• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 608 0

should $43.5 billion (or any other figure) buy? Should output be assessed by the number of reports produced? The number of covert actions undertaken? The number of spies recruited? Moreover, the overall number—which does not strike many as a small sum—leads some people to question intelligence community performance. Statements along the lines of “How could they miss that coup (or lose that spy) when they have $43.5 billion?” would ensue. Such sentiments would add little to a meaningful debate about intelligence because these types of questions reveal a lack of appreciation for how intelligence functions. The budget is not neatly divided into specific issues (for example, terrorism or China). Rather, it funds activities (collection, analysis, systems administration, and so on), which are then allocated by senior managers into the areas where they are deemed to be most needed. Moreover, the intelligence community does not have the luxury of concentrating on just a few issues and disregarding the others, or putting them on hold until resources are available or the issues grow critical. The intelligence agencies devote resources to a very large array of issues at any one time. Therefore, the overall budget figure offers virtually no insight into how well intelligence should be able to perform on any given issue or overall.

Finally, just as the budget is Congress’s main means of control over the intelligence community, it is also the locus of Congress’s responsibility for how well intelligence performs. Congress ultimately decides which satellites are built, how many are built, and how many analysts and clandestine officers the intelligence community can afford to have on its payroll. Although this was self-evident, it did not become an issue until after the 2001 terrorist attacks. Some people observed that Congress bore some responsibility for intelligence performance because of the steep decline in resources devoted to intelligence after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Budgets were cut and, according to DCI Tenet, the equivalent of twenty-three thousand positions were lost over the decade of the 1990s, affecting performance and capabilities. This apparently became a controversial issue within the joint inquiry, as some members wanted to take note of this responsibility and others refused. Ultimately, the joint inquiry’s report did not address the issue. Given that the Joint Inquiry was actually a combination of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, some critics felt they had not been forthright in addressing their own responsibilities.

REGULATING THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY. Since the end of World War 11, Congress has passed only two major pieces of intelligence legislation: the National Security Act of 1947 and the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004. Thus. the structure of the intelligence community was remarkably stable throughout the cold war and the immediate post-cold war period. Only as a result of the terrorist attacks and the war in Iraq was there sufficient political impetus to foster major changes. (See chap. 14.) Four presidents have issued extensive EOs on intelligence—Gerald R. Ford in 1976, Jimmy Carter in 1978, Ronald Reagan in 1981, and George W. Bush in 2004.

President George Washington issued the first executive order under his presumed authority, setting a precedent. Each president since also has done so. No specific constitutional power grants a president this authority. The authority to write EOs stems from the president’s obligation, under Article II, Section 3, to “take Care that the laws be faithfully executed.” EOs are legal documents but may not conflict with a law or a judicial decision. Thus, they sometimes tend to operate in areas where there are neither legislation nor judicial decisions. The major advantage of EOs is that they give presidents the flexibility to make changes in the intelligence community to meet changing needs or to reflect their own preferences about how the intelligence community should be managed or its functions limited. The major disadvantages