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Introduction
INTRODUCTION
See: Directors of Central Intelligence, 1946-2005 [PDF 33KB*]
This office will probably be the greatest cemetery for dead cats in history.
James Forrestal used the above words in a private letter in 1947 to describe his new position as the first US secretary of defense.[1] As secretary of the navy, he had played a major role in designing the new office so it would not be able to wield much power over the military services. Now, thanks to President Harry Truman, he found himself occupying the position and facing the challenge of leading the nation’s federal defense establishment with deliberately limited authority.
Forrestal might just as well have been describing another new position then being created as part of a revised national security structure, that of the director of central intelligence (DCI). This post, originally created early in 1946 by President Truman within his own office, was given statutory basis in 1947 by the same National Security Act that established the office of the secretary of defense. Like the secretary of defense, the director of central intelligence was associated with a collection of already existing organizations. How well either official could make disparate elements work together was in question.
The similarity between the two jobs did not last. Forrestal’s original limited conception of the secretary of defense’s office—“it will be a coordinating, a planning, and an integrating rather than an operating office”—gave way soon to the view that he needed more direct authority and control.[2] In 1949, the Truman administration supported legislation that converted the 1947 act’s “National Military Establishment” into a single executive department, the Department of Defense (DOD), headed unambiguously by the secretary of defense and incorporating all the organizations for which he was responsible.[3] In later years, as DOD incorporated elements responsible for new national defense capabilities (including intelligence organizations), its chief automatically acquired authority over them.
No such strengthening of DCI authority with respect to the various federal foreign intelligence organizations took place. Whereas organizational “unification” of the military services was a major postwar presidential interest and congressional priority, consolidating all federal intelligence units in one department or agency was not.[4] The organizations associated with the DCI acquired no collective name analogous to “national military establishment,” the term “intelligence community” appearing only in the 1950s. The legislative and executive charters that shaped postwar intelligence put as much emphasis on not changing existing efforts as it did on creating new ones.
The DCI commanded the new Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and therefore he exercised decisive control over some aspects of the nation’s intelligence capabilities, most notably the activities of the clandestine service in conducting espionage and covert actions abroad. Over the years, DCIs added to CIA’s capabilities—especially in the areas of all-source analysis and technical collection—and thus expanded their arena of direct control. But other major additions to America’s growing intelligence enterprise during the Cold War grew up outside the DCI’s domain. Because these capabilities—in satellite reconnaissance, signals intelligence, and other fields—dealt heavily with defense matters and contained many military personnel, they were placed in DOD and hence fell naturally more subject to direction from the secretary of defense than from the DCI.
These facts notwithstanding, the DCI from the outset has been associated with expectations that he would be able to integrate the nation’s foreign intelligence efforts. How he has exercised this “community role,” is the story told in this study. The questions that defined the research undertaken for the study were the following: How have the various DCIs through the years viewed and carried out their community role? What expectations regarding that role did they face? What priority did they give it? What specifically did they try to do? And how did their efforts fare?
The issue of the DCI’s community role is not, of course, a new one. But systematic treatment of how that role has evolved over time is surprisingly absent from the now quite large body of literature about intelligence. In doing the research for this study, the author encountered only one specific recommendation that a study of this sort be conducted. Walter Laqueur suggested in a footnote in a book published in 1985 that “a special monograph ought to be written about the attempts made by successive DCIs ‘to provide effective guidance and coordination’ to the entire intelligence community, to quote an internal directive issued by [President John F.] Kennedy to John McCone.”[5]
The story will take up first the roots of the DCI’s community role. It will then proceed chronologically, describing the various approaches that successive DCIs have taken toward fulfilling their responsibilities in this regard. At the end, it will pull together some themes and sum up circumstances as of 2005, when a new official—the director of national intelligence—replaced the DCI.[6] It will not propose recommendations for resolving the mismatch between responsibility and authority that has bedeviled all DCIs. Rather, it will attempt to clarify through historical research some of the issues involved and to provide future commissions and officials with a fuller knowledge base upon which to build recommendations for change.
This study is very much a first effort to sketch an outline of major developments over a lengthy period of time based primarily on CIA files. There no doubt are many sources of information not adequately reflected in it that can add useful new facts and insights to those presented here. Most useful would be perspectives from the vantage points of intelligence agencies other than CIA, various presidents and other senior executive branch officials, and Congress. The author’s hope is that this study will spur additional research into how the Intelligence Community has functioned, including exploration of how it can best operate and be led.
Footnotes:
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Historical Document
Posted: Mar 16, 2007 08:48 AM
Last Updated: Jun 27, 2008 12:26 PM
Last Reviewed: Mar 16, 2007 08:48 AM