At the end of the war, President Harry S. Truman and his advisors followed American tradition and demobilized the armed forces, including the OSS. Even with the emergence of the USSR as a serious threat and the rapidly changing strategic situation, the Truman administration was slow to recognize the need for the United States to have an intelligence capability. As a stopgap measure, and bowing to the realities of the emerging Cold War, Congress in January 1946 established the National Intelligence Authority (NIA) and the Central Intelligence Group (CIG) to coordinate intelligence, primarily among the feuding military services and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), while the civilians debated the merits of establishing a permanent professional civilian intelligence organization.
A good deal of public and policy opposition to a central civilian organization focused on possible threats to civil liberties and constitutional government. Even President Truman wanted to be certain “that no single unit or agency of the Federal Government would have so much power that we would find ourselves, perhaps inadvertently, slipping in the direction of a police state.” The military also opposed the creation of a central intelligence organization for bureaucratic reasons, fearing some loss of turf, access, authority, and money if strategic military intelligence were to be taken away by a new intelligence-gathering agency. The FBI was opposed, too, because it did not want to lose the foreign intelligence and espionage capabilities in Latin America that it had acquired in the 1930s.
Yet, Congress enacted the National Security Act in August of 1947, setting up the National Security Council (NSC), a coordinating and policy-planning body consisting of the president, vice president, and the secretaries of defense and state. It also established the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to coordinate intelligence analysis so that never again would the government suffer from too many intelligence agencies working at cross-purposes. The act specified the CIA as an independent agency reporting to the president through the NSC to coordinate intelligence activities, provide intelligence analysis to political leaders, and engage in special activities that the National Security Council may direct. The director of central intelligence (DCI), whose position was created in 1946 to coordinate intelligence information, was designated under the act the advisor to the president on intelligence matters. The act also gave the DCI command of the CIA. The CIA’s limited mandate—the act denied the CIA any police, subpoena, law-enforcement powers, or internal security functions—spoke to the concerns of those who feared for American liberties.
The National Security Act of 1947 also created the National Military Authority and the Office of the Secretary of Defense, with little authority over the autonomous military services. A 1949 amendment to the law established the Department of Defense (DOD) and incorporated the services within it. The Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) was also created out of the loose arrangements that existed during World War II and before. The act did not abolish the intelligence units of the army, the Military Intelligence Division (MID), or the navy, the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), or other departmental intelligence services. Instead, the act stipulated each would continue to perform its own more specialized intelligence functions.
The Central Intelligence Agency became the spearhead for intelligence operations during the Cold War. However, given the bureaucratic tensions over the creation of the CIA, it surprised no one that the CIA quickly became enmeshed in bureaucratic fights to expand its authorities into areas not mentioned in the National Security Act and into covert operations designed to thwart Soviet designs in the European theater. As a matter of fact, the late 1940s and the entire decade of the 1950s were later to be known as the CIA’s Golden Age, when the agency engaged in a series of successful covert operations that built its reputation as the “quiet option” available to American presidents for wielding power. For example, the CIA’s operations secured Italy away from the communists in 1948; overthrew Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran in 1953 (Operation Ajax); and ousted the elected government of Alfonso Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954 (Operation Success). U. S. intelligence also managed to get hold of Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev’s secret 1956 speech to the Communist Party Congress, denouncing Stalin’s abuses. In addition, the CIA forecast the launching of the Soviet Sputnik in 1957. However, the CIA failed in many respects to anticipate key developments during this time. For example, it failed to forecast the North Korean invasion of South Korea in 1950; the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC’s) entry into the Korean War; the defeat of the French in Vietnam; the British-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt that led to the Suez Crisis in 1956; and the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956.
Technological innovations in the post-World War II environment prompted new intelligence advances. The National Security Agency (NSA) was established in 1952 to consolidate cryptology (or interception of communications), code making and code breaking (on which cryptology depends), and communications security (COMSEC). Combining all these activities in a single agency meant that the other intelligence agencies would have to depend on the NSA for their needs in these areas. Thus, the NSA became a service agency for the entire U. S. government, in and out of the intelligence community, providing services in encryption, communications interception, and secure communications. The NSA continues to function in this capacity today.
The launching of the Sputnik satellite in 1957 inaugurated the space age and gave U. S. intelligence the incentive to delve into new technological areas. The Sputnik energized U. S. intelligence in the area of aerial and space reconnaissance, especially the satellite program that was already in the works within the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the Department of Defense. Meanwhile, the CIA had contracted and built the U-2 aircraft in the mid-1950s. The CIAhad also begun to develop the CORONA satellite project that would in the 1960s return photographic images in film canisters. The CIA soon established the National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC) to analyze the information gleaned from these new technologies.
The urgency of attaining an operational satellite program increased with the downing of Francis Gary Powers and his U-2 aircraft over the Soviet Union in 1960. In that year, the air force established the Office of Missile and Satellite Systems to direct, supervise, and control satellite development for the military. To facilitate this development, the CIA and the air force signed an agreement in 1961 to establish the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) to oversee and fund research and development for reconnaissance aircraft and their sensors, procure space systems and their associated ground stations, determine launch vehicle requirements, operate spacecraft after they attained orbit, and disseminate the data collected. Because of satellites, overhead reconnaissance rapidly became the principal source of American intelligence. The NRO remained an official state secret until 1994, when the Department of Defense and the CIA acknowledged its existence but refused to declassify anything else about the organization.
A joint study group in 1958 recommended the consolidation of military intelligence agencies within the Office of the Secretary of Defense. However, President John F. Kennedy’s secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, decided to allow the services to retain tactical intelligence and transfer strategic military intelligence to the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), which was established in 1961 as the intelligence arm of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The energetic use of new collection technologies enabled U. S. intelligence agencies to score some impressive successes during the 1960s. For example, U. S. intelligence did forecast the Sino-Soviet split in 1962, the development of the Chinese atomic bomb in 1964, the deployment of new Soviet strategic weapons, the Arab-Israeli War in 1967, and the Soviet antiballistic missile (ABM) system in 1968. However, there is also an equally impressive list of intelligence failures during the 1960s. The Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, intended to oust Fidel Castro from power, turned into a disaster. In quick succession thereafter, U. S. intelligence failed to forecast developments in Vietnam, although intelligence officials were split on various issues, with the CIA assessing the war as unwinnable and the military holding on to the view that sufficient force could conclude the war. American intelligence also failed to foresee the toughness of the Vietnamese guerrillas — the Viet Cong—and the Tet Offensive of 1968, which is generally considered the watershed event that turned the American public against the U. S. political leadership and the conduct of the Vietnam War. U. S. intelligence failed in 1968 to forecast the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.
The decade of the 1970s ushered in an era that weakened U. S. intelligence. Soon after the decade began, American intelligence was mired in defending itself against a public outcry about its illegal activities. Revelations came in quick succession—assassination attempts against Castro, an assassination program in Vietnam (the Phoenix Program), spying on antiwar activists in the United States (COINTELPRO), dirty tricks against civil-rights leaders and liberal politicians, and the overthrow of democratically elected governments. The public as well as political leaders demanded curbs on U. S. intelligence, which were quickly set in place.
In 1974, the Hughes-Ryan Amendment, an amendment to the Intelligence Authorization Act, prohibited the Central Intelligence Agency from engaging in assassinations and initiated the “finding” process. Executive orders during the Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter administrations put additional restrictions on intelligence operations. The U. S. Congress also began a series of hearings in the late 1970s on U. S. intelligence activities, which culminated in the establishment of formal congressional oversight. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) was established in 1977, and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) was established in 1978. Both committees considered and rejected the notion of an intelligence charter for the CIA, but Congress passed the Intelligence Oversight Act of 1980, which put in place, for the first time, a process for the approval of covert action by the U. S. Congress.
Despite preoccupation with survival, intelligence agencies forecast the India-Pakistan War of 1971; the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974; and the Chinese invasion of Vietnam in 1978. However, they failed to foresee the Arab-Israeli war in 1973; the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979; and the fall of the Iranian shah in 1979.
In 1981, President Ronald Reagan issued Executive Order 12333, which still is the legal instrument governing U. S. intelligence activities. President Reagan’s order described the agencies of the U. S. intelligence community and their activities, set in place oversight mechanisms in both the executive and legislative branches, and extended the prohibition of assassination to the rest of the U. S. government.
Stringent congressional and executive branch oversight did not inhibit U. S. intelligence from becoming embroiled in the Contra War in Nicaragua and the Iran-Contra Affair in the mid-1980s. These developments gave further credence to those who believed that U. S. intelligence could not refrain from illegal activities despite statutory safeguards.
U. S. intelligence agencies were in no position in the late 1980s to accurately forecast the breakup of the USSR and the fall of communism. On the one hand, there is substantial evidence that agencies like the DIA and CIA did produce finished intelligence that marked the slow but steady deterioration of the Soviet system. On the other hand, the media has long claimed that U. S. intelligence agencies failed to call the Soviet breakup. Preoccupation with Soviet developments probably accounted for the failure of the U. S. intelligence community to anticipate Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990.
The end of the Cold War in the early 1990s brought a call to downsize the national security apparatus in the U. S. government, including the intelligence agencies. Anticipating the “peace dividend,” each of the agencies began programs of reducing staff and activities, such that by the mid-1990s staffing numbers were at levels not seen since the early 1970s. At the same time, a process of “openness” ushered in a period of public debate and discussion about intelligence and its role in the American society.
Rapid technological advancements, especially in information technologies, also contributed to organizational innovations in the 1990s. Yet, the American intelligence establishment did not forecast the intertribal conflict in Somalia that led to the killing of American peacekeepers in 1993, and it performed poorly in Bosnia and Kosovo. It even missed the Indian nuclear tests in 1998. Because of widespread perceptions of a steady deterioration of U. S. intelligence capabilities, the administration of President William J. Clinton reversed itself and began making substantial investments in intelligence capabilities. By the end of the 1990s, U. S. intelligence was making a comeback from the sloth into which it had sunk in the early parts of the decade. The 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks propelled U. S. intelligence into the forefront of the national fight against terrorists and thrust the U. S. intelligence community into the center of American national security policy.
Despite its prominence in the national security front, U. S. intelligence came under intense scrutiny for its failure to anticipate the 9/11 terrorist attacks. First, a congressional joint intelligence inquiry in 2002 found America’s intelligence agencies to have performed poorly in collecting and analyzing terrorism information and criticized the loose management of the intelligence community. The independent national commission investigating the terrorist attacks, established in 2003, came to similar conclusions, focusing on the lack of centralized direction and control as the key ingredient in making for the 9/11 intelligence failure. Subsequently, Congress passed the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, which established the position of the director of national intelligence (DNI) and provided for various fusion centers as palliatives for the historic drawbacks of the American intelligence community.
World History
