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By Root 729 0

time, policy makers in both the executive branch and Congress viewed intelligence as a newcomer to national security. Even within the Army and Navy, intelligence developed relatively late and was far from robust until well into the twentieth century. As a result, intelligence did not have long-established patrons in the government, but it did have many rivals with competing departments, particularly the military and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), both of which were not willing to share their sources of information. Furthermore, intelligence did not have well-established traditions or modes of operation and thus was forced to create these during two periods of extreme pressure: World War II and the cold war.

A THREAT-BASED FOREIGN POLICY. With the promulgation of the Monroe Doctrine, the United States assumed a vested interest in the international status quo. This interest became more pronounced after the Spanish-American War in 1898. With the acquisition of a small colonial empire, the United States achieved a satisfactory international position—largely self-sufficient and largely unthreatened. However, the twentieth century saw the repeated rise of powers whose foreign policies were direct threats to the status quo: Kaiserine Germany in World War I, the Axis in World War II, and then the Soviet Union.

Responding to these threats became the mainstay of U.S. national security policy. The threats also gave focus to much of the operational side of U.S. intelligence, from its initial experience in the OSS during World War II to its broader covert actions in the cold war. Intelligence operations were one way in which the United States countered these threats

The terrorism threat in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries fits the same pattern of an opponent who rejects the international status quo and has emerged as an issue for U.S. national security. However, now the enemy is not a nation-state—even when terrorists have the support of nation-states—which makes it more difficult to deal with the problem. The refusal to accept the status quo could be more central to terrorists than it was to nation-states such as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, for whom the international status quo was also anathema. Such countries can, when necessary or convenient, forgo those policies and continue to function. Terrorists, however, cannot accept the status quo without giving up their raison D’être.

THE INFLUENCE OF THE COLD WAR. Historians of intelligence often debate whether the United States would have had a large-scale intelligence capability had there been no cold war. The view here is that the answer is yes. The 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, not the cold war, prompted the initial formation of the U.S. intelligence community.

Even so, the prosecution of the cold war became the major defining factor in the development of most basic forms and practices of the U.S. intelligence community. Until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the cold war was the predominant national security issue, taking up to half of the intelligence budget, according to former director of central intelligence Robert M. Gates (1991-1993). Moreover, the fact that the Soviet Union and its allies were essentially closed targets had a major effect on U.S. intelligence, forcing it to resort to a variety of largely remote technical systems to collect needed information from a distance.

THE GLOBAL SCOPE OF INTELLIGENCE INTERESTS. The cold war quickly shifted from a struggle for predominance in postwar Europe to a global struggle in which virtually any nation or region could be a pawn between the two sides. Although some areas always remained more important than others, none could be written off entirely. Thus, U.S. intelligence began to collect and analyze information about and station intelligence personnel in every region.

A WITTINGLY REUNDANT ANALYTICAL STRUCTURE. Intelligence can be divided into four broad activities: collection, analysis, covert action, and counterintelligence. The United States developed