Since the revolutionary war, intelligence gathering was
an art that was not largely practiced. At the time of the Revolution, there was
no such thing as the "intelligence community" of today; there was not
even an organization solely dedicated to collect intelligence not in the
conventional sense anyway. Spying was largely a freelance business. Paul
Revere's ride in April 1775 alerting colonists to a British attack from Boston
is a classic example of warning intelligence, back then it was a personal initiative.
For the most part, generals ran spies directly as part of their scout services.
This was the relationship between British General Henry Clinton and his agent
Major John André, as well as that of George Washington with spies John Honeyman
and Joshua Merserau, and scouts like Knowlton's Rangers. Nathan Hale, possibly
the best known revolutionary war spy, was a volunteer from that unit. This type of approach continued through the
Civil War, which saw the beginnings of a distinct intelligence mission.
In 1861–1862 contracting a private security firm was the
only way that General George S. McClellan could procure intelligence and
counterespionage reports. So he depended heavily upon Allan Pinkerton's
organization, the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, Many of the Pinkerton
reports exaggerated the Confederates
strength, and McClellan's successors terminated the Pinkerton
connection, but spying nevertheless became much more systematic. On the
Confederate side, no formal arrangements for spying existed, but they also used
agents quite often used. Scholars of that period have identified more than
4,200 persons who functioned as spies, informants, guides, scouts, and so on.
It is alleged that President Abraham Lincoln's assassin, John Wilkes Booth,
certainly a Confederate sympathizer, may have been a southern agent as well.
After the Civil War the U.S. military began to collect
information on foreign militaries more systematically. In 1866 the Assistant
Secretary of the Navy Gustavus Fox went to Russia on an official information
gathering mission. In 1882 the Office of Naval Intelligence became the first
official U.S. intelligence agency. The army created an information office in
1885 that became the Military Intelligence Division in 1918. World War I stimulated
growth of both units, as well as the Cipher Bureau within the State Department
on 17 June 1917. The latter contained a code-breaking unit that achieved
notoriety revealed in the 1930s for unraveling Japanese instructions to their
diplomats at the Washington Naval Conference of 1921–1922, an early
illustration of the utility of intelligence. The code-breaking unit was
abolished in 1929, but State continued to play a coordinating role among U.S.
agencies in the field right through World War II.
The need for coordination grew when President Franklin D.
Roosevelt ordered the Federal Bureau of Investigation, previously entirely
involved in crime solving, to carry out counterespionage activities in Latin
America. Roosevelt also created a propaganda organization with
quasi-intelligence functions, the Office of Coordination of Information, in
1941. This soon evolved into a true intelligence organization, the Office of
Strategic Services (OSS), with propaganda left to the Office of War
Information. The OSS developed both analytical and operational sides, greatly
benefiting from the pillars of intelligence developed during the war. When the
OSS was abolished in 1945, its espionage and counter-espionage elements went to
the War Department, while its analytical unit was absorbed by the State
Department, eventually becoming the Bureau of Intelligence and Research that
exists today. The other former OSS elements, meanwhile, had a difficult time
within the War Department, where OSS counterespionage was seen to be in
competition with the army's Counterintelligence Corps, and its espionage nets
as having little to contribute.
A far cry from the dreams of former OSS chief General
William J. Donovan for a peacetime permanent intelligence service, the postwar
situation resulted from decisions by President Harry S. Truman, who was
concerned primarily with ending the ravages of war, and not especially fond of
Donovan or his ideas. With a growing Cold War in 1946 and later, Truman worried
more about intelligence. He approved formation of the National Intelligence
Authority in January 1946, under which the former clandestine units from OSS
were gathered with the Central Intelligence Group. This order also created the
post of director of central intelligence. But the National Intelligence
Authority proved to be moribund, and the Central Intelligence Group, of very
limited utility, was stymied by the departments of government in competition
with it. In 1947, as part of the National Security Act (Public Law 80-253),
which also established the Department of Defense and National Security Council,
the Central Intelligence Agency became the legally authorized U.S. foreign
intelligence organization. As Truman described his intentions to an aide
several years later, he had wanted a unit to take the intelligence flowing to
him from "200 different sources" and boil it down to make
presentations—exactly the kind of activity at the heart of the intelligence
cycle described at the outset of this narrative. Functions of the National
Intelligence Authority were taken over by the National Security Council (NSC)
while the CIA absorbed the Central Intelligence Group.
For several years the CIA grew slowly and gradually
acquired missions. Covert operations and political action were added to the
agency's basic analytical and espionage functions with the formation of the
Office of Policy Coordination by NSC directive in 1948. A 1949 review by a
panel of outside consultants found flaws in CIA operations and led to covert
action and espionage both being merged in the Directorate of Operations (called
the Directorate of Plans until 1973). Agency work interpreting photography led
to formation of the National Photographic Interpretation Center in 1953, which
the CIA ran on behalf of the entire intelligence community until the 1995
creation of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency. The need for development
of machine spies obliged the director of central intelligence to conduct
certain research programs, such as U-2, SR-71, and CORONA development, directly
out of his own office, but this became formalized in 1962 with creation of the
Directorate of Science and Technology (called Directorate of Research until
1964). The Directorate of Administration is responsible for support, security,
data processing, recruitment, printing, finance, logistics, training, and other
functions.
Reference: The NCIX and the National Counterintelligence
Mission: What has Worked, What has not, and why?
http://www.pnsr.org/data/images/michelle.pdf
Reference: Evolution of u.s. intelligence - Intelligence
and Counterintelligence
http://www.americanforeignrelations.com/E-N/Intelligence-and-Counterintelligence-Evolution-of-u-s-intelligence.html#ixzz1vpky4coH
Reference: National Counterintelligence Strategy Of The
United States
http://www.ncix.gov/publications/policy/FinalCIStrategyforWebMarch21.pdf
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