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THE CIA AND THE CULT OF INTELLIGENCE

THREE: The CIA and the Intelligence Community

It is the task of the Director
of Central Intelligence,
utilizing his influence in the
various interdepartmental
mechanisms, to create out of
these diverse components a
truly national estimate, useful to
the national interest and not
just to a particular bureaucratic
preference. This is not
an easy task.
-- HARRY HOWE RANSOM
The Intelligence Establishment

THE CIA is big, very big. Officially, it has authorized manpower
of 16,500, and an authorized budget of $750 million -- and
even those figures are jealously guarded, generally made available
only to Congress. Yet, regardless of its official size and cost,
the agency is far larger and more affluent than these figures indicate.
The CIA itself does not even know how many people work for
it. The 16,500 figure does not reflect the tens of thousands who
serve under contract (mercenaries, agents, consultants, etc.) or
who work for the agency's proprietary companies. * Past efforts to
total up the number of foreign agents have never resulted in precise
figures because of the inordinate secrecy and compartmentalization
practiced by the Clandestine Services. Sloppy record-keepingoften
deliberate on the part of the operators "for security purposes"-
is also a factor. There are one-time agents hired for
specific missions, contract agents who serve for extended periods of
time, and career agents who spend their entire working lives secretly
employed by the CIA. In some instances, contract agents are
retained long after their usefulness has passed, but usually are
known only to the case officers with whom they deal. One of the
Watergate burglars, Eugenio Martinez, was in this category. When
he was caught inside the Watergate on that day in June 1972, he
still was receiving a $100-a-month stipend from the agency for
work apparently unrelated to his covert assignment for the Committee
to Re-Elect the President. The CIA claims to have since
dropped him from the payroll.
A good chunk of the agency's annual operational funds, called
* 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.
The CIA and the Intelligence Community 59
"project money," is wasted in this fashion. Payments to no-longerproductive
agents are justified on several grounds: the need to
maintain secrecy about their operations even though these occurred
years ago; the vague hope that such agents will again prove to be
useful (operators are always reluctant to give up an asset, even a
useless one), and the claim that the agency has a commitment to its
old allies-a phenomenon known in the CIA as "emotional attachment."
It is the last justification that carries the most weight within
the agency. Thus, hundreds-perhaps thousands-of former Cuban,
East European, and other minor clandestine agents are still on
the CIA payroll, at an annual cost to the taxpayers of hundreds
of thousands, if not millions, of dollars a year.
All mercenaries and many field-operations officers used in
CIA paramilitary activities are also contractees and, therefore, are
not reflected in the agency's authorized manpower level. The records
kept on these soldiers of fortune are at best only gross approximations.
In Laos and Vietnam, for example, the Clandestine Services
had a fairly clear idea of how many local tribesmen were in
its pay, but the operators were never quite certain of the total
number of mercenaries they were financing through the agency's
numerous support programs, some of which were fronted for by
the Department of Defense, the Agency for International Development,
and, of course, the CIA proprietary, Air America.
Private individuals under contract to-or in confidential contact
with-the agency for a wide variety of tasks other than soldiering
or spying are also left out of the personnel totals, and complete
records of their employment are not kept in any single place. * In
1967, however, when the CIA's role on American campuses was
under close scrutiny because of the embarrassing National Student
Association revelations, Helms asked his staff to find out just how
many university personnel were under secret contract to the CIA.
After a few days of investigation, senior CIA officers reported
back that they could not find the answer. Helms immediately
ordered a full study of the situation, and after more than a month
* 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.
60 THE CIA AND THE CULT OF INTELLIGENCE
of searching records allover the agency, a report was handed in
to Helms listing hundreds of professors and administrators on over
a hundred campuses. But the staff officers who compiled the report
knew that their work was incomplete. Within weeks, another
campus connection was exposed in the press. The contact was not
on the list that had been compiled for the director.
Just as difficult as adding up the number of agency contractees is
the task of figuring out how many people work for its proprietaries.
CIA headquarters, for instance, has never been able to compute
exactly the number of planes flown by the airlines it owns, and
personnel figures for the proprietaries are similarly imprecise. An
agency holding company, the Pacific Corporation, including Air
America and Air Asia, alone accounts for almost 20,000 people,
more than the entire workforce of the parent CIA. For years this
vast activity was dominated and controlled by one contract agent,
George Doole, who later was elevated to the rank of a career
officer. Even then his operation was supervised, part time, by only
a single senior officer who lamented that he did not know "what
the hell was going on."
Well aware that the agency is two or three times as large as it
appears to be, the CIA's leadership has consistently sought to
downplay its size. During the directorship of Richard Helms, when
the agency had a career-personnel ceiling of 18,000, CIA administrative
officers were careful to hold the employee totals to 200 or
300 people below the authorized complement. Even at the height
of the Vietnam war, while most national-security agencies were
increasing their number of employees, the CIA handled its increased
needs through secret contracts, thus giving a deceptive impression
of personnel leanness. Other bureaucratic gambits were
used in a similar way to keep the agency below the 18,000 ceiling.
Senior officers were often rehired on contract immediately after
they retired and started to draw government pensions. Overseas,
agency wives were often put on contract to perform secretarial
duties.
Just as the personnel figure is deceptive, so does the budget
figure not account for a great part of the CIA's campaign chest. The
agency's proprietaries are often money-making enterprises, and
The CIA and the Intelligence Community 61
Size and Cost of the CIA
(Approximate)
Directorate of Management and Services 5,300
Communications (z,ooo)
Other Support (3,300)
Personnel
Office of the Director 400
Clandestine Services
(Directorate of Operations)
Espionage/ Counterespionage
Covert Action
Directorate of Intelligence
Analysis
Information Processing
Directorate of Science and Technology
Technical Collection
Research and Development
6,000
(4,200)
(1,800)
3,500
(I,ZOO)
(Z,300)
1,300
(1,000)
(300)
16,500*
$ Millions
10
440
(180)
(z60)
110
(70)
(40)
70
(50)
(zo)
lZ0
(50)
(70)
750**
* Nearly 5,000 CIA personnel serve overseas, the majority (60-70 percent)
being members of the Clandestine Services.Of the remainder, most
are communications officers and other operational support personnel.
** Does not include the Director's Special Contingency Fund.
thus provide "free" services to the parent organization. The prime
examples of this phenomenon are the airlines (Air America, Air
Asia, and others) organized under the CIA holding company, the
Pacific Corporation, which have grown bigger than the CIA itself
by conducting as much private business as possible and continually
reinvesting the profits. These companies generate revenues
in the tens of millions of dollars each year, but the figures are
imprecise because detailed accounting of their activities is not
normally required by agency bookkeepers. For all practical purposes,
the proprietaries conduct their own financial affairs with a
minimum of oversight from CIA headquarters. Only when a pro62
THE C I A AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL L I G ENe E
prietary is in need of funds for, say, expansion of its fleet of planes
does it request agency money. Otherwise, it is free to use its profits
in any way it sees fit. In this atmosphere, the proprietaries tend to
take on lives of their own, and several have grown too big and too
independent to be either controlled from or dissolved by headquarters.
Similarly, the CIA's annual budget does not show the Pentagon's
annual contribution to the agency, amounting to hundreds of
millions of dollars, to fund certain major technical espionage programs
and some particularly expensive clandestine activities. For
example, the CIA's Science and Technology Directorate has an
annual budget of only a little more than $100 million, but it
actually spends well over $500 million a year. The difference is
funded largely by the Air Force, which underwrites the national
overhead-reconnaissance effort for the entire U.S. intelligence
community. Moreover, the Clandestine Services waged a "secret"
war in Laos for more than a decade at an annual cost to the government
of approximately $500 million. Yet, the CIA itself financed
less than 10 percent of this amount each year. The bulk of the
expense was paid for by other federal agencies, mostly the Defense
Department but also the Agency for International Development.
Fully aware of these additional sources of revenue, the CIA's
chief of planning and programming reverently observed a few years
ago that the director does not operate a mere multimillion-dollar
agency but actually runs a multibillion-dollar conglomerate-with
virtually no outside oversight.
In terms of financial assets, the CIA is not only more affluent than
its official annual budget reflects, it is one of the few federal
agencies that have no shortage of funds. In fact, the CIA has more
money to spend than it needs. Since its creation in 1947, the
agency has ended almost every fiscal year with a surplus-which
it takes great pains to hide from possible discovery by the Office of
Management and Budget (OMB) or by the congressional oversight
subcommittees. The risk of discovery is not high, however,
since both the OMB and the subcommittees are usually friendly
and indulgent when dealing with the CIA. Yet, each year the
agency's bookkeepers, at the direction of the organization's top
The CIA and the Intelligence Community 63
leadership, transfer the excess funds to the accounts of the CIA's
major components with the understanding that the money will be
kept available if requested by the director's office. This practice of
squirreling away these extra dollars would seem particularly unnecessary
because the agency always has some $50 to $100 mil.
lion on call for unanticipated costs in a special account called the
Director's Contingency Fund.
The Director's Contingency Fund was authorized by a piece of
legislation which is unique in the American system. Under the Central
Intelligence Agency Act of 1949, the Director of Central Intelligence
(DCI) was granted the privilege of expending funds "without
regard to the provisions of law and regulations relating to the
expenditure of Government funds; and for objects of confidential,
extraordinary, or emergency nature, such expenditures to be accounted
for solely on the certificate of the Director. ... " In the
past, the Fund (
DELETED
) But there have been times when the
fund has been used for the highly questionable purpose of paying
expenses incurred by other agencies of the government.
In 1967 Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara promised
Norwegian officials that the U.S. government would provide them
with some new air-defense equipment costing several million
dollars. McNamara subsequently learned the equipment was not
available in the Pentagon's inventories and would have to be specially
purchased for delivery to Norway. He was also informed
that, because of the high cost of the Vietnam war (for which the
Defense Department was then seeking a supplemental appropriation
from Congress), funds to procure the air-defense equipment
were not immediately at hand. Further complications arose from
the fact that the Secretary was then engaged in a disagreement
with some members of Congress over the issue of foreign military
aid. It was therefore decided not to openly request the funds for
the small but potentially sticky commitment to the Norwegians.
Instead, the Pentagon asked the CIA (with White House approval)
64 THE C I A AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL L I G ENe E
to supply the money needed for the purchase of air-defense equipment.
The funds were secretly transferred to the Defense (
DELETED
) That same year President
Johnson traveled to Punta del Este, a posh resort in Uruguay,
for a meeting of the Organization of American States. He entertained
the attending foreign leaders in a lavish manner which he apparently
thought befitted the President of the United States, and he
freely dispensed expensive gifts and souvenirs. In the process, LBJ
greatly exceeded the representational allowance that the State
Department had set aside for the conference. When the department
found itself in the embarrassing position of being unable to cover
the President's bills because of its tight budget (due in part to the
economies LBJ had been demanding of the federal bureaucracy
to help pay for the war in Vietnam), it was reluctant to seek additional
funds from Congress. Representative John Rooney of
Brooklyn, who almost singlehandedly controlled State's appropriations,
had for years been a strong critic of representational funds
(called the "booze allowance") for America's diplomats. Rather
than face Rooney's wrath, State turned to the CIA, and the Director's
Contingency Fund was used to pay for the President's fling at
Punta del Este.
For some reason-perhaps because of the general view in the
CIA that its operations are above the law-the agency has tended
to play fiscal games that other government departments would not
dare engage in. One example concerns the agency's use of its employee
retirement fund, certain agent and contract-personnel escrow
accounts, and the CIA credit union's capital, to play the
stock market. With the approval of the top CIA leadership, a
small group of senior agency officers has for years secretly supervised
the management of these funds and invested them in stocks,
hoping to turn a greater profit than normally would be earned
through the Treasury Department's traditional low-interest but
The CIA and the Intelligence Community 65
safe bank deposits and bond issues. Originally, the investment
group, consisting of CIA economists, accountants, and lawyers,
dealt with an established Boston brokerage house, which made the
final investment decisions. But several years ago the Boston
brokers proved too conservative to suit the agency investors, some
of whom were making fatter profits with their personal portfolios.
The CIA group decided it could do much better by picking its
own stocks, so the brokerage house was reduced to doing only the
actual stock trading (still with a handsome commission, of course).
Within a matter of months the agency investors were earning
bigger profits than ever before. Presumably, the gains were
plowed back into the retirement, escrow, and credit-union funds. *
In 1968, Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, then the chairman
of the Senate joint subcommittee for overseeing the CIA's activities,
privately informed Director Helms that because of increasing
skepticism among certain Senators about the agency operations,
it probably would be a good idea for the CIA to arrange to have
its financial procedures reviewed by an independent authority.
Thus, in Russell's view, potential Senate critics who might be considering
making an issue of the agency's special fiscal privileges
would be undercut in advance. Senator Russell suggested the
names of a few private individuals who might be willing to undertake
such a task on behalf of the CIA. After conferring with his
senior officers, Helms chose to ask Wilfred McNeil, at that time
the president of Grace Shipping Lines (
DELETED
) to serve as the confidential reviewer of the
* 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)?
66 • THE C I A AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL L I G ENe E
agency's budgetary practices. McNeil, a former admiral and once
comptroller for the Defense Department, was thought by Helms
to be ideally suited, politically and otherwise, for the assignment.
McNeil accepted the task and soon came to CIA headquarters
for a full briefing on the agency's most sensitive financial procedures-
including an account of the methods used for purchasing
and laundering currency on the international black market. He
was told of the CIA's new planning, programming, and budgeting
system, modeled after the innovations Robert McNamara had
introduced at the Defense Department. Agency experts explained
to McNeil how funds for new operations were authorized within
the agency. He learned that the agency maintained a sliding-scale
system for the approval of new projects or the periodic renewal of
ongoing ones; that espionage operations costing up to $10,000
could be okayed by operators in the field; and that progressively
more expensive operations necessitated branch, division, and Clandestine
Services chief approval until, finally, operations costing
over $100,000 were authorized personally by the Director. McNeil
also was briefed on the agency's internal auditing system to prevent
field operatives from misusing secret funds.
McNeil's reaction to his long and detailed briefing was to express
surprise at the scope of the CIA's financial system and to
praise the accounting practices used. When asked where and when
he would like to begin his work in depth, he politely demurred
and departed-never to return. A month or so later a CIA officer
working in the Director's office learned that McNeil had had certain
misgivings about the project and had sought the advice of
former agency Director William Raborn, who had his own doubts
about the reliability of the CIA's top career officers. Raborn had
apparently discouraged McNeil from becoming involved in such
a review. But as far as the CIA was concerned, Senator Russell's
request for an independent audit had been carried out, since the
agency's fiscal practices had been looked over by a qualified outsider
and found to be in no need of improvement. The whole matter
was then dropped.
The CIA and the Intelligence Community 67
Organization
The CIA is neatly organized into five distinct parts, a relatively
small office of the Director and four functional directorates, the
largest of which is the Directorate of Operations (known inside
the agency as the Clandestine Services). The executive suite
houses the CIA's only two political appointees, the Director of
Central Intelligence (DCI) and the Deputy Director (DDCI),
and their immediate staffs. Included organizationally, but not
physically, in the Office of the Director are two components that
assist the DCI in his role as head of the U.S. intelligence community.
One is a small group of senior analysts, drawn from the
CIA and the other agencies of the community, which prepares the
"blue books," or National Intelligence Estimates, on such subjects
as Soviet strategic defense capabilities, Chinese long-range missile
developments, and the political outlook for Chile. * The other is
the Intelligence Resources Advisory Committee, a group created
in 1971, which provides staff assistance to the Director in his efforts
to manage and streamline the $6-billion intelligence community.
The Intelligence Resources Advisory Committee, long a dream
of those officers who believe the U.S. intelligence community to
be too big and inefficient, has thus far proven to be something of
a nightmare. Instead of eliminating wasteful and redundant activities
within U.S. intelligence, it has been turned into a vehicle
for the military intelligence agencies to justify and expand their
already overly ambitious collection programs. Likewise, the recent
revamping of the Board of National Estimates, under present
Director William Colby, has been characterized by some experienced
hands as "a sellout" to Pentagon power, caused in part
by the political pressures of Henry Kissinger's National Security
* 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.
Organization of the CIA
Intelligence Resources
Advisory Committee
Operations Office of Office of Office of
Center Current Scientific Electronics
Intelligence Intelligence
USIB Office of
Secretariat Office of Office of Special
Strategic Special Projects
Research Activities
Intelligence
Requirements
Office of
Office of
Service Office of Computer
Economic Research and Services
Research Development
Central
Reference Service Foreign Missiles Office of Basic and Space Activities
and Geographic Center
Foreign
Research
Broadcast
Information
Service Imagery Analysis
Service
Office of
Operations
National
Photographic
Interpretation
Center
National Intelligence
Officers
Covert
Action
Staff
Counterintelligence
(Counterespionage)
Staff
Technical
Services
Division
Foreign
Intelligence
(Espionage)
Staff
Office of
Communications
Planning, Programming,
and Budgeting Stall
Office of
Medical
Services
70 • THE C I A AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL L I G ENe E
Council staff. Under Colby, the board has been greatly reduced
in both prestige and independence, and has been brought under
the stifling influence of military men whose first allegiance is to
their parent services rather than to the production of objective,
balanced intelligence assessments for the policy-makers.
The other components of the Office of the Director include
those traditionally found in governmental bureaucracies: press
officers, congressional liaison, legal counsel, and so on. Only two
merit special note: the Cable Secretariat and the Historical Staff.
The former was established in 1950 at the insistence of the
Director, General Walter Bedell Smith. When Smith, an experienced
military staff officer, learned that agency communications,
especially those between headquarters and the covert field stations
and bases, were controlled by the Clandestine Services, he immediately
demanded a change in the system. "The operators are not
going to decide what secret information I will see or not see," he
is reported to have said. Thus, the Cable Secretariat, or message
center, was put under the Director's immediate authority. Since
then, however, the operators have found other ways, when it is
thought necessary, of keeping their most sensitive communications
from going outside the Clandestine Services.
The Historical Staff represents one of the CIA's more clever
attempts to maintain the secrecy on which the organization
thrives. Several years ago the agency began to invite retiring
officers to spend an additional year or two with the agency-on
contract, at regular pay-writing their official memoirs. The
product of their effort is, of course, highly classified and tightly
restricted. In the agency's eyes, this is far better than having
former officers openly publish what really happened during their
careers with the CIA.
The largest of the agency's four directorates is the Directorate of
Operations, or the Clandestine Services, which has about 6,000
professionals and clericals. The ratio between professionals, mostly
operations officers, and clericals, largely secretaries, is roughly two
to one. Approximately 45 percent of the Clandestine Services personnel
is stationed overseas, the vast majority using official cover
The CIA and the Intelligence Community • 71
-Le., posing as representatives of the State or Defense Department.
About two out of three of the people in the Clandestine
Services are engaged in general intelligence activities-liaison,
espionage, and counterespionage-the remainder concentrating on
various forms of covert action. Yet despite the smaller number of
personnel working on covert action, these interventions in the
internal affairs of other countries cost about half again as much as
spying and counterspying ($260 million v. $180 million annually).
The greater expense for covert action is explained by the high
costs of paying for paramilitary operations and subsidizing political
parties, labor unions, and other international groups.
The Clandestine Services is broken down into fifteen separate
components, but its actual operating patterns do not follow the
neat lines of an organizational chart. Exceptions are the rule.
Certain clandestine activities which would seem to an outsider to
be logically the responsibility of one component are often carried
out by another-because of political sensitivity, because of an
assumed need for even greater secrecy than usual, because of
bureaucratic compartmentalization, or simply because things have
always been done that way.
The bulk of the Clandestine Services' personnel, about 4,800
people, work in the so-oalled area divisions, both at headquarters
and overseas. These divisions correspond roughly to the State
Department's geographic bureaus-a logical breakdown, since
most CIA operators in foreign countries work under State cover.
The largest area division is the Far East (with about 1,500
people), followed in order of descending size by Europe (Western
Europe only), Western Hemisphere (Latin America plus
Canada), Near East, Soviet Bloc (Eastern Europe), and Africa
(with only 300 staff). The chain of command goes from the head
of the Clandestine Services to the chiefs of the area divisions, then
overseas to the chiefs of stations (CaS) and their chiefs of bases
(COB).
The CIA's stations and bases around the world serve as the
principal headquarters of covert activity in the country in which
each is located. The station is usually housed in the U.S. embassy
in the capital city, while bases are in other major cities or some72
THE C I A AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL L I G ENe E
times on American or foreign military bases. For example, in West
Germany, the CIA's largest site for operations, the station is
located in Bonn; the chief of station is on the staff of the American
ambassador. There are subordinate bases in ( DELETED
) and a few other cities, along with several bases under American
military cover scattered throughout the German countryside.
The Domestic Operations Division of Clandestine Services is,
in essence, an area division, but it conducts its mysterious clandestine
activities in the United States, not overseas. Its chief-like the
other area-division chiefs, the civilian equivalent of a two- or threestar
general-works out of an office in downtown Washington,
within two blocks of the White House. Under the Washington
station are bases located in other major American cities.
Also in the Clandestine Services are three staffs, Foreign Intelligence
(espionage), Counterintelligence (counterespionage),
and Covert Action, which oversee operational policy in their respective
specialties and provide assistance to the area divisions and
the field elements. For instance, in an operation to plant a slanted
news story in a Chilean newspaper, propaganda experts on the
Covert Action Staff might devise an article in cooperation with the
Chilean desk of the Western Hemisphere Division. A CIA proprietary,
like ( DELETED ) might
be used to write and transmit the story to Chile so it would
not be directly attributable to the agency, and then a clandestine
operator working out of the American embassy in Santiago might
work through one of his penetration agents in the local press to
ensure that the article is reprinted. While most CIA operations
abroad are carried out through the area divisions, the operational
staffs, particularly the Covert Action Staff, also conduct independent
activities.
The Special Operations Division is something of a hybrid between
the area divisions and the operational staffs. Its main
function is to provide the assets for paramilitary operations, largely
the contracted manpower (mercenaries or military men on loan),
the materiel, and the expertise to get the job done. Its operations,
however, are organizationally under t-he station chief in the country
where they are located.
The CIA and the Intelligence Community 73
The remammg three components of the Clandestine Services
provide technical assistance to the operational components. These
three are: the Missions and Programs Staff, which does much of
the bureaucratic planning and budgeting for the Clandestine
Services and which writes up the justification for covert operations
submitted for approval to the 40 Committee; the Operational
Services Division, which among other things sets up cover arrangements
for clandestine officers; and the Technical Services Division,
which produces in its own laboratories the gimmicks of the spy
trade-the disguises, miniature cameras, tape recorders, secret
writing kits, and the like.
The Directorate of Management and Services (formerly the
Directorate of Support) is the CIA's administrative and housekeeping
part. However, most of its budget and personnel is devoted
to assisting the Clandestine Services in carrying out covert operations.
(This directorate is sometimes referred to within the agency
as the Clandestine Services' "slave" directorate.) Various forms
of support are also provided to the Directorate of Intelligence and
the Directorate of Science and Technology, but the needs of these
two components for anything beyond routine administrative tasks
are generally minimal. Covert operations, however, require a large
support effort, and the M&S Directorate, in addition to providing
normal administrative assistance, contributes in such areas as
communications, logistics, and training.
The M&S Directorate's Office of Finance, for example, maintains
field units in Hong Kong, Beirut, Buenos Aires, and Geneva
with easy access to the international money markets. The Office
of Finance tries to keep a ready inventory of the world's currencies
on hand for future clandestine operations. Many of the purchases
are made in illegal black markets where certain currencies are
available at bargain rates. In some instances, most notably in the
case of the South Vietnamese piaster, black-market purchases of
a single currency amount to millions of dollars 'a year.
The Office of Security provides physical protection for clandestine
installations at home and abroad and conducts polygraph
(lie detector) tests for all CIA employees and contract personnel
74 • THE C I A AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL L I G ENe E
and most foreign agents. The Office of Medical Services heals the
sicknesses and illnesses (both mental and physical) of CIA personnel
by providing "cleared" psychiatrists and physicians to treat
agency officers; analyzes prospective and already recruited agents;
and prepares "psychological profiles" of foreign leaders (and
once, in 1971, at the request of the Watergate "plumbers," did a
"profile" of Daniel Ellsberg). The Office of Logistics operates the
agency's weapons and other warehouses in the United States and
overseas, supplies normal office equipment and household furniture,
as well as the more esoteric clandestine materiel to foreign
stations and bases, and performs other housekeeping chores. The
Office of Communications, employing over 40 percent of the Directorate
of Management and Services's more than 5,000 career
employees, maintains facilities for secret communications between
CIA headquarters and the hundreds of stations and bases overseas.
It also provides the same services, on a reimbursable basis, for the
State Department and most of its embassies and consulates. The
Office of Training operates the agency's training facilities at many
locations around the United States, and a few overseas. (The Office
of Communications, however, runs (
DELETED
) The Office of Personnel handles the recruitment
and record-keeping for the CIA's career personnel.
Support functions are often vital for successful conduct of
covert operations, and a good support officer, like a good supply
sergeant in an army, is indispensable to a CIA station or base.
Once a station chief has found the right support officer, one who
can provide everything from housekeeping to operational support,
the two will often form a professional alliance and stay together as
they move from post to post during their careers. In some instances
the senior support officer may even serve as the de facto secondin-
command because of his close relationship with the chief.
Together, the Clandestine Services and the Directorate for
Management and Services constitute an agency within an agency.
These two components, like the largest and most dangerous part
of an iceberg, float along virtually unseen. Their missions, methods,
and personnel are quite different from those of the CIA's other two
The CIA and the Intelligence Community 75
directorates, which account for only less than a third of the agency's
budget and manpower. Yet the CIA-and particularly former
Director Richard Helms-has tried to convince the American
public that the analysts and technicians of the Directorates for
Intelligence and Science and Technology, the clean white tip of
the CIA iceberg, are the agency's key personnel.
The Directorate of Intelligence, with some 3,500 employees, engages
in two basic activities: first, the production of finished intelligence
reports from the analysis of information (both classified
and unclassified); and second, the performance of certain services
of common concern for the benefit of the whole intelligence community.
Included in the latter category are the agency's various
reference services (e.g., a huge computerized biographical library
of foreign personalities, another on foreign factories, and so
on); the Foreign Broadcasting Information Service (a worldwide
radio and television monitoring system); and the National
Photographic Interpretation Center (an organization, run
in close cooperation with the Pentagon, which analyzes photographs
taken from satellites and spy planes). About two thirds of
the Intelligence Directorate's $70 million annual budget is devoted
to carrying out these services of common concern for the government's
entire national-security bureaucracy. Thus, the State and
Defense departments are spared the expense of maintaining duplicate
facilities, receiving from the CIA finished intelligence in areas
of interest to them. For example, when there is a shift in the Soviet
leadership, or a new Chinese diplomat is posted to Washington,
the Intelligence Directorate routinely sends biographical information
(usually classified "secret") on the personalities involved to
the other government agencies. Similarly, the various State Department
bureaus (along with selected American academicians
and newspapers) regularly receive the agency's unclassified transcripts
of foreign radio and television broadcasts.
Most of the rest of the Intelligence Directorate's assets are
focused on political, economic, and strategic military research. The
agency's specialists produce both current intelligence--reports and
explanations on a daily basis of the world's breaking events76
THE C I A AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL L I G ENe E
and long-range analysis of trends, potential crisis areas, and other
matters of interest to the government's policy-makers. Turning out
current intelligence reports is akin to publishing a newspaper, and,
in fact, the Intelligence Directorate puts out daily and weekly publications
which, except for their high security classifications, are
similar to work done by the American press. These regular intelligence
reports, along with special ones on topics like corruption
in South Vietnam or the prospects for the Soviet wheat crop, are
sent to hundreds of "consumers" in the federal government. The
primary consumer, however, is the President, and he receives every
morning a special publication called the President's Daily Brief. In
the Johnson administration these reports frequently contained, in
addition to the normal intelligence fare, rather scandalous descriptions
of the private lives of certain world leaders, always avidly
read by the President. * The agency found, however, that in the
Nixon administration such items were not appreciated, and the
tone of the daily report was changed. Even so, President Nixon
and Henry Kissinger soon lost interest in reading the publication;
the task was relegated to lower-ranking officials on the National
Security Council staff.
The fourth and newest of the CIA's directorates. Science and
Technology, also employs the smallest number of personnel, about
1,300 people. It carries out functions such as basic research and
development, the operation of spy satellites, and intelligence
analysis in highly technical fields. In addition to these activities,
it also handles the bulk of the agency's electronic data-processing
(computer) work. While the S&T Directorate keeps abreast of and
does research work in a wide variety of scientific fields, its most
important successes have come in developing technical espionage
systems. The precursor of this directorate was instrumental in
the development of the U-2 and SR·71 spy planes. The S&T ex-
* 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.
The CIA and the Intelligence Community • 77
perts have also made several brilliant breakthroughs in the intelligence-
satellite field. In the late 1950s, when Clandestine Services
chief Richard Bissell encouraged the technicians in their development
of America's first photo-reconnaissance satellite, they produced
a model which was still in use as late as 1971. And agency
technicians have continued to make remarkable advances in the
"state of the art." Today spy satellites, capable of producing photographs
from space with less than ( DELETED )
resolution, lead all other collection means as a source of intelligence.
The S&T Directorate has also been a leader in developing
other technical espionage techniques, such as over-the-horizon
radars, "stationary" satellites, and various other electronic information-
gathering devices.
The normal procedure has been for the S&T Directorate, using
both CIA and Pentagon funds, to work on a collection system
through the research-and-development stage. Then, once the system
is perfected, it is turned over to the Defense Department. In
the case of a few particularly esoteric systems, the CIA has kept
operational control, but the agency's S&T budget of about $120
million per year is simply not large enough to support many independent
technical collection systems.
CIA technicians, for example, worked with Lockheed Aircraft
at a secret site in Nevada to develop the A-II, probably the most
potent airborne collection system ever to fly. In February 1964,
before the plane became operational, President Johnson revealed
its existence to the news media, describing it as a long-range Air
Force interceptor. Five months later, at another news conference,
the President disclosed that there was a second version of the aircraft,
which he described as "an advanced strategic reconnaissance
plane for military use, capable of worldwide reconnaissance."
Three years after that, when the A-ll, now the SR-71, was flying
regularly, the program was turned over to the Air Force. (
DELETED
78 THE C I A AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL L I G ENe E
DELETED
)
Any reasonable reviewer of the CIA, after surveying the deployment
of agency funds and personnel and weighing these against
the intelligence gains produced by the various directorates, would
probably come to the same conclusion as did Richard Helms'
temporary replacement as Director, James Schlesinger. On April
5, 1973, Schlesinger admitted to the Senate Armed Forces Committee
that "We have a problem ... we just have too many people.
It turns out to be too many people in the operational areas. These
are the people who in the past served overseas .... Increasing
emphasis is being placed on science and technology, and on intelligence
judgments."
Schlesinger's words-and the fact that he was not a "house
man" from the Clandestine Services-were auguries of hope to
those many critics of the CIA who believe that it is overly preoccupied
with the covert side of intelligence. But Schlesinger lasted
only four months at the agency before he was named Secretary of
Defense, and the changes he effected were generally confined to a
6-percent staff cut and an early-retirement program for certain
superannuated employees. Schlesinger has been succeeded by
William Colby-a man who had a highly successful career as a
clandestine operator specializing in "dirty tricks," and who can
only be expected to maintain the Dulles-Helms policy of concentration
on covert action.
At present the agency uses about two thirds of its funds and its
manpower for covert operations and their support-proportions
that have been held relatively constant for more than ten years.
Thus, out of the agency's career workforce of roughly 16,500
people and yearly budget of about $750 million, 11,000 personnel
and roughly $550 million are earmarked for the Clandestine Services
and those activities of the Directorate of Management and
The CIA and the Intelligence Community 79
Services (formerly the Directorate of Support), such as communications,
logistics, and training, which contribute to covert activities.
Only about 20 percent of the CIA's career employees
(spending less than 10 percent of the budget) work on intelligence
analysis and information processing. There is little reason, at
present, to expect that things will change.
The Intelligence Community
Taken as a whole, U.S. intelligence is no longer made up of a small
glamorous fraternity of adventurous bluebloods-men motivated
by a sense of noblesse oblige who carry out daring undercover
missions. That is the romantic myth without which there would be
few spy novels, but it is not the substance of the modern intelligence
profession. Today the vast majority of those in the spy business
are faceless, desk-bound bureaucrats, far removed from the world
of the secret agent. To be sure, the CIA still strives to keep alive
such techniques as classical espionage and covert action, but its
efforts have been dwarfed by the huge technical collection programs
of other government intelligence organizations--chiefly military
agencies.
In all, there are ten different components of the federal government
which concern themselves with the collection and/or analysis
of foreign intelligence. These ten agencies, complete with their
hundreds of subordinate commands, offices, and staffs, are commonly
referred to as the "intelligence community." Operating
silently in the shadows of the federal government, carefully obscured
from public view and virtually immune to congressional
oversight, the intelligence community every year spends over $6
billion and has a full-time workforce of more than 150,000 people.
The bulk of this money and manpower is devoted to the collection
of information through technical means and the processing and
analysis of that information. The intelligence community amasses
data on all the world's countries, but the primary targets are the
communist nations, especially the Soviet Union and China, and
the most sought-after information concerns their military capabilities
and intentions.
80 THE C I A AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL L iG ENe E
Size and Cost of
U.S. Intelligence Community
(Approximate)
ANNUAL
ORGANIZATION PERSONNEL BUDGET
Central Intelligence Agency 16,500 $750,000,000
National Security Agency* 24,000 $1,200,000,000
Defense Intelligence Agency * 5,000 $200,000,000
Army Intelligence* 35,000 $700,000,000
Naval Intelligence* 15,000 $600,000,000
Air Force Intelligence* 56,000 $2,700,000,000
(Including the National
Reconnaissance Office
State Department
(Bureau of Intelligence
and Research) 350 $8,000,000
Federal Bureau of Investigation
(Internal Security Division) 800 $40,000,000
Atomic Energy Commission 300 $20,000,000
(Division of Intelligence)
Treasury Department 300 $10,000,000
TOTAL 153,250 $6,228,000,000
* Department of Defenseagency
As can be seen, the intelligence community's best-known member,
the CIA, accounts for less than 15 percent of its total funds
and personnel. Despite the agency's comparatively small size, however,
the head of the CIA is not only the number-one man in his
own agency but, as a result of the National Security Act of 1947,
is also the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI)-the titular
chief of the entire intelligence community. However, the community
which the DCI supposedly oversees is made up of fiercely
independent bureaucratic entities with little desire for outside
supervision. All the members except the CIA are parts of much
larger governmental departments, and they look to their parent
The CIA and the Intelligence Community 81
agencies for guidance, not to the DCI. While all participants share
the same profession and general aim of protecting the national
security, the intelligence community has developed into an interlocking,
overlapping maze of organizations, each with its own
goals. In the words of Admiral Rufus Taylor, former head of
Naval Intelligence and former Deputy Director of the CIA, it
most closely resembles a "tribal federation."
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 (lRAC) and the United States
Intelligence Board (USIB). The lRAC'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 DCls 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
* 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
The U.S. Intelligence Community
The Congress
State Department
Bureau of
Intelligence
and Research
Justice Department
FBI
Assistant for
National Security
Affairs
Defense Department
Assistant Secretary
for Intelligence
Treasury Department
Atomic Energy
Commission
Army Intelligence
National
Security
Agency
Central
Security
Services
Defense
Intelligence
Agency
Defense
Map
Agency
Naval Intelligence
Air Force Intelligence
National
Reconnaissance
Office
Office of
Defense
Investigations
Office of
Management and
Budget
Foreign
Intelligence
Advisory Board
Verification
Panel
Director of
Central Intelligence
U.S. Intelligence
Board
15 Interagency
Subcommittees
CIA
Intelligence
Resources
Advisory Committee
84 THE C I A AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL L I G ENe E
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
* 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 CIA and the Intelligence Community 85
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
86 THE C I A AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL L I G ENe E
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 intel-
* 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.
The CIA and the Intelligence Community 87
ligence-"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
88 THE C I A AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL L I G ENe E
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 inteUigence 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,
The CIA and the Intelligence Community 89
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
* 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."
90 THE CIA AND THE CULT OF INTELLIGENCE
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
The CiA and the intelligence Community 91
and develops secure communications for the U.S. governmentat
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 aU the USIB and other inter-agency panels
92 THE C I A AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL L I G ENe E
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."
* 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.
The CIA and the Intelligence Community 93
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-thehorizon
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,
94 THE C I A AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL L I G ENe E
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
The CIA and the Intelligence Community 95
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. How96
• THE C I A AND THE C V L T 0 FIN TEL L I G ENe E
ever, 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 timehonored
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
The CIA and the Intelligence Community 97
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
98 THE C I A AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL L I G ENe E
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 costeffectiveness
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 CommitThe
CIA and the Intelligence Community 99
tee). 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
100 THE CIA AND THE CULT OF INTELLIGENCE
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
* 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.
The CIA and the Intelligence Community 101
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 Deparment 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 militaryoriented
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
102 THE CIA AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL L 1G ENe E
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,
* 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.
The CIA and the Intelligence Community 103
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
I 04 • THE C I A AND THE C U L T 0 FIN TEL L I G ENe E
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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