Mission Impossible
The inside story of how a band of reformers tried--and failed--to change America's spy agencies
Twice each week, a top-secret report with distinctive red stripes lands on the desks of select policymakers in Washington. Called the "Red Cell," it is the work of a CIA unit by the same name, set up after the 9/11 attacks to think "outside the box." "Some of it is really wacky, even scary," says an insider. "Like bombing Iran." The "Red Cell," in a very real sense, is emblematic of the trouble the U.S. intelligence community finds itself in today. Its reports, in-house critics say, are getting stale. "There's not a lot of young blood," an analyst says, "and there's not enough turnover."
That even the "Red Cell" analysts are having trouble thinking about the new challenges to the United States suggests how hard it will be to change America's much-maligned intelligence community, a $40 billion complex of 14 agencies in six cabinet departments plus the CIA. It is, by far, the largest, most expensive intelligence network in history. Created in 1947, the U.S. intelligence community has grown enormously in terms of bodies and dollars but also in the number and complexity of its responsibilities.
It has also, for many reasons, grown into a mess. "The intelligence community does not exist except as a figment of congressional imagination," confides one of its most senior officials. "We've created the hardest structure you can ever imagine--to understand, to manage, to be effective. We've created an impossible situation." Porter Goss, a CIA veteran who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, agrees: "Nobody in their right mind would create the architecture we have in our intelligence community today. It's a dysfunctional community."
One must go back 30 years to find a time when America's intelligence agencies were under such assault. Back then, America's spy agencies were lumbered with revelations of assassination plots, mind-control experiments, and illegal spying on Americans. Today, the charges are different. If the crisis a generation ago was of accountability, the trouble now centers more on competence. The release last week of the final report by the bipartisan 9/11 commission was just the latest humiliation for the intelligence community (Page 34); that report comes hard on the heels of the Senate Intelligence Committee's July 7 critique of the community's assessments of Iraq's prewar weapons capabilities.
After 9/11, Americans had good reason to assume the nation's intelligence capabilities were being improved. But then came the Iraq war and the subsequent revelations that the CIA's "slam dunk" intelligence on Saddam Hussein's stockpiles of banned weapons was a complete air ball, a casualty of badly forged documents, eager exiles with outlandish stories, and analysis that, in the most charitable sense, could be described as flawed. The Senate Intelligence Committee's 511-page Iraq report documents how on the country's weightiest issue--whether to launch a pre-emptive war--the U.S. intelligence community ended up wrong on virtually every critical point. "In short," laments Sen. Jay Rockefeller, the intelligence panel's ranking Democrat, "we went to war in Iraq based on false claims."
The record of failures, combined with new threats and high-tech challenges, has pushed serious intelligence reform to center stage for the first time in 40 years. In its final report, the 9/11 commission is calling for a major restructuring; many top intelligence officials agree change is overdue.
But it won't be easy. Since 1991, the intelligence community has been the subject of no fewer than 16 federal studies and commissions--many calling for major reform--yet its basic structure has remained essentially unchanged for a half century. Why? The usual Washington reasons: fights over turf and money. In the intelligence game, the big players include a half-dozen powerful congressional commit-tees, a handful of billion-dollar contractors, and the Pentagon, the CIA, the FBI, and a dozen other agencies.
But money and power alone don't explain the failure to improve America's intelligence capabilities. A six-month examination by U.S. News --based on extensive interviews with senior intelligence officials and a review of thousands of pages of internal government memorandums, reports, and other documents--shows why the nation's hydra-headed intelligence network has been so stubbornly, and successfully, resistant to change. The magazine's inquiry identified many of the same problems found by the 9/11 commission and the Senate intelligence panel: chronic shortages of qualified spies, experienced analysts, and fluent linguists, and a system hobbled by overclassification, conflicting security rules, and myopic management.
The magazine's review, however, documented not just technical problems but cultural, structural, and even psychological impediments to change. They are illuminated by a story, never previously told, of the last major effort to reform the nation's intelligence services--and why that effort failed. Technically, the story begins just three years before the 9/11 attacks, but those involved say it really dates back to the early 1990s. At the time, the fall of the Berlin Wall was still fresh in the public mind, but for many intelligence hands the celebration of the victory over communism was short-lived. In search of a peace dividend, Congress slashed the intelligence budget by nearly 20 percent. Some lawmakers, angry at the CIA's exaggeration of Soviet economic strength, even sought to abolish the agency.
By the mid-1990s, cutbacks and controversies like the Aldrich Ames espionage scandal had taken their toll. Plummeting morale and a booming tech market prompted a brain drain of some of the community's best minds. At the same time, cellphones, 24-hour cable-news networks, and the Internet were revolutionizing communications. In the cloistered cubicles of the intelligence agencies, managers were finding their deadlines shorter and their staffs smaller. The threats also seemed to have multiplied, from Serbian ethnic cleansing to North Korea's secret nuclear program.
Two-part job. By 1996, calls for reform were echoing across the Potomac. To better marshal the intelligence community's resources, some in Congress demanded what studies and commissions have repeatedly called for: increasing the power of the DCI, the director of central intelligence. The DCI has always worn two hats: first as CIA chief and second as coordinator, at least on paper, of the entire intelligence community. The problem is that the DCI controls only about 10 percent of the intelligence budget; nearly all the rest is run by the Pentagon, with its military intelligence programs and control of satellites and electronic listening posts.
Unsurprisingly, Pentagon brass argued that a true DCI would shortchange military priorities. Others warned that an intelligence czar, not unlike that proposed last week by the 9/11 panel, would add unneeded bureaucracy or create an unaccountable superspy agency. Confronted by the Pentagon and its powerful allies on Capitol Hill, the reformers backed down. The compromise: Congress created four new positions under the DCI, charged specifically with managing the intelligence community. The new plan gave the four a clear mandate, fancy new titles--and virtually no real authority.
The quartet who took the reigns of the ODCI--the Office of the DCI--are virtually unknown outside Washington's national security circles. But to many inside they are heroes, operatives who were given a true mission impossible--reforming the intelligence community before 9/11.
There was Joan Dempsey, an Arkansas native who had worked in U.S. intelligence since she was an 18-year-old Navy tech listening in on Soviet bomber and submarine traffic. Known as a tough, shrewd professional, Dempsey had risen to be the Pentagon's senior civilian career intelligence officer before joining the CIA as George Tenet's chief of staff. She was, says one colleague, the best "closer" he'd ever seen--someone who knew how to cut deals and get the job done. Dempsey was given the top spot, as deputy director of central intelligence for community management.
Under Dempsey were three veterans of the CIA. Her deputy for administration was a sharp-witted native of Montgomery, Ala. An amateur Egyptologist and 25-year veteran of Army intelligence and the CIA, James Simon had experience in almost every facet of the spy business, from imagery to eavesdropping. Placed in charge of analysis was John Gannon, a widely respected veteran who had run the agency's Directorate of Intelligence and was now chairman of the DCI's National Intelligence Council, which oversaw the community's weighty "estimates" on key issues. Finally, there was Charlie Allen, more of a legend than a man around the CIA. "If you don't think you're getting your money's worth out of the federal government," says an admirer, "you should meet Charlie Allen." A workaholic, Allen had served as an intelligence officer for 40 years and earned a reputation as a plain-spoken professional who regularly bucked the bureaucracy. After warning again and again back in 1990 that Saddam Hussein was about to invade Kuwait, Allen was dismissed as an alarmist and nearly disciplined. Saddam invaded two weeks later; Allen received a CIA Commendation Medal for his trouble. At the ODCI, Allen was put in charge of collection, overseeing the gathering of intelligence by everything from human spies to satellites to remote listening posts.
The nerve center of the new team was the sixth floor of CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. There the ODCI staff, some 200 men and women from a dozen different agencies, spread out across a series of colorless government cubicles. The new managers harbored few illusions. The Office of the DCI was long seen as a backwater in the intelligence community. "You had a certain percentage of people there," said Simon, "who, frankly, had retired in place or were considered to be brain-dead."
Before the team was fully assembled, events interceded. In May 1998, the new nationalist government in New Delhi detonated three nuclear weapons in India's first tests since 1974, a move thought likely to spark a new arms race with Pakistan. Washington learned about the blasts from an Indian press release. White House officials were livid; critics branded it the worst intelligence failure since the inflated estimates of Soviet power. The CIA's new director, Tenet, put on his DCI cap and promised change. "I'm going to take direct charge of how our community collects information, how collection and analysis are lashed together," he told reporters, "to ensure that the kind of event that occurred here will not occur again."
Three months later, al Qaeda's terrorists struck in East Africa, destroying two embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. On December 4, Tenet sent out his now famous memo: "We are at war," he declared. "I want no resources or people spared in this effort, either inside CIA or the community." From her office on the sixth floor, Dempsey dutifully had the memo faxed to the heads of the other major intelligence agencies. The response: nothing. The new ODCI staff was getting its first taste of their limited powers.
Charlie Allen sprung to action. He began sending out "tasking" orders, demanding increased satellite coverage of Afghanistan and more electronic intercepts of al Qaeda's communications. "Charlie tasked the hell out of the collection agencies," says an ODCI staffer, "but Tenet's memo was completely ignored by the leadership." Why? The National Security Agency director at the time, Lt. Gen. Kenneth Minihan, told the 9/11 commission he believed the memo applied only to the CIA. Not so, says the staffer. "They knew they didn't have to respond to the DCI and they didn't . . . . they had lots of taskings so they can pick and choose what they do."
Pushing the Predator. Allen kept at it. "Everyone said this is a job that can't be done," he told U.S. News . "I began to task and to push and to shove." Eventually, things started to happen. "I had to lean on people," he says, sounding more like a Mafia boss than a bureaucrat. Allen convened daily meetings on al Qaeda with key players from across the community--specialists in satellite imagery, electronic intercepts, and covert action. He finally got a satellite moved--no easy task--and had U.S. intelligence charting al Qaeda's camps as never before. Working with the National Security Council's Richard Clarke, Allen pushed a new drone, the Predator, into service in Afghanistan--despite the CIA's reluctance. "It was," he said, "a bloody struggle."
The rest of the new ODCI team was finding it no easier. The problems were so many and so deep it was hard even to know where to begin. The budgetary and personnel systems were archaic and labyrinthine. Individual spy agencies resembled not so much modern corporations as feudal fiefdoms. Communitywide, there was only the most tenuous central authority, widespread duplication of effort, and secrecy bordering on paranoia.
The ODCI's first job, the team decided, was crafting a common vision, a strategic plan that set goals for the entire intelligence community. The fact that one did not exist, insiders say, was itself an indictment of the system. Within a year, the ODCI staff had produced a classified road map. Titled simply "Strategic Intent for the Intelligence Community," the plan was anything but simple. At the heart of the strategy was integrating a dozen disparate agencies into a true community by breaking down the walls that impeded the flow of intelligence.
The walls, however, were everywhere. Not just between agencies but within them, too. At the CIA, the spies of the Operations Directorate distrusted the analysts whose job was to make sense of patterns and look for clues. The FBI's criminal investigators and spy catchers refused to talk to each other. The National Security Agency, the nation's global eavesdropping shop, had so many internal E-mail systems that the director had trouble communicating with his own staff. In the arcane argot of the intelligence world, such divisions are called stovepipes, vertical tubes that send information upward for superiors to mull but seldom across divisions, where it could be checked and added to other data. Reformers spoke of "gorillas in the stovepipes" --program managers who protected their turf from outsiders at all costs. "If you collected it," Simon explained, "you own it."
The more the team looked, the more dismayed they became. Basic questions seemed to have no answers. No one had any idea how many analysts or linguists worked in the intelligence community, what expertise they had, or where they could be reached. Gannon launched a survey, found more than 10,000 analysts spread across a dozen agencies, and began building a database. Nor had anyone done a worldwide survey of U.S. collection efforts. Allen took that on and found a completely disjointed, uncoordinated effort. Among the holes in the collection net: central Iraq. While U.S. intelligence listened in and surveilled Iraq's northern and southern no-fly zones, incredibly, no one in the entire U.S. intelligence community was looking at Baghdad and Saddam's strongholds. When the United Nations weapons inspectors left Iraq, America's intelligence services were virtually blind. On the sixth floor at Langley, Charlie Allen was shocked at how dependent America's spy agencies had become on the U.N. inspectors. "We had," he recalls, "almost nothing."
The lack of basic data on collection meant, among other things, that there was no reliable way to determine which programs were more effective--and more cost efficient--among the different agencies. The intelligence community, Simon believed, was a good five years away from having the tools it needed. In the meantime, he mused, what passed for data were, in effect, "dueling anecdotes."
No inventory control. Perhaps most extraordinary was that analysts across the intelligence community had no idea what was happening to their requests for surveillance. Surprisingly, when analysts ask for raw intelligence on a target overseas--whether through satellite photography or electronic eavesdropping--they rarely know if the collecting agencies, like the NSA, consider the request their top priority or their 25th. They don't know when those agencies might respond, nor even if other analysts have made similar requests. The intelligence community is, in effect, a multibillion-dollar conglomerate with no inventory control.
ICMAP was meant to change all that. Proposed by Dempsey's staff in 1999, ICMAP was a computerized system that would set up an audit trail to look at "tasking" requests and responses throughout the intelligence community. "You could find out what you've forgotten or were not paying attention to," explains one of its backers. "You could find if we weren't watching central Iraq--which we weren't." The directors of the five big agencies-the CIA, the NSA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, and the Pentagon's National Imagery and Mapping Agency--all signed off on ICMAP. And then the fight began. "ICMAP was sabotaged and undercut at every turn," says Simon, one of its founders. The heaviest opposition came from the NSA, say staffers, which feared the program as conceived was intrusive, overly complex, and would force it to rework a labyrinth of expensive, aging databases. "This was a question of will," says a former top intelligence officer and ICMAP supporter. "Somebody should have been shot for blocking this."
Another project that went down to defeat was creating a standard clearance for members of the intelligence community. The ODCI staff's own security badges worked only at CIA and NSA. James Simon had to enter the Pentagon using his reserve officer ID. The patchwork of clearances had helped feed an astounding backlog of people waiting to be cleared. Standardizing clearances would have eased the wait (as long as two years today) while saving millions of dollars. This time the culprit was the CIA. Because Pentagon agencies didn't use polygraph exams in screening job candidates, the CIA's security people nixed the plan.
Dempsey and her three lieutenants continued to push their reforms. But the more they pushed the worse things got. Representatives of other spy agencies failed to come to meetings convened by the ODCI staff. Some questioned their authority to even hold meetings. Others complained to Congress, says a former staffer, claiming the group was threatening the security of their agencies.
One area their detractors didn't mind was ODCI's fundraising. The concept of a unified intelligence community was a big sell on Capitol Hill, and in 1999, after a long drought, Dempsey and her team helped persuade Congress to loosen the purse strings. The team began moving funds to high-priority areas. Language training was key. So was research into open sources, public-record material spy agencies too often ignore. To NSA, the team dispatched funds for research into quantum computing--cutting-edge technology based on subatomic particles--that could revolutionize code-breaking. But once the funds were transferred, the agencies often moved them to other programs, say staffers, and ODCI was un-able to stop it. "CIA was the worst," says a former insider, "but every agency did it."
Among the most glaring problems was how to drive the intelligence community into the computer age. Insular and obsessed with security, much of the community had effectively missed the information and communications revolution of the 1990s. Security concerns prevented employees from bringing cellphones, laptops, and personal digital assistants into the CIA and other agencies. "It's a good thing the telephone was invented before the CIA existed," an analyst joked, "because if it were the other way around, they'd never let it in the building." In a world of networking, the price of such security was high. As the Internet and cellphones transformed how people worked and communicated, and sent productivity soaring in corporate America, many in the intelligence community lacked basic E-mail and Internet access. "We were focused on our navel," says a senior official, "during the biggest revolution since the Gutenberg press."
Despite its image as a gadget-happy, high-tech operation, the CIA was particularly backward. In 1995, electrical engineer Ruth David left Sandia National Laboratories to head the CIA's vaunted Science and Technology Division. She found an agency living in the past. Not only did her desk lack Internet access--so did most of the scientists and engineers who worked for her. "I was astonished," she told U.S. News . "You had a community that had fallen behind the power curve, not just in the use of technology but in how that technology was changing their world."
To help pull the community forward, among the ODCI's first steps was to do for the intelligence community what virtually every top corporation in America had already done--create a position of chief information officer. Remarkably, such a post did not yet exist. No one, in other words, was responsible for figuring out how to get the various agencies to communicate with one another. The ODCI's plan offered a vision of linking the disparate agencies with state-of-the-art tools for networking and shared databases. They began work on improving ICMAIL (pronounced ICE-mail), a clunky, classified E-mail system so unreliable that one top official likened it to "legalized gambling." Attachments could not be sent, and there were no address books. ODCI staffers also helped set up virtual communities, with code names like IranLink and Mexico Pilot, for intelligence analysts working on specific topics.
All these projects encountered fierce opposition from the parent agencies in the intelligence community. "The reward systems are all based on protection," says John Gannon, who played a key role in trying to link up the community's analysts. "You don't come into work saying how can I share better today." The message was clear enough from a study the ODCI staff commissioned, in which virtual teams collaborated at the highest classification levels across seven agencies. The exercise was a resounding flop. An executive summary cited "significant cultural barriers to effective collaboration." In fact, participants were wary of sharing their secrets and blindly distrustful of each other. Worse, they saw few if any benefits from sharing their work product. Gannon was confronted by a member of the CIA executive director's staff, who insisted he explain why it was in the agency's interest to collaborate. "Why can't we do this ourselves?" he demanded. When it came to networking, concluded Gannon, the CIA "was a real dinosaur." It was easier for him to communicate with a CIA station in Azerbaijan than with the Defense Intelligence Agency 17 miles away.
Beaten down by the entrenched bureaucracies and the security police, the ODCI team gave up trying to network the intelligence community. In 2001, Dempsey transferred the position of chief information officer to the CIA, hoping that the agency's clout might make a difference. Her staff was furious and blamed the DCI for failing to support the networking initiative. "Tenet," complained a Dempsey aide, "could have made a difference."
And just where was George Tenet? The ODCI staff was beginning to get the idea that not even their boss was behind them. "There was no top leadership support for us," reflects Gannon, who faults not only Tenet but his predecessors. "The DCI s I worked with cared most about CIA resources that gave them clout in the White House, the Congress, and overseas. They saw little incentive to use even the authority they had to manage the community."
There was ample reason for this. Years as a top Capitol Hill staffer had taught Tenet about the politics of power. Given the inherent lack of authority in the DCI post and the absence of any mandate from the White House to shake things up, it made little sense to pick fights with the rest of the intelligence community. The ODCI staff felt they were left on their own. The result, says Simon, "was death by a thousand cuts."
Tenet takes strong exception to such criticism, and argues that community issues were in fact at the top of his agenda (box, above). But ODCI veterans disagree. The worst of it, they say, was that the CIA, on whose turf they worked, had become their toughest foe. Tenet never backed them on any project the CIA opposed, staffers claim, and by 2001 the list of casualties had grown long: computer networking, clearances, open sources, foreign liaison, and more. "The CIA," Gannon said, "was not much of a community player." They point to the fact that the ODCI's top executive, Dempsey, lacked an office on the seventh floor, where the CIA's other deputy directors worked.
Moving on technology. Despite the opposition, the ODCI team did have some successes. The staff created a Mission Requirements Board, an interagency committee that, for the first time, ensures that future satellites and other key intelligence systems are compatible and wired into the community. On R&D, they set up the community's first joint research effort, the Advanced Research and Development Activity, which now spends up to $100 million annually on cutting-edge technologies deemed vital to intelligence. Among the project areas: using nanotechnology to create microscopic electronic bugs that can penetrate terrorist camps, and development of sophisticated new data-mining software, dubbed Novel Intelligence from Massive Data. Even a scaled-back version of ICMAP is getting funded, says Charlie Allen, who took over the project when James Simon left in early 2003. Allen expects a pilot version next year. All it took, he says wryly, were 23 drafts to get the proposal approved by agency heads.
By last year, Allen was the only survivor of the original ODCI team; the others have moved on to new jobs in national security. For fighting the good fight, Joan Dempsey was given the William Oliver Baker Award in July, an honor shared by four former CIA directors and, in 2002, by Allen. She is still pushing to tear down the walls. At the awards ceremony, she spoke ruefully of an intelligence community that believed "controlling intelligence was more important than using it." It was, she said, "the one constant in every job I've held and, frankly, I believe it is our biggest failing. . . . We simply must find a way to change the paradigm." Exactly who will change that paradigm is unclear. Dempsey's job, as head of community management, remains unfilled a year after her departure.
Well past retirement age, Allen remains at his post, tasking spies, satellites, and electronic eavesdroppers around the globe. "I'm the night watch for central intelligence," he jokes. "It's like housework; you have to keep it up." The problem, say his former colleagues, is that Allen is essentially a one-man show. "Even Charlie can only deal with the top 5 percent of problems," says one. "Who knows what will happen when he goes?"
Why the ODCI team failed to succeed, despite the high-profile talent involved, remains a subject of debate. Porter Goss, the CIA veteran who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, calls the ODCI effort "a brilliant fix that didn't work." But that, says Simon, is precisely because Congress failed to give the team real authority. The ODCI effort failed, Simon argues, because it lacked the two key elements of successful reform in government: control of budget and of personnel. "Congress put us in an untenable situation," he says. "Being clever can only take you so far when you lack resources."
Gannon sees it somewhat differently. "We were transforming, but we weren't transforming fast enough," he says. At an intelligence conference a year before the 9/11 attacks, Gannon warned of the consequences of failure, citing Will Rogers's old advice: "It isn't good enough to be moving in the right direction. If you are not moving fast enough, you can still get run over!"
When Harry Truman signed into law the National Security Act of 1947, creating the CIA, he wanted precisely what the name implied: a central agency for intelligence. Its mission, above all, was to prevent another Pearl Harbor from happening. "The CIA was set up by me for the sole purpose of getting all the available information to the president," Truman wrote. "It was not intended to operate as an international agency engaged in strange activities."
Within months, of course, Truman himself was ordering the CIA to engage in "strange activities," such as staving off a Communist takeover in Italy. Still, the agency's key purpose remained the same. "We've lost sight of Truman's dream," says intelligence scholar Loch Johnson, a University of Georgia professor, "to have the wisdom of all the government before the president. In order to get these managers of the other agencies to send their information, they've got to fear him. And that comes from being able to fund or fire someone." Simon agrees: "As long as the DCI has neither capability," he says, "all this talk is garbage."
Split the job? Most of the reform proposals buzzing about Washington offer some version of a new, improved DCI. Some call for enhancing the position by granting the CIA chief authority over the budgets and personnel of the big collectors, such as the NSA. "It raises all kinds of huge issues," says one retired spy. "If CIA can't do its own job today, how does it also manage 14 other agencies?" Other proposals call for splitting the job--breaking off the DCI from the CIA and giving that person control over money and appointments. Some call this a DNI, a director of national intelligence. Either way, the military is bound to put up another formidable fight, as it has since 1947. Any attempt to wrest control of the Pentagon's spy agencies, says a Senate intelligence committee veteran, "would leave blood all over Capitol Hill."
Fortunately, other, smaller steps can be taken that would markedly improve the performance of U.S. intelligence. They are out there, in black and white, in a dozen federal studies over the past decade. They were the top priorities of the ODCI reformers: improving coordination and tasking, fostering cooperation and data sharing, standardizing security practices, and opening up and networking the community for the information age. But putting those into effect will take leadership--leadership that begins in the White House and Congress, they say. It can be done. Simon and his colleagues point to Wall Street firms, some saddled with conservative cultures and old technology, that successfully yanked their firms into the future; many have formidable security problems of their own--the protection of billions of dollars.
There are some hopeful signs. Allen says he has seen "fairly phenomenal" progress since 9/11 on threat reporting. Intelligence on potential terrorists now flows quickly through the system, he adds. Agencies are finally getting serious about common databases and communications. "I've done more sharing in the last two years than in the last 10," boasts a senior CIA analyst. At the FBI, the "wall" that separated national security investigations from criminal ones is down, and CIA officers now work on most of the FBI's terrorism task forces. The Defense Department's classified SIPRNET system, used by the military and U.S. embassies worldwide, is coming to the CIA soon and should help wire its analysts into a broader world.
No one can be sure if the reforms pushed by the ODCI would have stopped the 9/11 or Iraq intelligence failures. But in both cases, a more open, more accountable, more fully networked intelligence community would surely have stood a better chance. "We did do a lot," says one former staffer, "but we could have done so much more had George backed us, or had we existed in a different structure, or had Congress given a rat's ass." With intelligence reform again on the national agenda, there is one more chance to get it right.
The U.S. Intelligence Community
Fifteen agencies make up the sprawling U.S. intelligence community, ranging from the 300 staffers at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research to the 38,000 people at the eavesdropping National Security Agency. The CIA chief also serves as director of central intelligence and is tasked with leading the community, but the DCI wields little actual influence outside the CIA. Eight of the agencies and most of the budget are run by the Department of Defense; other agencies, like the FBI and Homeland Security, run their own operations.
The Budget Breakdown
Although the precise figure is classified, the U.S. intelligence budget now stands at some $40 billion annually, officials say. Growth has been explosive; the amount has jumped by 50 percent in the past six years. Much of the budget goes to high-tech hardware such as satellites and electronic listening posts.
85 pct. Department of Defense agencies
10 pct. Central Intelligence Agency
5 pct. Other agencies
THE PRESIDENT
NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL
The NSC is the president's principal body for setting and coordinating national-security policy.
Direct authority NSC over DCI and SD
DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE
The DCI runs the CIA, serves as the president's chief intelligence adviser, and is charged with coordinating the entire intelligence community.
Direct Authority DCI over CIA
Central Intelligence Agency
Leader of America's civilian intelligence community, the CIA collects foreign intelligence, runs covert operations, and provides reports and analysis on national-security topics.
Limited authority DCI over FBI, DHS, Treasury, CG, State, Energy, NSA, NGIA, NRO, DIA, and Armed Forces intelligence organizations
Federal Bureau of Investigation
The FBI's National Security Division is responsible for thwarting foreign spies and terrorists within the United States.
Department of Homeland Security
Created in 2003, DHS runs an intelligence unit, the Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection Directorate, charged with analyzing terrorism and other threats inside the United States.
Department of Treasury
Part of the intelligence community since the early 1970s, Treasury works through its Office of Intelligence Support, which collects and analyzes data that affect U.S. fiscal and monetary policy.
Coast Guard
The Coast Guard's intelligence program deals with information tied to safeguarding more than 95,000 miles of U.S. coastlines and other maritime issues. It joined the U.S. intelligence community in 2001.
Department of State
State's Bureau of Intelligence and Research analyzes foreign intelligence drawn from, among other sources, America's diplomatic missions abroad.
Department of Energy
DOE's small intelligence unit analyzes issues related to foreign nuclear weapons, nuclear nonproliferation, and energy security."
Direct authority Sec. Defense over NSA, NGIA, NRO, DIA, and Armed Forces intelligence organizations
Secretary of Defense
The secretary of defense coordinates the military's varied intelligence units. The Defense Department is home to huge agencies that handle spy satellites and electronic eavesdropping.
National Security Agency
The NSA collects and analyzes overseas electronic communications, such as phone calls, and runs the nation's codes and cryptography efforts.
National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
The NGA provides the United States and its allies with imagery and maps drawn from spy satellites, aircraft, and other means.
National Reconnaissance Office
Established in 1960, the NRO builds and operates the nation's spy satellites. Its existence was an official secret until 1992.
Defense Intelligence Agency
Created in 1961, the DIA's more than 7,000 staff provide intelligence on foreign armed forces, weapons systems, and military strategies.
Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps intelligence organizations
Each armed-service branch collects and processes relevant intelligence, focused heavily on tactical military operations.
Oversight Committees
The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence authorize the community's budgets and oversee its operations.
With Kevin Whitelaw and Monica M. Ekman
This story appears in the August 2, 2004 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.