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THE INVISIBLE GOVERNMENT -- THE DEFENSE INTELLIGENCE AGENCY |
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The Defense Intelligence Agency THE DIA, the newest member of the Invisible Government and the most powerful competitor of the CIA, owes its existence to the post-Sputnik "missile gap" controversy of the late 1950s. As the Soviets demonstrated the range and accuracy of their missiles in a series of spectacular space shots, the Air Force demanded that the United States embark on a massive ICBM program of its own. Almost weekly in the period between 1957 and 1960 the Air Force went before the United States Intelligence Board to argue that the Russians were deploying hundreds of ICBMs and were tipping the military balance of power in their favor. To substantiate the claim, Air Force photo-interpreters introduced scores of pictures taken by the U-2 spy plane, which started to fly over the Soviet Union in 1956. "To the Air Force every flyspeck on film was a missile," a CIA man remarked scornfully. Allen Dulles, relying on the independent interpretation of the photos by the CIA's Research Division, challenged two thirds of the Air Force estimates. USIB's meetings were dominated by long and bitter arguments over the conflicting missile estimates. The situation reflected the perennial problem of interservice rivalry. Each service tended to adopt a self-serving party line and pursue it relentlessly. At budget time each year the Air Force would see endless numbers of Soviet missiles and bombers; the Navy would detect the latest enemy submarines just off the East Coast; and the Army would mechanize a few dozen more Russian divisions. Overwhelmed by the constant bickering, USIB and the civilian leaders of the Pentagon were anxious to find some mechanism for resolving the conflict. They turned the problem over to a Joint Study Group which was set up in 1959 to conduct a sweeping investigation of the intelligence community. The group was composed of military men, active and retired, and career intelligence officials in the State Department, the Defense Department and the White House. It was headed by Lyman Kirkpatrick, then the inspector general of the CIA. A polio victim who was confined to a wheel chair, Kirkpatrick was often spotted overseas, pursuing his many investigations. The Joint Study Group submitted a comprehensive list of recommendations late in 1960. One of the most important called for the creation of the DIA and for the removal of the service intelligence agencies from USIB. The DIA was to serve as the arbiter of the conflicting service estimates and to present its findings to USIB as the final judgment of the Pentagon. The idea appealed strongly to Thomas S. Gates, Jr., the last Secretary of Defense in the Eisenhower Administration. When the Kennedy Administration took office in January, 1961, Gates forcefully urged McNamara to put the recommendation into effect without delay. McNamara was quickly persuaded of the wisdom of Gates' advice. After a thorough study of the missile-gap claims, McNamara concluded that there was no foundation in the argument that the United States was lagging behind the Soviet Union in the production or deployment of ICBMs. The study convinced him of the dangers inherent in the fragmented intelligence operation at the Pentagon. He saw great value in subordinating the service intelligence branches to a centralized agency directly under his supervision. Accordingly, McNamara recommended the speedy creation of the DIA. But Dulles balked at the idea. Despite his many wrangles with the services, Dulles felt it was imperative that they continue to have a voice in the deliberations of the intelligence community. He feared that the creation of the DIA would lead to the elimination of the service intelligence branches from USIB. Then the CIA would be cut off from direct access to the facts and opinions developed by the military men and would be forced to rely on whatever information the DIA saw fit to give it. Dulles was impressed with the service argument, which ran something like this: Yes, the services have been guilty at times of analyzing intelligence from a parochial point of view. But other agencies of the government are no less susceptible to self-serving judgments. The function of USIB is to serve as a forum for all viewpoints -- even extreme viewpoints. Only then can the Director of Central Intelligence, and through him the President, arrive at comprehensive and objective assessments. Dissent should be aired at the highest possible level and not suppressed outside the orbit of presidential observation. If the service intelligence branches were removed from USIB, the DIA would become the sole representative of the government's biggest producer and biggest consumer of intelligence. And the DIA as an agency subordinate to a political appointee -- the Secretary of Defense -- would be more vulnerable to political influences than are the services which have a semi-autonomous status by law. Dulles was particularly worried about the possibility that the DIA would gain a monopoly over aerial reconnaissance. The Defense Department controlled the reconnaissance equipment and Dulles feared that the DIA would be tempted to hoard the photographs produced by the equipment. He was determined to prevent any such thing. During the U-2 era, the CIA had built up a skilled corps of civilian photo-interpreters and they would surely quit if the Pentagon monopolized aerial photographs. Without interpreters, the CIA would have no way to verify Defense Department estimates. At a time when electronic espionage was bulking ever larger, Pentagon control of aerial reconnaissance could result in Pentagon dominance of the entire intelligence community. Dulles expressed his misgivings to McNamara, who responded with assurances that the DIA would be only a coordinating body and that it would not supplant the intelligence branches of the Army, Navy and Air Force. Some of Dulles' advisers suspected that the Pentagon had covert ambitions for the DIA which were being suppressed temporarily for tactical reasons. But Dulles felt McNamara's pledge left no ground for him to oppose the DIA. He went along with the proposal. So did John McCone, then head of the AEC. The DIA was created officially on October 1, 1961. Named as director was Lieutenant General Joseph F. Carroll, who had been the inspector general of the Air Force. Carroll started his career with the FBI and was a leading assistant of J. Edgar Hoover at the time he moved to the Air Force in 1947 to set up its first investigation and counter-intelligence section. CIA men delighted in pointing out that all of Carroll's experience had been as an investigator and that he had no credentials as a foreign or military intelligence analyst. More to the CIA's liking were Carroll's two subordinates, both of whom had served with the CIA: Major General William W. (Buffalo Bill) Quinn, a former West Point football star, who was named deputy director; and Rear Admiral Samuel B. Frankel, a Chinese and Russian-speaking expert on the Communist world, who became the DIA's chief of staff. Both of these men had worked closely with Allen Dulles. Frankel served under him on USIB. Quinn, the G-2 for the Seventh Army in Europe during World War II, acted as personal courier for the information Dulles gathered in Switzerland on Nazi troop movements. (Quinn left the DIA to become the commander of the Seventh Army in November, 1963.) The original charter for the DIA provided that the new agency was to: (1) draw up a consolidated budget for all the intelligence units within the Pentagon; (2) produce all Defense Department estimates for USIB and other elements of the intelligence community; (3) provide representation on USIB in the person of its director; and (4) develop plans for integrating the intelligence schools run by the various services. Although the original list of functions seemed relatively modest, an expansion of the DIA's responsibilities was clearly implied in its authorization by McNamara to provide "overall guidance for the conduct and management" of all duties retained by the individual services. And with the inevitability of Parkinson's Law, the DIA quickly added to its domain. By 1964, when the DIA became fully operational, it had more than 2,500 employees. It had acquired 38,000 feet of Pentagon office space and had submitted a request for a separate $17,000,000 building. It had succeeded in eliminating the separate service intelligence publications and supplanting them with two of its own; and it had launched a Daily Digest, which was viewed by the CIA as duplicatory and competitive to its Own Central Intelligence Bulletin. The DIA had also supplanted the J-2, the intelligence staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, both on USIB and in supplying information to the Chiefs themselves. It had replaced the services in the production of "order of battle" intelligence-estimates of the size and deployment of enemy forces. And it was occasionally providing information directly to the President without funneling it through USIB. The DIA did so on request in 1963 when Kennedy wanted quick intelligence on whether the Guatemalan Army would be able to handle expected Communist riots. By 1964 the DIA's control over military intelligence had expanded to such a degree that the services were reduced to the role of providing technical information on enemy weapons, running the attache system and collecting -- but not analyzing -- raw intelligence. Most significantly, the leaders of the Invisible Government had decided to remove the service intelligence agencies from USIB. Only a veto by President Johnson could prevent the DIA from becoming the sole military voice on the board. Allen Dulles' apprehensions were being realized. "There is, of course, always the possibility," Dulles had observed with monumental understatement, "that two such powerful and well-financed agencies as CIA and DIA will become rivals and competitors." [1]
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