies have continued to grow and flourish since its founding. Indeed, each of the three is larger than the DIA, and Air Force intelligence is the biggest spy organization in the whole intelligence community, with 56,000 employees and an annual budget of about $2.7 billion. Most of this latter figure goes to pay for the extremely costly reconnaissance satellites and the rockets necessary to put them in orbit. A separate part of Air Force intelligence, the National Reconnaissance Office, operates these satellite programs for the entire community, and the NRO's budget alone is more than $1.5 billion a year. The NRO works in such intense secrecy that its very existence is classified. Its director for many years was a mysterious Air Force colonel (and later brigadier general) named Ralph Steakley, who retired in the early 1970s to take employment with Westinghouse, a defense contractor which sells considerable equipment to the NRO.
The Office of Naval Intelligence, with about 15,000 employees and a $600 million annual budget, is perhaps the fastest-growing member of the intelligence community. At the same time submarine- missile (Polaris and Poseidon) programs have in recent years received larger and larger budgets (DELETED) have similarly captured the imagination of the military planners. Naval Intelligence operates (DELETED) crammed with the most modern sensors, radars, cameras, and other listening devices which (DELETED)
The Navy formerly sent surface ships, like the Liberty and the Pueblo, on similar missions, but since the attack on the former and the capture of the latter, these missions have largely been discontinued.
Army Intelligence is the least mechanized of the three service agencies. Its mission is largely to acquire tactical intelligence in support of its field forces. Yet, due to the great size of the Army and the proliferation of G2-type units, the Army still manages to spend about $700 million annually and employ 35,000 people in intelligence.
The remaining large component of military intelligence is the National Security Agency. The NSA, the most secretive member of the intelligence community, breaks foreign codes and ciphers and develops secure communications for the U.S. government -- at a cost to the taxpayer of about $1.2 billion every year. Founded in 1952 by a classified presidential order, the NSA employs about 24,000 people. Its headquarters is at Fort Meade, Maryland, and its hundreds of listening posts around the world eavesdrop on the communications of most of the world's countries-enemy and friend alike. Most of the NSA's intercept stations are operated by special cryptological units from the armed forces, which are subordinate to the head of the NSA.
Under the Fitzhugh recommendations, which were put into effect in 1972, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence has overall responsibility for military intelligence. Independent of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the military services, he is supposed to coordinate and generally supervise the activities of the DIA, the service intelligence agencies, the NSA, the Defense Mapping Agency, and the Defense Investigative Service. These latter two organizations were formed in early 1972 (also as a result of the Fitzhugh recommendations) out of the three separate mapping and investigative agencies which had previously existed in the Army, Navy, and Air Force. The mappers, aided by satellite photography, chart nearly every inch of the earth's surface. The investigators perform counterintelligence work and look into the backgrounds of Defense Department personnel. In the late 1960s, however, the three units which would later become the Defense Investigative Service devoted much of their time and effort to reporting on domestic dissident and anti-war groups. The Secretary of Defense ordered that this military surveillance of civilians be stopped in early 1971, but there are indications that it is still going on.
The State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research has the smallest budget in the intelligence community-only $8 million-and it is the only member with no collection capability of its own. It is completely dependent on State Department diplomatic cables and the sources of other community members for the data which its 350 employees turn into finished intelligence reports. INR represents State on all the USIB and other inter-agency panels dealing with intelligence. It coordinates within State the departmental position for 40 Committee meetings, and does the Under Secretary's staff work for these meetings. The Director of INR until the end of 1973, Ray S. Cline, spent twenty-two years with the CIA before he joined the State Department in 1969. He had risen to be the agency's Deputy Director for Intelligence before losing out in an internal CIA struggle in 1966, when he was sent off to head agency operations in West Germany. Although the German station was (and is) the CIA's largest in the world, Cline was far from the center of power in Washington. However, his absence apparently did not diminish either his bureaucratic skills or his capabilities as an intelligence analyst, and he bolstered INR's position within the community, although the bureau, without any resources of its own, still remains a comparatively minor participant. *
The FBI, the Atomic Energy Commission, and the Treasury Department-the lesser members of the USIB-are all active participants in the intelligence community although the primary functions of these organizations are unrelated to the collection of foreign intelligence. Nevertheless, the FBI's internal-security duties include protecting the country against foreign espionage attempts, a responsibility considered to be associated with that of the intelligence community. The Atomic Energy Commission has an intelligence division which concerns itself with information about nuclear developments in foreign countries and maintains technical listening posts around the world (sometimes manned by CIA personnel) to monitor foreign atomic blasts. The Treasury Department's connection with the intelligence community is based primarily in its campaign to halt drugs entering the United States.
Contrary to the National Security Act of 1947, the CIA today does not in fact perform the function of "coordinating the intelligence activities of the several governmental departments and agencies." For a time during the early 1950s the DCI did manage some degree of control over the other agencies, but in the years that followed came the technological explosion in intelligence and with it the tremendous expansion of the community. The spying trade was transformed--everywhere but at the CIA-from a fairly small, agent-oriented profession to a machine-dominated informationgathering enterprise of almost boundless proportions. Technical collection, once a relatively minor activity in which gentlemen did read other gentlemen's mail, blossomed into a wide range of activities including COMINT (communications intelligence), SIGINT (signal intelligence), PHOTINT (photographic intelligence), EUNT (electronic intelligence), and RADINT (radar intelligence). Data was obtained by highly sophisticated equipment on planes, ships, submarines, orbiting and stationary space satellites, radio and electronic intercept stations, and radars-some the size of three football fields strung together. The sensors, or devices, used for collection consisted of high-resolution and wide-angle cameras, infrared cameras, receivers for intercepting microwave transmissions and telemetry signals, side-looking and over-the-horizon radars, and other even more exotic contrivances.
The proliferation of technical collection has also had a significant influence on the personnel makeup of the intelligence community. The mountains of information received gave rise to a variety of highly specialized data processors: cryptanalysts, traffic analysts, photographic interpreters, and telemetry, radar, and signal analysts, who convert the incomprehensible bleeps and squawks intercepted by their machines into forms usable by the substantive intelligence analysts. And it has created a new class of technotrats and managers who conceive, develop, and supervise the operation of systems so secret that only a few thousand (sometimes only a couple of hundred) people have high enough security clearances to see the finished intelligence product.
The information collected by the technical systems constitutes the most valuable data available to U.S. intelligence. Without it, there would be no continuing reliable way for government to determine with confidence the status of foreign--especially Soviet and Chinese--strategic military capabilities. Without it, also, there would have been no agreement with the Soviet Union in 1972 for the limitations of strategic armaments, since that pact was absolutely dependent on each side being confident that it could monitor new military developments-even possible cheating-on the other side through its own satellites and other surveillance equipment.
The first advanced overhead-reconnaissance systems-the U-2 spy planes and the early satellites in the late 1950s and early 1960s-provided valuable information about the Soviet Union, but their successes only whetted the appetites of U.S. military planners, who had so long been starved for good intelligence on America's main adversary. Once they got a taste of the fruits of technical collection, they demanded more specific and more frequent reporting on the status of the Soviet armed forces. And the technicians, with nearly unlimited funds at their disposal, obliged them, partly because the technicians themselves had a natural desire to expand the state of their art.
A complementary circle of military intelligence requirements and technical collection methods evolved. Collection responded to requirements and, in turn, generated still further demands for information, which resulted in the development of yet bigger and better collection systems. If some particular type of data could somehow be collected, invariably one or another part of the Pentagon would certify that it was needed, and a new technical system for gathering it would be developed. The prevailing ethic became collection for collection's sake.
In the infant years of the technological explosion, Allen Dulles paid scant attention to technical collection's potential as an intelligence tool. He was far more interested in clandestine operations and the overthrowing of foreign governments. After the Bay of Pigs debacle in 1961 cut short Dulles' career as DCI, his successor, John McCone, soon grasped the importance of the new information- gathering systems. He tried to reassert the CIA's leadership position in this area, and as part of his effort he created the Directorate for Science and Technology and recruited a brilliant young scientist, Albert "Bud" Wheelon, to head the component. But try as he might, the tenacious, hard-driving McCone could not cope with the Pentagon juggernaut, then under the direction of Robert McNamara, who energetically supported the military services in their efforts to gain maximum control of all technical collection. McCone was forced to conclude that the battle with the Defense Department was lost and the trend toward Pentagon domination was irreversible. This was one of the reasons that McCone resigned in 1965 (another being, in McCone's view, President Johnson's lack of appreciation for strategic intelligence such as the National Intelligence Estimates).
McCone was followed by Admiral William Raborn, whose ineffective tour as DCI was mercifully ended after only fourteen months, to the relief of all members of the intelligence community. Richard Helms took over the CIA in the spring of 1966. Like Dulles, he was much more interested in the cloak-and-dagger field, where he had spent his entire career, than in the machines that had revolutionized the intelligence trade. Although he was Director of Central Intelligence, not just the head of CIA, Helms rarely challenged the Pentagon on matters regarding technical co1- lection-or, for that matter, intelligence analysis-until, belatedly, his last years as DCI. As a result, during his directorship the CIA was completely overshadowed by the other agencies in all intelligence activities other than covert operations, and even here the military made deep inroads.
Richard Helms clearly understood the bureaucratic facts of life. He knew all too well that he did not have Cabinet status and thus was not the equal of the Secretary of Defense, the man ultimately responsible for the military intelligence budget. Helms simply did not have the power to tell the Pentagon that the overall needs of U.S. intelligence (which were, of course, his responsibility as DCI) demanded that the military cut back on a particular spying program and spend the money elsewhere. Since managing the intelligence community did not interest him very much anyway, only on a few occasions did he make the effort to exercise some measure of influence over the other agencies outside the CIA.
In 1967 Helms was urged by his staff to authorize an official review of intelligence collection by community members, with special emphasis on the many technical collection systems. However, Helms was reluctant to venture very far into this highly complex, military-controlled field, and decided only to authorize a study of the CIA's "in-house" needs. He named an experienced senior agency officer, Hugh Cunningham, to head the small group picked to make the study. Cunningham, a former Rhodes scholar, had previously served in top positions with the Clandestine Services and on the Board of National Estimates. With his broad experience, he seemed to agency insiders to be an ideal choice to carry out the review. After several months of intense investigation, he and his small group concluded-this was the first sentence of their report -"The United States intelligence community collects too much information." They found that there was a large amount of duplication in the collection effort, with two or more agencies often spending great amounts of money to amass essentially the same data, and that much of the information collected was useless for anything other than low-level intelligence analysis. The study noted that the glut of raw data was clogging the intelligence system and making it difficult for the analysts to separate out what was really important and to produce thoughtful material for the policymakers. The study also observed that the overabundance of collection resulted in an excess of finished intelligence reports, many of which were of little use in the formulation of national policy; there simply were too many reports on too many subjects for the high-level policy-makers to cope with.
The Cunningham study caused such consternation in the CIA that Helms refused to disseminate it to the other intelligence agencies. Several of his deputies complained bitterly about the study's critical view of their own directorates and the way it seemed to diminish the importance of their work. Since the study was even harsher in dealing with the military's intelligence programs, Helms was further unwilling to risk the Pentagon's wrath by circulating it within the intelligence community. He decided to keep the controversial report within the CIA.
Always the master bureaucrat, Helms resorted to the time-honored technique of forming another special study group to review the work of the first group. He organized a new committee, the Senior Executive Group, to consider in general terms the CIA's managerial problems. The SEG's first job was to look over the Cunningham study, but its members were hardly fitted to the task. They were the chiefs of the agency's four directorates, each of which had been heavily criticized in the original study; the Executive Director (the CIA's number-three man), a plodding, unimaginative former support officer; and-as chairman-the Deputy DCI, Admiral Rufus Taylor, a career naval officer. After several prolonged meetings, the SEG decided, not surprisingly, that the study on collection was of only marginal value and therefore not to be acted on in any significant way. A short time later Cunningham was transferred to the Office of Training, one of the CIA's administrative Siberias. The SEG never met again.
Although Richard Helms showed little talent for management -and even less interest in it-during his years as DCI he did make some efforts to restrict the expansion of the intelligence community. One such try was successful. It occurred in the late 1960s when Helms refused to give his approval for further development work on the Air Force's extremely expensive manned orbiting laboratory (MOL), which was then being promoted as being, among other things, an intelligence-collection system. Without Helms' endorsement, the Air Force was unable to convince the White House of the need for the project, and it was subsequently dropped by the Johnson administration. (Some Air Force officials viewed Helms' lack of support as retaliation for the Air Force's "capture" in 1967 of the SR-71 reconnaissance plane, which the CIA had originally developed and would have preferred to keep under its control, but this criticism was probably unfair. Helms simply seemed to be going along with the strong pressure in the Johnson administration to cut costs because of the Vietnam war, and saw the MOL as a particularly vulnerable-and technically dubious-program in a period of tight budgets.)
Helms was always a realist about power within the government, and he recognized that, except in a rare case like that of the MOL, he simply did not have the clout to prevent the introduction of most new technical collection systems. He also understood that the full force of the Pentagon was behind these projects-as redundant or superfluous as they often were-and that if he concentrated his efforts on trying to eliminate or even reduce unproductive and outdated systems, he was making enemies who could undercut his own pet clandestine projects overseas. But even the few efforts he did bring against these obviously wasteful systems failed (save that against the MOL), demonstrating vividly that the true power over budgets in the intelligence community lies with the Pentagon, not the Director of Central Intelligence.
In 1967, for example, Helms asked Frederick Eaton, a prominent and conservative New York lawyer, to conduct a review of the National Security Agency. For some time the NSA's cost-effectiveness as a contributor to the national intelligence effort had been highly suspect within the community, especially in view of the code-breaking agency's constantly growing budget, which had then risen over the billion-dollar mark. Eaton was provided with a staff composed of officials from several intelligence offices, including the CIA, the State Department, and the Pentagon, and this staff accumulated substantial evidence that much of the NSA's intelligence collection was of little or marginal use to the various intelligence consumers in the community. But Eaton, after extensive consultation with Pentagon officials, surprised his own staff by recommending no reductions and concluding that all of the NSA's programs were worthwhile. The staff of intelligence professionals rebelled, and Eaton had to write the conclusions of the review himself.
The lesson of the Eaton study was clear within the intelligence community. The NSA was widely recognized as the community member most in need of reform, and the professionals who had studied the matter recommended substantial change in its programs. Yet Helms' effort to improve the supersecret agency's performance through the Eaton study accomplished nothing, and if the Director of Central Intelligence could not, as the professionals said, "get a handle on" the NSA, then it was highly unlikely that he could ever influence the expanding programs of the other Pentagon intelligence agencies.
In 1968 Helms created another select inter-agency group at the insistence of his staff: the National Intelligence Resources Board (the forerunner of the Intelligence Resources Advisory Committee). Intended to bring about economies in the community by cutting certain marginal programs, the NIRB had more bureaucratic power than any of its predecessors because it was chaired by the Deputy Director of the CIA and had as members the directors of the Defense Intelligence Agency and the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. It immediately decided to take a new look at the NSA's programs, and it singled out a particular communications-intercept program, costing millions of dollars a year, as particularly wasteful. The NIRB had found that nearly all intelligence analysts within the community who had access to the results of the NSA program believed the data to be of little or no use. These findings were related to Paul Nitze, then Deputy Secretary of Defense, with the recommendation that the program be phased out. (The final decision on continuing the NSA program, of course, had to be made in the Pentagon, since the NSA is a military intelligence agency.) Nitze did nothing with the recommendation for several months. Then, as he was leaving office in January 1969, he sent a letter to Helms thanking the DCI for his advice but informing him that approval had been given by Pentagon decision-makers to continue the dubious project. And despite the NIRB's overwhelming arguments against the project, Nitze did not even bother to list any reasons why the Pentagon chose not to concur with the decision of the Director of Central Intelligence.
In the wake of such defeats, Helms gave up on making attempts at managing the intelligence community. At one point, months later, he observed to his staff that while he, as DCI, was theoretically responsible for 100 percent of the nation's intelligence activities, he in fact controlled less than 15 percent of the community's assets-and most of the other 85 percent belonged to the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Under such circumstances, Helms concluded, it was unrealistic for any DCI to think that he could have a significant influence on U.S. intelligence-resource decisions or the shaping of the intelligence community.
But when the Nixon administration took over in 1969, some very powerful people, including Defense Secretary Melvin Laird and the President himself, became concerned about the seemingly uncontrolled expansion of the Pentagon's intelligence programs. Laird said in his 1970 Defense budget statement:
Intelligence is both critical and costly. Yet we have found intelligence activities, with management overlapping or nonexistent. Deficiencies have provoked criticism that became known even outside the intelligence community. These criticisms can be summarized in five principal points:
1. Our intelligence product was being evaluated poorly. *
2. Various intelligence-gathering activities overlapped and there was no mechanism to eliminate the overlap.
3. There was no coordinated long-range program for resource management and programming.
4. Significant gaps in intelligence-gathering went unnoticed.
5. The intelligence community failed to maintain frank and unrestricted channels of internal communication.
That same year President Nixon appointed a "blue-ribbon" panel chaired by Gilbert W. Fitzhugh, chairman of the board of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, to conduct a review of the Defense Department's entire operations and organization. Fitzhugh declared at a July 1970 press conference that his investigation showed that the Pentagon was "an impossible organization to administer in its present form, just an amorphous lump." Then turning to military spying, he stated, "I believe that the Pentagon suffers from too much intelligence. They can't use what they get because there is too much collected. It would almost be better that they didn't have it because it's difficult to find out what's important." The Fitzhugh panel recommended a series of economies in Pentagon espionage and also urged that a new post of Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence be created. Under this proposal, the various military intelligence agencies, which previously had been scattered all over the Defense Department's organizational chart, were to be put under the authority of the new Assistant Secretary, who in turn would report to Secretary Laird.
By 1971, before the Fitzhugh recommendations were put into effect, the House Committee on Appropriations had become aware that military intelligence was in need of a shake-up. The committee released a little-noticed but blistering report which stated that "the intelligence operations of the Department of Defense have grown beyond the actual needs of the Department and are now receiving an inordinate share of the fiscal resources of the Department." The congressional report continued, "Redundancy is the watch word of many intelligence operations. . . . Coordination is less effective than it should be. Far more material is collected than is essential. Material is collected which cannot be evaluated ... and is therefore wasted. New intelligence means have become available . . . without offsetting reductions in old procedures." With these faults so obvious even to the highly conservative and military-oriented congressional committee, strong reform measures would have seemed to be in order. But little was done by the Congress to bring the intelligence community under control. The fear on Capitol Hill of violating the sacred mystique of "national security" prevented any effective corrective action.
Finally, in November 1971, after a secret review of the intelligence community carried out by the Office of Management and Budget's James Schlesinger, who would a year later be named Director of the CIA, the Nixon administration announced "a number of management steps to improve the efficiency and effectiveness" of U.S. intelligence. The President reportedly had been grumbling for some time about the poor information furnished him by the intelligence community. Most recently he had been disturbed by the community's blunder in assuring that American prisoners were being held at the Son Tay camp in North Vietnam, which during a dramatic rescue mission by U.S. commandos in 1970 was found to be empty. Nixon was also angered by the failure of intelligence to warn about the ferocity of the North Vietnamese response to the South Vietnamese invasion of Laos in early 1971. (In both these instances the faulty intelligence seems to have come from the Pentagon, * although there are good reasons to believe that in the Son Tay case the President's political desire to make a show of support for the prisoners outweighed the strong possibility that no prisoners would be found there.) The President, as the nation's primary consumer of intelligence, felt that he had a right to expect better information.
Whether a President takes great personal interest in intelligence, as Lyndon Johnson did, or, as in Nixon's case, delegates most of the responsibility to an aide (Henry Kissinger), the intelligence field remains very much a private presidential preserve. Congress has almost completely abdicated any control it might exercise. Thus, when President Nixon chose to revamp the intelligence structure in 1971, he did not even bother to consult in advance those few Congressmen who supposedly oversee the intelligence community.
The ostensible objective of the 1971 reorganization was to improve management of the intelligence community by giving the DCI "an enhanced leadership role . . . in planning, reviewing, coordinating, and evaluating all intelligence programs and activities, and in the production of national intelligence." Under the Nixon plan, the DCI's powers over the rest of the community for the first time included the right to review the budgets of the other members-an unprecedented step in the tribal federation of intelligence and one absolutely necessary to the exercise of any meaningful degree of control.
But with this very same plan to enhance the DCI's "leadership role," the President was also placing control over all U.S. intelligence squarely in the National Security Council staff, still headed today by Henry Kissinger, even after he also has become Secretary of State. Kissinger was put in charge of a new NSC Intelligence Committee which included as members the DCI, the Attorney General, the Under Secretary of State, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. This Intelligence Committee was to "give direction and guidance on national intelligence needs and provide for a continuing evaluation of intelligence products from the viewpoint of the intelligence user." At the same time the President established another new body, called the Net Assessment Group, under Kissinger's control, to analyze U.S. military capabilities in comparison with those of the Soviets and Chinese as estimated by intelligence studies. Already chairman of the 40 Committee, which passes on all high-risk CIA covert operations, and the Verification Panel, which is responsible for monitoring the intelligence related to the S.A.L.T. negotiations and agreements, Kissinger, with his control now asserted over virtually all the NSC's key committees, had clearly emerged as the most powerful man in U.S. intelligence-as well as in American foreign policy.
Yet with Kissinger almost totally occupied with other matters, the President clearly intended under his November 1971 reorganization that CIA Director Helms take over and improve the actual management of the intelligence community-under Kissinger's general supervision, to be sure. Partly because of the nearly impervious tribalism of the community and partly because of Helms' pronounced lack of interest in management and technical matters, the shake-up had little effect on the well-entrenched ways of the community. Much to the amazement of his staff, Helms did virtually nothing to carry out the wishes of the President as contained in the restructuring order.
Shortly after the 1972 election, Helms was fired by the President as Director of Central Intelligence. According to his own testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he wanted to stay on the job, but that was not the wish of the White House. The President's dissatisfaction with Helms' management of the intelligence community was certainly a factor in his ouster, as perhaps were Helms' social connections with liberal Congressmen and journalists (some of whom were on the White House "enemies" list).
From his earlier work at the Office of Management and Budget and the Rand Corporation, James Schlesinger appeared knowledgeable about the problems facing the community and moved quickly, once he arrived at the CIA to replace Helms, to set up the bureaucratic structures necessary to exercise control over the other intelligence agencies. He created a new Deputy Director for Community Relations and strengthened the Intelligence Resources Advisory Committee, but his four-month tenure was too short to bring about any large-scale reform. And nothing in the record of his successor, William Colby-a clandestine operator for thirty years-indicates that he has either the management skills or the inclination to bring the spiraling growth of the intelligence community under control.
Clearly, the CIA is not the hub, nor is its Director the head, of the vast U.S. intelligence community. The sometimes glamorous, incorrigibly clandestine agency is merely a part of a much larger interdepartmental federation dominated by the Pentagon. And although the Director of Central Intelligence is nominally designated by each President in turn as the government's chief intelligence advisor, he is in fact overshadowed in the realities of Washington's politics by both the Secretary of Defense and the President's own Assistant for National Security Affairs, as well as by several lesser figures, such as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Nevertheless, agency directors and the CIA itself have managed to survive, and at times even flourish, in the secret bureaucratic jungle because of their one highly specialized contribution to the national intelligence effort. The CIA's primary task is not to coordinate the efforts of U.S. intelligence or even to produce finished national intelligence for the policy-makers. Its job is, for better or worse, to conduct the government's covert foreign policy.
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Notes:
* Nor does the figure include the guard force which protects the CIA's buildings and installations, the maintenance and char force, or the people who run the agency's cafeterias. The General Services Administration employs most of these personnel.
* Attempts to computerize the complete CIA employment list were frustrated and eventually scuttled by Director Helms, who viewed the effort as a potential breach of operational security.
* The investment practices of the CIA group in companies with overseas holdings open up some interesting questions about "insider" information. Would the CIA group have sold Anaconda Copper short in 1970 when the agency realized that its covert efforts to prevent Salvador Allende from assuming the Presidency of Chile had failed? Or in 1973, when Director James Schlesinger decided to allow William Broe, the former chief of the Clandestine Services' Western Hemisphere Division, to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and describe ITT's role in trying to provoke CIA action against Allende, might the investment group not have been tempted to dump its ITT stock (if it had any)?
* These senior analysts are called National Intelligence Officers (and sometimes "the Wise Men" by their colleagues within the community). The group has replaced the Board of National Estimates, which was a larger and more formalized body of senior officers who oversaw the preparation of national estimates.
* President Johnson's taste in intelligence was far from conventional. A former high State Department official tells of attending a meeting at the White House and then staying on for a talk with the President afterward. LBJ proceeded to play for him a tape recording (one of those presumably made by the FBI) of Martin Luther King in a rather compromising situation.
* Although in a crisis situation, like the implementation of the Arab-Israeli cease-fire in 1970, Henry Kissinger or occasionally the President himself may set the standards. In the 1970 case (DELETED)
* Intelligence reports are routinely provided to certain foreign countries, especially the English-speaking ones, on the basis of so-called intelligence agreements entered into by the DCI and his foreign equivalents. Although these agreements commit the United States government to a specified course of action enforceable under international law, they are never submitted as treaties to the U.S. Senate. In fact, they are negotiated and put into force in complete secrecy, and no member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has ever seen one, even for informational purposes.
* The Pentagon claimed that there was not enough money available in its budget to attain the level of detection on the Richter scale set forth in the USIB guidelines, and that relaxing the standard reflected this financial reality. The State Department argued that a changed goal might open the intelligence community up to criticism on grounds that it had not done everything possible to achieve a comprehensive nuclear test ban-which would ultimately be dependent on both sides, being confident that cheating by the other party could be detected. DCI Helms sided with State. But the civilian victory was a hollow one, since there was no way the DCI could ensure that the Pentagon would indeed spend more money on seismic research in order to be able to meet the level of detection fixed by the USIB.
* As a colonel in the late 1960s, Graham nearly resigned from the Army to accept an offer of permanent employment with the CIA. In early 1973 DCI James Schlesinger brought him back to the agency, still in uniform, to work on military estimates. Graham was widely known in the corridors of the CIA as the funny little military officer who hung a drawing of a bayonet over his desk with a caption describing it as "The weapon of the future."
* INR's position within. the intelligence community has been upgraded recently because of Henry Kissinger's assumption of the role of Secretary of State and by his appointment of long-time NSC aide and former CIA officer William Hyland to the post of director.
* Some intelligence was not being evaluated at all, and, as a result, a new concept, "the linear drawer foot," entered the English language. Translated from Pentagonese, this refers to the amount of paper needed to fill a file drawer one foot in length. A 1969 House Armed Services Committee report noted that the Southeast Asia office of the DIA alone had 517 linear drawer feet of unanalyzed raw intelligence locked in its vaults.
* Reporter Tad Szulc, formerly of the New York Times, recalls that after the Son Tay raid a CIA official approached him to emphasize that the agency had played no part in the operation and that the faulty information had originated with military intelligence.