HISTORY

The United States government has had to deal with and address these issues in varying degrees throughout its history. In fact, the United States government engaged in intelligence activities from the inception of the republic, but the quality of the capability has varied over time, largely owing to the fact that Americans generally have been suspicious of such European balance of power tactics as espionage. For much of the history of the United States, Americans rejected anything associated with nefarious European politics, and intelligence suffered as a result.

The historical antipathy to intelligence is now part of the political culture and still affects the American psyche. The history of U. S. intelligence can be broken down into three historical periods. The first period spans the nascent years just before the onset of the Revolutionary War in 1776 until the end of the Civil War in 1865 and can best be described as one during which intelligence remained largely in the background, providing services to individual decision makers—particularly to military commanders or specific presidents — who wanted to avail themselves of its services but rejected the notion of having a formal and centralized intelligence establishment. The second period, from 1865 until the end of World War II in 1945, was one of transition, in which the United States, an emerging power in world politics, made piecemeal and largely unsuccessful attempts to establish an ongoing and permanent intelligence capability. The third period, spanning the years 1945 until the present, is the one in which the United States developed a permanent, professional, and civilian intelligence apparatus that took into account American unease with intelligence while bowing to the realities of the modern world, such as the Cold War and the more complicated global environment that followed it.