Directors of Central Intelligence
as Leaders of the
U.S. Intelligence Community
1946–2005

Douglas F. Garthoff

Center for the Study of Intelligence
Central Intelligence Agency
Washington, DC 20505

The lessons to America are clear as day. We must not again be caught napping with no adequate national Intelligence organization. The several Federal bureaus should be welded together into one, and that one should be eternally and comprehensively vigilant.

—Arthur Woods,
1919[1]

Whatever he does and however he does it, the Director will be held responsible by the NSC, Congress, and the country for any failure to produce all intelligence pertaining to the national security. If he can do this only by requesting cooperation, the task is hopeless.

—Lawrence Houston,
General Counsel, CIA,
1948[2]

Footnotes:

[1]Woods, police commissioner of New York City, had been involved in law enforcement and intelligence efforts to deal with German espionage and sabotage in the United States during World War I. Thomas J. Tunney and Paul Merrick Hollister, Throttled: The Detection of the German and Anarchist Bomb Plotters in the United States (Boston, MA: Small, Maynard, 1919), ix. Cited in Michael Warner, “The Kaiser Sows Destruction,” Studies in Intelligence 46, no. 1 (2002): 9.

[2]Houston, CIA’s chief lawyer at the time, drafted these words in exasperation after a meeting in which intelligence agency representatives had refused to accept the DCI as anything more than an equal, seeking cooperation.