US Intelligence: A Historical Analysis

Various factors like the nature of bureaucratic organizations, unsuccessful diplomacy, lack of military actions, legislators, the uneven structure of the Federal government, advances in technology, backdrops of police surveillance, and policy formation promote organizational problem s in U.S intelligence communities. Intelligence officials and law enforcement experts have made conscious effort in handling terrorist threats before 9/11 attack. Unsuccessful diplomacy and the uneven structure of the Federal government accelerated organizational problems and absence of information sharing among the intelligence agencies. U.S Intelligence strategies have failed to recognize their new enemy and intelligence agencies lacked resources and manpower. U.S Intelligence agencies like CIA, FBI, and National Security Agency have faced organizational crisis from the side of Federal government and bureaucrats, and this organizational crisis contributed failure in their activities.

Intelligence is all the information gathered by a country regarding political issues, both internal and external. Intelligence is collected through spies, special agents, internet data collection, pictures and many other sources.

Throughout Intelligence Community’s history, there has been multiple attempts to input reform measures into various agencies. Often met with pushback, the reform attempts typically fail or are weak in merit. Being unaccepting of reform and showing little adaptation towards newer strategies and technological advancements, the IC was caught unprepared to thwart the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the twin towers and the Pentagon. Some governmental reports, those that have assessed the IC’s actions regarding the devastating attack, have noted that greater cooperative efforts between various agencies may have halted the terrorist attack. The creation of a Homeland Intelligence Organization could be the start of implementation of a reform to bring the IC closer together.

During WWII, the creation of the OSS was a significant improvement in gathering intelligence on foreign spies and enemies of the state. Roosevelt created the OSS with the purpose of uniting the often-divided Army and Navy intelligence gathering services that often concealed information from each other in terms of a quasi-military rivalry in the Armed Forces. More so, the FBI and The United States Department of State had its own separate intelligence service that further divided the nation’s

Dating back to the 1930’s and following the Great Depression, Americans witnessed exponential growth of Federal Government Agencies. Implementation of many of these agencies by President Roosevelt came as a sort of relief to citizens, seemingly. While a growing federal government stifles civil liberties, the constitutional responsibility of the government to provide national defense remains paramount. Governmental expenditures and advancements regarding our military are imperative in maintaining superiority internationally. With this in mind, we have the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Dangers to the country are tireless and continually developing. Local and remote psychological warfare and the growing range of transnational composed wrongdoing syndicates crosswise over the internet, worldwide outskirts, and jurisdictional limits of the United States highlight then proceeded with need to manufacture and manage successful knowledge and data sharing organizations among the government; state, nearby, tribal, and regional (SLTT) governments; and the

For the most part “intelligence norms” are still serving the purposes for which they were designed to fulfill. However, the intelligence community (IC) is not currently post-cold war which is where these norms may have been exactly what was needed in order to protect our national security. The treats that our national security faced during the cold war are not the same as the advanced technological tactics that are threatening our national security today. With the early on perceived intelligence community failures that are still looming such as the Chinese Embassy bombing, 9/11 and weapons of mass destruction (WMD), the transformation of the IC21 process needs to be transparent as a step to reestablish trust with the public.

Over time, intelligence took various shapes and changed its incarnations. For example, during the Cold War, both the United

The history of intelligence in the United States resulted from the Cold War period and also provided intelligence support to the United States military which helped develop policies and procedures of the United States toward other countries. The development of intelligence in the United States has ultimately provided higher security for our citizens.

In September of 1947 the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was realised and hatched, the eventuality of the intelligence reformation in the United States occurring after the Second World War. Less than a year before this date a Joint

After 9/11 we continued even harder than before to watch and listen for terrorist chatter, so much so that our public safety, law enforcement and governmental agencies begin to see the urgent need to formulate a plan for strategy, so that they could deal with terrorisms worldwide. In order to accomplish this, we would need to implement our policymakers’ so that they will be able to help in the planning stages. The Intelligence Community has shifted its resources to join the fight against terrorism. According to Hass (2007) states that our social factors, economic, political, and cultural decisions that was made or fail to make it, what we say or do not say, will create widespread repercussions that will dictate how the CIA, FBI, DHS and other governmental agencies preparing to respond to any type of other terrorist acts.

With the fall of the Soviet Union War in the early-1990s, the Intelligence Community experienced a significant downsizing in the workforce. Through a series on budgets cutes, hiring freezes, and natural attrition the IC shrank in size and experience. Additionally, the body of analytic capital was quickly depleted as the community entered into an era without a major threat to drive intelligence collection, analysis, and reporting. Nearly two decades passed before the American public watched Twin Towers fall on September 11, 2001. Soon after the events of 9/11, the American public and federal government focused its attention on the state of the IC and the 9/11 Commission Report and Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission Report helped shape

There are many different meanings of the term intelligence. Intelligence was not considered a serious subject for study before Sherman Kent wrote a book called "Strategic Intelligence for American World Policy" in 1949. In this book he had explained that this term was used by the intelligence practitioners to refer to as information, meanwhile the organizations use this term to explain the activities that produce this information.

The events of September 11, 2001, once again provoked the need of intelligence and more importantly the need of domestic intelligence. The very thought of domestic intelligence gathering raises red flags and immediately causes disputes and discussions. As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, stated: The governments of free societies charged with fighting a rising tide of terrorism are thus faced with a democratic dilemma: If they do not fight terrorism with the means available to them, they endanger their citizenry; if they do, they appear to endanger the very freedoms which they are charged to protect (Burch 2015).

Setting the context of Military or Governmental Intelligence aside, it is important to grasp that the word Intelligence is a word commonly used to define a mental process. Intelligence is a term, when used on a person, that is complimentary and often implies that the person has a substantial amount of knowledge and knows how to express it in a productive manner. This having been said, it is perhaps simpler to take the words ‘information’ and ‘analysis’ and see how they are associated with the term ‘intelligence’.