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Authors: Mark M. Lowenthal

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MAJOR THEMES
 
A number of major themes can be discerned in the development of the U.S. intelligence system, each of which will be discussed in turn.
 
THE NOVELTY OF U.S. INTELLIGENCE. Of the major powers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the United States has the briefest history of significant intelligence beyond wartime emergencies. British intelligence dates from the reign of Elizabeth 1(1558-1603), French intelligence from the sway of Cardinal Richelieu (1624-1642), and Russian intelligence from the reign of Ivan the Terrible (1533—1584). Even given that the United States did not come into being until 1776, its intelligence experience is brief. The first glimmer of a
national intelligence
enterprise did not appear until 1940. Although permanent and specific naval and military intelligence units date from the late nineteenth century, a broader U.S. national intelligence capability began to arise only with the creation of the Coordinator of Information (COI), the predecessor of the World War II-era Office of Strategic Services (OSS).
What explains this nearly 170-year absence of organized U.S. intelligence? For most of its history, the United States did not have strong foreign policy interests beyond its immediate borders. The success of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine (which stated that the United States would resist any European attempt to colonize in the Western Hemisphere), abetted by the acquiescence and tacit support of Britain, solved the basic security interests of the United States and its broader foreign policy interests. The need for better intelligence became apparent only after the United States achieved the status of a world power and became involved in wide-ranging international issues at the end of the nineteenth century.
Furthermore, the United States faced no threat to its security from its neighbors, from powers outside the Western Hemisphere, or—with the exception of the Civil War (1861-1865)—from large-scale internal dissent that was inimical to its form of government. This benign environment, so unlike that faced by all European states, undercut any perceived need for national intelligence.
Until the cold war with the Soviet Union commenced in 1945, the United States severely limited expenditures on defense and related activities during peacetime. Intelligence, already underappreciated, fell into this category. (Historians have noted, however, that intelligence absorbed a remarkable and anomalous 12 percent of the federal budget under President George Washington. This was the high-water mark of intelligence spending in the federal budget, a percentage that was never approached again. In 2007 national intelligence accounted for roughly 1.6 percent of the federal budget—for a total national intelligence budget of $43.5 billion, according to figures declassified by the director of national intelligence. This percentage is the same as it was in 1999. the last year in which the intelligence budget was made public. These data suggest that although there has been a great increase in intelligence spending in terms of dollars since the 2001 attacks, intelligence remains roughly where it was as a national priority for the period before the 9/11 terrorist attacks.)
Intelligence was a novelty in the 1940s. At this time, policy makers in both the executive branch and Congress viewed intelligence as a newcomer to national security. Even within the Army and Navy, intelligence developed relatively late and was far from robust until well into the twentieth century. As a result, intelligence did not have long-established patrons in the government, but it did have many rivals with competing departments, particularly the military and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), both of which were not willing to share their sources of information. Furthermore, intelligence did not have well-established traditions or modes of operation and thus was forced to create these during two periods of extreme pressure: World War II and the cold war.
 
A THREAT-BASED FOREIGN POLICY. With the promulgation of the Monroe Doctrine, the United States assumed a vested interest in the international status quo. This interest became more pronounced after the Spanish-American War in 1898. With the acquisition of a small colonial empire, the United States achieved a satisfactory international position—largely self-sufficient and largely unthreatened. However, the twentieth century saw the repeated rise of powers whose foreign policies were direct threats to the status quo: Kaiserine Germany in World War I, the Axis in World War II, and then the Soviet Union.
Responding to these threats became the mainstay of U.S. national security policy. The threats also gave focus to much of the operational side of U.S. intelligence, from its initial experience in the OSS during World War II to its broader covert actions in the cold war. Intelligence operations were one way in which the United States countered these threats
The terrorism threat in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries fits the same pattern of an opponent who rejects the international status quo and has emerged as an issue for U.S. national security. However, now the enemy is not a nation-state—even when terrorists have the support of nation-states—which makes it more difficult to deal with the problem. The refusal to accept the status quo could be more central to terrorists than it was to nation-states such as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, for whom the international status quo was also anathema. Such countries can, when necessary or convenient, forgo those policies and continue to function. Terrorists, however, cannot accept the status quo without giving up their
raison D’être.
 
THE INFLUENCE OF THE COLD WAR. Historians of intelligence often debate whether the United States would have had a large-scale intelligence capability had there been no cold war. The view here is that the answer is yes. The 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, not the cold war, prompted the initial formation of the U.S. intelligence community.
Even so, the prosecution of the cold war became the major defining factor in the development of most basic forms and practices of the U.S. intelligence community. Until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the cold war was the predominant national security issue, taking up to half of the intelligence budget, according to former director of central intelligence Robert M. Gates (1991-1993). Moreover, the fact that the Soviet Union and its allies were essentially closed targets had a major effect on U.S. intelligence, forcing it to resort to a variety of largely remote technical systems to collect needed information from a distance.
 
THE GLOBAL SCOPE OF INTELLIGENCE INTERESTS. The cold war quickly shifted from a struggle for predominance in postwar Europe to a global struggle in which virtually any nation or region could be a pawn between the two sides. Although some areas always remained more important than others, none could be written off entirely. Thus, U.S. intelligence began to collect and analyze information about and station intelligence personnel in every region.
 
A WITTINGLY REUNDANT ANALYTICAL STRUCTURE. Intelligence can be divided into four broad activities: collection, analysis, covert action, and counterintelligence. The United States developed unique entities to handle the various types of collection (imagery, signals, espionage) and covert action; counterintelligence is a function that is found in virtually every intelligence agency. But, for analysis, U.S. policy makers purposely created three agencies whose functions appear to overlap: the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Directorate of Intelligence (DI), the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research, and the Defense Intelligence Agency. Each of these agencies is considered an all-source analytical agency; that is, they have access to the full range of collected intelligence, and they work on virtually the same issues.
Two major reasons explain this redundancy, and they are fundamental to how the United States conducts analysis. First, different consumers of intelligence—policy makers—have different intelligence needs. Even when the president, the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff are working on the same issue, each has different operational responsibilities. The United States developed analytical centers to serve each policy maker’s specific and unique needs. Also, each policy agency wanted to be assured of a stream of intelligence dedicated to its needs.
Second, the United States developed the concept of competitive analysis, an idea that is based on the belief that by having analysts in several agencies with different backgrounds and perspectives work on the same issue, parochial views more likely will be countered—if not weeded out—and proximate reality is more likely to be achieved. Competitive analysis should, in theory, be an antidote to groupthink and forced consensus, although this is not always the case in practice. For example, during the pre-war assessment of Iraq’s weapon of mass destruction (WMD) programs, divisions formed among agencies about the nature of some intelligence (such as the possible role of aluminum tubes in a nuclear program) and whether the totality of the intelligence indicated parts of a nuclear program or a more coherent program. But these differences did not appreciably alter the predominant view with respect to the overall Iraqi nuclear capability.
As one would expect, competitive analysis entails a certain cost for the intelligence community because it requires having many analysts in several agencies. During the 1990s, as intelligence budgets contracted severely under the pressure of the post-cold war peace dividend and because of a lack of political support in either the executive branch or Congress, much of the capability to conduct competitive analysis was lost. There simply were not enough analysts. According to DCI George J. Tenet (1997-2004), the entire intelligence community lost some twenty-three thousand positions during the 1990s, affecting all activities. One result was a tendency to do less competitive analysis and, instead, to allow agencies to focus on certain issues exclusively, which resulted in a sort of analytical triage.
 
CONSUMER-PRODUCER RELATIONS. The distinct line that is drawn between policy and intelligence leads to questions about how intelligence producers and consumers should relate to each other. The issue is the degree of proximity that is desirable.
Two schools of thought have been evident in this debate in the United States. The distance school argued that the intelligence establishment should keep itself separate from the policy makers to avoid the risk of providing intelligence that lacks objectivity and favors or opposes one policy choice over others. Adherents of the distance school also feared that policy makers could interfere with intelligence to receive analysis that supported or opposed specific policies. This group believed that too close a relationship increased the risk of politicized intelligence.
The proximate group argued that too great a distance raised the risk that the intelligence community would be less aware of policy makers’ needs and therefore produce less useful intelligence. This group maintained that proper training and internal reviews could avoid politicization of intelligence.
By the late 1950s to early 1960s the proximate school became the preferred model for U.S. intelligence. But the debate was significant in that it underscored the early and persistent fears about intelligence becoming politicized.
In the late 1990s there were two subtle shifts in the policy-intelligence relationship. The first was a greatly increased emphasis on support to military operations, which some believed gave too much priority to this sector—at a time when threats to national security had seemingly decreased—at the expense of other intelligence consumers. The second was the feeling among some analysts that they were being torn between operational customers and analytical customers.
The apotheosis of the proximate relationship may have come under President George W. Bush (2001- ) who, upon taking office, requested that he receive an intelligence briefing six days a week. DCIs George Tenet and Porter J. Goss (2004-2005) attended these daily briefings, which was unprecedented for a DCI. This greatly increased degree of proximity led some observers to question its possible effects on the DCI’s ability to remain objective about the intelligence being offered. This practice continued under Directors of National Intelligence (DNI) John Negroponte (2005-2007) and Mike McConnell (2007- ).
 
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ANALYSIS AND COLLECTION AND COVERT ACTION. Parallel to the debate about producer-consumer relations, factions have waged a similar debate about the proper relationship between intelligence analysis, on the one hand, and intelligence collection and covert action, on the other.
The issue has centered largely on the structure of the CIA, which includes both analytical and operational components: the Directorate of Intelligence and what had been the Directorate of Operations (DO), which is now called the National Clandestine Service (NCS). The NCS is responsible for both espionage and covert action. Again, distance and proximate schools of thought took form. The distance school argued that analysis and the two operational functions are largely distinct and that housing them together could be risky for the security of human sources and methods and for analysis. Adherents raised concerns about the ability of the DI to provide objective analysis when the DO/NCS is concurrently running a major covert action. Will covert operators exert pressure, either overt or subliminal, to have analysis support the covert action? As an example of such a conflict of interest, such stresses existed between some analytical components of the intelligence community and supporters of the counterrevolutionaries (contras) who were fighting the Sandinista government in Nicaragua in the 1980s. Some analysts questioned whether the contras would ever be victorious, which was seen as unsupportive by some advocates of the contras’ cause.

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