First, have you ever thought about how many different "Intelligence Agencies" of one form or another exist in the United States? Allow me to list them, and this is not an all-inclusive list:
- Independent agencies
- United States Department of Defense
- Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Agency (AFISRA)
- Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM)
- Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)
- Marine Corps Intelligence
- National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA)
- National Reconnaissance Office (NRO)
- National Security Agency (NSA)
- Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI)
- United States Department of Energy
- United States Department of Homeland Security
- United States Department of Justice
- United States Department of State
- United States Department of the Treasury
I got this list off that authoritative source, Wikipedia, so if the list is not precisely accurate, consider the source for a minute. I just wanted to get the idea across, ok?
Part of the idea of the CENTRAL Intelligence Agency was to CENTRALIZE intelligence reporting in this country. The former Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was reformatted to become the Central Intelligence Group (CIG). The idea was that the CIG was supposed to have "all-source" intelligence access. The other intelligence agencies in existence at that time, most of them military intelligence agencies, did not communicate what they knew with anyone, so an overall intelligence gathering, all-inclusive agency had to be formed and the CIG was formed, actually, the National Security Authority had oversight over the CIG, but if I get into all the different alphabet soup agencies, I am going to lose the few that have managed to stay awake this long. The bottom line is that under the terms of the National Intelligence Act of 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Council were born. The idea was that everyone was supposed to talk to them. They were the clearinghouse for all intelligence in this country.
Time passed and pretty soon, no one talked to the CIA. They were just another intelligence agency and all the other intelligence agencies would not play nice with any of the other intelligence agencies, including the CIA. Informal organizational theory predicts this because every bureaucracy zealously guards its turf. The way they do this is to be unique and separate, and therefore, indispensible. So, they refuse to play well with others. Unfortunately, we had to wait until 9/11 to figure out this was anything other than bureaucratic in-fighting. It took a real problem, with real consequences and real dead people on the ground before we treated it seriously, and I would argue that we applied a bureaucratic fix that will not work either.
Today, in recognition that the exact same thing that occurred after World War II has once again occurred, we formed yet another layer of bureaucracy. I give you the Director of National Intelligence or "Intelligence Czar." Today, the DNI has almost identically the same job as the Director of Central Intelligence, so rather than getting rid of any layer of bureaucracy, we just added another to deal with too many layers of bureaucracy. Is anyone seeing a pattern here? Governmental institutions are immortal and they just keep spawning more and more bureaucracy, at least in intelligence, and I'll bet you that they view the occupants of the White House and The Congress as temporary pains in the butt whom they merely have to placate during their terms in office. And so it goes that nothing ever really changes.
Finally, a little food for thought... The newly appointed Director of Central Intelligence is retired Army Four-Star General David Petraeus. The Director of National Intelligence is retired Air Force Three-Star General James R. Clapper, Jr. The DNI is supposed to supervise and supposedly has authority over the Director of the CIA. How do you think that is going to work out in practice? Hmmmmm.
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