History of U.S. Intelligence - Research Paper Example

History of U.S. Intelligence Introduction: In every country, be it a super power like America or a small nation of Africa, the responsibilities of providing security to the people living in that country as well to those who have come on a temporary visit to the country are ascribed in the hands of intelligence agencies. It is the intelligence community of any country which has the duty to devise strategies for combating any possibility of war or terrorists’ activities. The United States has the biggest Intelligence Community in the world. Since the United States is the world leader in economic as well as political areas, the Intelligence community of the United States has not only to look into the security matters relating to U.S. only, it also has to work towards ensuring global security. U.S. intelligence community is considered to have one of the most complex set up which has always devised complicated strategies to deal with wars or any other conflicts and terrorists’ attacks. (Richelson, 478) In the United State, intelligence services are provided by 16 government owned intelligence agencies. All these sixteen intelligence agencies form the famous the United States Intelligence Community. All these agencies are ascribed with the duties of conducting several matters related to foreign relations and most importantly working separately as well as jointly to ensure the protection of the national security. For ensuring national security the U.S. Intelligence Community has to conduct a variety of activities. For instance, the agencies that are included in the Intelligence Community have to collect necessary domestic as well as foreign informations, use those informations for producing domestic and foreign intelligence, provide significant contribution to military planning and perform the role of spies to gathers necessary informations regarding the movements and strategies of the enemies of the nation. (Warner and McDodand, 1) To build a good understanding of the United States Intelligence, it is not sufficient enough to look at its present structure and current activities. The Current structure and the span of the activities of the U.S. Intelligence community can best be understood by examining its evolution since the starting of the Second World War. Since the time of the Second World War, the U.S. intelligence system has gone through several dramatic changes. It would be quite interesting to examine how the U.S. Intelligence has evolved into its current structure with the passage of time. If one compares the intelligence system of U.S. during the period of the Second World War with that which exists after the 9/11 and Iraq events, it can easily be found that during this long time period, the intelligence system of U.S. has changed dramatically. But the important point to be considered here is that all of these changes have not come at once. The present structure of the U.S. intelligence system has been obtained through step by step reforms that have been undertaken at different points of time. The major reform measures that are responsible for bringing about dramatic changes in the U.S. intelligence system have been undertaken at three different point of time. The U.S. Intelligence system had changed dramatically for the first time after the Second World War. The second set of dramatic changes had come during the time of Congressional investigation in an effort to improve the intelligence system. And finally, the events of 9/11 and Iraq war are responsible for bringing about another set of changes in the intelligence system the final outcome of which is the present structure of the U.S. Intelligence community which has become more well organized as well as more complicated compared to what it had been prior to the second World War. One of the major feature of the evolution process of the U.S. intelligence system is that over time the intelligence has increasing been adopting more proactive strategies. Without devoting much time in thinking what could have been done to improve security related aspects after the occurrence of certain events, viz. some wars, or some attacks made by terrorists, etc., the intelligence agencies of the U.S. have shown an increasing tendency to devise strategies that would help the nation to protect its national security against any probable event of the future that could harm the nation’s security. (Richelson, 478) The present study makes an attempt to examine how through implementing several reform measures at different points of time the United States Intelligence system have tended towards becoming more proactive instead of intensify its reactive approach. For this purpose, the present paper will examine reform measured that have been under taken after each of the three events mentioned earlier in the paper, i.e. after the second world war, the congressional interventions during 1970s, and finally after the events of 9/11 and Iraq war. Then it will study how reform measures takes at these three different points of time have affected the U.S. Intelligence and how these measures have contributed to making the intelligence system more proactive. Reforms measures under taken during the Second World War and Its effects During the time of the World War II, the U.S. government under the Presidential regime of Henry Truman had felt an urgent need of modernization of the defense set up of the country. Modernization of the defense set up had in turn necessitated a reorganization of the intelligence system of the United States. Every part of the Truman Administration had its own views regarding the ways that could be adopted to modernize the intelligence system of the country so as to make it more effective in protecting national security of the U.S. under the highly uptight international environment. But in most of the cases, officials did not have appropriate insights to assess the newly created capabilities of America in handling the situation. However, Truman Set up a committee for providing recommendations on making the intelligence services of the U.S. more effective in the post war period so that no repeated incidence of Pearl Harbor takes place. While investigating into the flaws of the security system of the country during the time of World War II, it had been found that the communication gap between the military authority and the state Department had been the major reason behind paving the way for Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor. The security system of the United States had suffered from lack of coordination between its different parts. So, at that time the immediate need was to form proper coordination among different departments of the defense system of the country. For this purpose an independent central agency was set up with an aim to synthesizing intelligence of various departments on a national policy level. (George and Kline, 42; Warner and McDodand, 7) The new intelligence system that had a central agency as the apex body possessed the capacity of canalizing information to every required dimension to bridge the gaps between the departments that were responsible for ensuring security of the nation. For example the central; agency took the responsibility for providing relevant information to the people who were in the higher level of administration as well as to the decision makers in the military. The central agency also undertook the responsibility of producing national intelligence with the help of the data that were readily available to the government. The new intelligence system in the aftermath of the World War II was set up in such a way that no single department had the capacity to significantly influence the nature of the national intelligence produced through the joint effort of a bunch of departments. The aim of building this type of intelligence system was to minimize the negative impacts of flaws made by one particular department on the entire intelligence system. (George And Kline, 42) The administration also felt a requirement of furthering the coordination of the intelligence activities through a reorganized Office of strategic services (OSS) for conducting more effective espionage activities. By the end of the year of 1946, some highly efficient members, assets and files belonging to the old OSS were selected in order to form the Office of special Operation as a special branch of the Central intelligence agency. The formation of new office was successful enough in building a network of overseas stations for gathering sufficient amount of information required for making effective defense strategy. The special operation brunch was also quite effective in increasing the level of espionage operations and producing such skill that would be efficient enough of dealing with intelligence system of the enemies. (Warner and McDodand, 7) This newly built national intelligence system became so effective in the context of providing adequate services towards national security that this new intelligence structure of the United States got a permanent base in the areas of intelligence services of the United states. (Warner and McDodand, 7) This national intelligence set up was unique in the sense that it had made a unique combination of two aspects – production of intelligence at executive level and establishing operational coordination of all the departments at one central agency. One thing is very essential to note that this unique set up of national intelligence came into place as a response of the historical events that had little chance to get repeated once again. So this kind of reform strategy can be characterized as reactive one. However, these steps can be considered as the first measures that were taken to modernize the intelligence set up of the nation and it served as a permanent base for the upcoming intelligence services. Major reforms during congressional investigations in 1970s In the early seventies several allegations were made against the national intelligence system of America following the ending of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal that had distracted policymakers at the administrative level as well as the intelligence officials. Congress Appointed a investigating commission to investigate into the wrongdoings of the government administration led by Nixon, the then President of the U.S. Apart from these this, the investigating team was also assigned the task of investigating into the serious allegations that were made against the misconduct of the intelligence officials. The investigation took place in 1973 and its outcome had forced Nixon to resign as the President. However, the most significant studies that were undertaken on the intelligence issues of the Unites states to after the early 1970s misconducts and abuses by the intelligence personnel, were conducted by the two selected congressional committees- Church Committee and the Pike Committee. Both of these two studies are better known as the Congressional investigations. (Warner and McDodand, 29; Jeffreys-Jones, 206) The Church committee made some important recommendation for reforming the operational structure of the American intelligence. Instead of the issues relating to cost and efficiency of the intelligence activity, the reports of the Church Committee put its main focus on the aspects related to powers and accountability of the intelligence activities. The Committee made some suggestions. According to the Committee, the intelligence should be assigned the multiple tasks of data collection, information gathering, along with acting as the instrument of implementing the foreign policy of the United States. In its final report the committee made an attempt to portray all possible secret activities conducted by the intelligence services of U.S. and appreciated the effort of the intelligence system in conducting several efficient espionages, skillful counterintelligence tasks and appropriate collection of domestic information. Hence, although people were demanding a complete ban on all the covert activities of the intelligence, the Committee recommended to retain the capacity of conducting covert activities for making effective reaction to extraordinary threat. The Committee also reaffirmed the necessity of the existence of the intelligence system within the country in spite of recognizing its misdeeds in earlier period. (Warner and McDodand, 29) The Pike Committee’s reports on the other hand completely contradict the outcomes of the Church report. In contrasts to the recommendation of the Church Committee, the Pike Committee proposed ban on all kinds of domestic and foreign covert activities except during war time. Along with this, the committee also recommended a significant change in the functioning of the DCI. The committee suggested separation of the functions of the DCI from all kind of operating as well as analytic intelligence agencies. The DCI was made responsible only for the supervision and control of those intelligence agencies that were engaged in the activities of foreign intelligence. The Committee also suggested placing some restrictions on the functioning of the FBI. (Warner and McDodand, 29; Jeffreys-Jones, 207) All the recommendations made by the two congressional committees took a little longer time to come into effect. The first impact of the recommendations of the committees was on the two houses of the Congress itself. Following the recommendations of the two committees, the two houses set up some committees to look at the intelligence activities. Although these newly created committees initially had limited power, but with time they started to expand their activities and to produce significant effects on the working of the Intelligence Community of the United states. They played a major role in making the Intelligence Community more disciplined and accountable. (Jeffreys-Jones, 207) Reviewing the recommendations of these two congressional committees it can be said that the reform measures that the two committees undertook were more proactive in nature than reactive. Both of the committees realized that if the misdeeds of the intelligence community were left unchecked then, it would provoke the intelligence officials to involve in those covert activities that would be abusive in nature. Hence both committees talked about putting ban on these activities either completely (as recommended by the Pike Committee) or partially (as recommended by the Church Committee). These bans were considered to be helpful in making the intelligence system more accountable in future which would in turn reduce the possibility of any scandalous activities that would hurt the nation’s interest. Reform measures in the aftermath of 9/11 and Iraq events and its effect The third set of dramatic reforms came in the intelligence system after the attack on Pentagon on 9th September, 2001. These events along with Iraq wars had provoked the administration to undertake high level investigations into the security related aspects to find out the possible factors that had allowed these incidents to happen on the land of the super power. A commission, known as the 9/11 Commission was set up to probe into these events. The Committee devoted much time in devising plans that would prevent any further mishap. Without wasting much time on what could have done to prevent the event of the 9/11, the Committee recommended some reform measure to improve the standards of the Intelligence activities to provide the country with the absolute security from terrorists attack in future. The Committee proposed a bunch of dramatic changes in the functioning as well as the structure of the Intelligence Community. Following the recommendations of the Committee, the responsibilities of the DCI were got spitted between the Intelligence Community’s Chief, commonly known as the NID (National Intelligence Director) and the director of the CIA. Following the recommendations of the Commission a special strategic center, known as the National Counter Terrorism Center, was also set up to build strategies that would be helpful in fighting with terrorism. This center takes adequate measure to counter domestic as well as foreign terrorist activities. This simply reflects the country’s proactive stance in respect of combating future terrorists’ attacks. (Warner and McDodand, 37; Posner, 1-2) After the Iraq war some important amendments were taken place in the National security act. Following the amendments, a new type of coordinator was appointed who was given the entire responsibility of the Intelligence Community. Conclusion: Reviewing the dramatic changes that took place in the intelligence system of the United States since the Second worlds War, it becomes quite evident that while in the earlier periods, for example, during the Second World War, reform measures used to be directed towards making reactive stance, over the years the reforms measures have changed its direction towards becoming more proactive in nature. Earlier major aim of the reform measures was to make solid reaction to the past incidences so that no repetition of such incidences occurs, no matter whatever is the probability of the occurrence of such repetition. But over time, the administration of the United States has started to give more importance on making proactive stance by predicting what kind of security threat could emerge in future and by envisaging plans to counter those threats. Works Cited 1. Warner, Michael and McDodand, J. Kenneth. J.K. US Intelligence Reform Since 1947. Washington D.C.: Center for the Study of Intelligence. 2005. 2. Richelson, Jeffrey. The US intelligence community. Westview Press. 2007. 3. Posner, Richard A. Preventing surprise attacks: intelligence reform in the wake of 9/11. Rowman & Littlefield. 2005. 4. Jeffreys-Jones, Rhodri. Cloak and dollar: a history of American secret intelligence. Yale University Press. 2002. 5. George, Roger Z. And Kline, Robert D. Intelligence and the national security strategist: enduring issues and challenges. Rowman & Littlefield, 2005. Read More