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single individual exercises ultimate control over all of them. During testimony about the 2004 intelligence legislation, some of the tension between the DCI and DOD over control of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and NSA was evident. These agencies are, as the names indicate, national intelligence agencies and come under the DNI (or the DCI at the time of the hearings). But NGA and NSA are also DOD agencies and are designated as combat support agencies, thus indicating a degree of control by the secretary of defense as well. The legislation creating the DNI does not clarify this situation. The stovepipes are therefore complete but individual and separate processes.

Intelligence officers also sometimes talk about the “stovepipes within the stovepipes.” Within specific collection disciplines, separate programs and processes likely work somewhat independently of one another and do not have insights into one another’s operations, but they have an aggregate competitive effect that influences a particular INT. This is, in part, the natural result of the compartmentation of various programs for the sake of security, but it further exacerbates the stovepipes issue and makes cross-INT strategies more difficult.

THE OPACITY OF INTELLIGENCE. The U.S. intelligence process seeks to have analysis-driven collection. This is a shorthand way of recognizing that collection priorities should reflect the intelligence needs of those crafting the analysis. It further reflects the expectation, occasionally misplaced, that analysts have received a sense of the priorities from policy makers. In reality, the collection and analytical communities do not operate as closely as some expect. One of the most striking aspects of this is the view held by many analysts, including veteran ones, that the collection system is a black box into which analysts have little insight. Analysts say that they have no real sense of how collection-tasking decisions are made, what gets collected for which reasons, or how they receive their intelligence. To many analysts, the collection process is something of a mystery. This could simply be dismissed as the failure of one professional group to understand the methods of another group. But the divide goes to the heart of collection, often leaving analysts believing that they have no influence on collection and that whatever sources they do get are somewhat random and fortuitous. This view is significant because the intelligence community does spend some time educating analysts about collection, but often with little apparent return on the investment. This perceived opacity of collection also undercuts the goal of having analysis drive collection. It is difficult to know how to task a system that one does not fully understand.

DNI McConnell has taken some steps to improve the collection-analysis liaison. The current most pressing and difficult intelligence issues (Iran, North Korea, Cuba/Venezuela, terrorism, WMD proliferation, counterintelligence) have been assigned to mission managers, at the recommendation of the WMD Commission. These mission managers report to both the deputy DNIs for analysis and collection and are responsible for ensuring that the two aspects of intelligence work together to improve both collection and analysis. This arrangement likely improves coordination at the top but does not solve the problem of too many analysts not having a complete or useful understanding of the collection system.

DENIAL AND DECEPTION. A targeted nation can use knowledge about the collection capabilities of an opponent to avoid collection (known as denial); the target can use the same knowledge to transmit information to a collector. This information can be true or false; if the latter, it is called deception. For example, a nation can display an array of weapons as a means of deterring attack. Such a display may reveal actual capabilities or may be staged to present a false image of strength. A classic example was when the Soviet Union sent its limited number of strategic bombers in large loops