THE REQUIREMENTS FOR INTELLIGENCE AT THE NATIONAL LEVEL

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP85G00105R000100040001-9
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: S
• Document Page Count: 15
• Document Creation Date: November 11, 2016
• Document Release Date: July 21, 1998
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: September 20, 1966
• Content Type: SPEECH

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SUBJECT: The Requirements for Intelligence at the National Level
Date: 20 September 1966
I find in reviewing the record of the last Intelligence Methods Con-
ference that one speaker observed that intelligence officers are
"chronically worried" whether their work is having an impact on policy.
He felt the evidence for his view was obvious: "whenever intelligence
men get together in conference, " he said, "they always arrange to
have at least one and sometimes two speakers on the subject of intelli-
gence and policy making. " And he concluded: "By now everything
that can be said on the subject must certainly have been said! " He was
wrong, of course.
The subject of intelligence and policy is inexhaustible. It is made up
of all the dynamics that interplay as men strive to master the knowledge
they must have to make the decisions they must make. The interaction
of one country's policy objectives upon another's, the influence of person-
ality and style upon leadership, the explosion in knowledge and the rev-
olution in the speed and pervasiveness of worldwide communications--
all these diverse factors and many others influence the intelligence officer
in how he deals with the policy maker, and attempts to meet his needs.
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Yesterday's solutions rarely fit today's problems. And one thing is
certain: there will be a need to discuss how intelligence contributes
to the highest national policy levels at every Intelligence Methods Con-
ference to come.
To serve the needs of those responsible for national policy decision--
this is why Intelligence exists.
This presentation will be in two parts. This morning I would like
to start the discussion by talking about the requirements for intelligence
at the national level from the perspective of the Office of the Deputy
Director for Intelligence in CIA. I will not attempt to speak for the other
organizations that make up the Washington intelligence community, nor
would I suggest that what I'm presenting is the whole picture. I hope
this rather specific approach to the subject will be useful in facilitating
subsequent discussion along specific lines.
When we return after lunch, I propose to speak in even more specific
terms on preparing the intelligence product in ways that are most useful
to the policy makers and responsive to their demands.
To begin my discussion on the requirements for intelligence at the
national level, I think it would be useful to identify who these people are
in the United States. This is not always the simple task it might appear
to be.
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We start with the President, of course. But we must take into
account certain members of his personal staff--full time, part time,
and ad hoc and, in particular, his special assistant handling national
security affairs and his staff. Next come the heads of departments,
in particular State and Defense, the military chiefs, and the heads
of independent agencies dealing with foreign affairs. Then there are
the numerous statutory and ad hoc interagency bodies established for
the purpose of recommending policy. (The Committee of Principals
on Disarmament would be one example.) And at the senior level are
also the regional pro-consuls such as Ambassador Lodge in Vietnam
and Ambassador Bunker in Santo Domingo, who have been delegated
additional authority.
But in the end the buck stops at the President's desk. The President
is the one who has to pass on all important matters involving US relations
with foreign countries. The advent of the nuclear age has greatly
multiplied the number of things he must decide personally to the point
where he has become, in Richard Neustadt's words, "a decision machine. "
His decisions in international affairs are of course shaped by the reports
of many people and institutions but in particular those that I have just
mentioned.
The requirements for intelligence at this national level are partic-
ularly fascinating because they are so kaleidoscopic. They change with
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the men, they change with the times, they change with the bureaucratic
structure, they change with each policy decision. As a result, it is
almost impossible to generalize on the needs of the senior policy maker.
He certainly must be provided with what he thinks he needs to know, if
this is possible. He sometimes must be provided with material that
the intelligence authorities think he should know. Often he must be pro-
vided with material which in the beginning neither the policy maker nor
the intelligence official realized would be needed--this is the material
generated by the interaction between the policy maker and the intelligence
officer as they work together over time.
A good deal of time and thought is spent by the intelligence officer
in trying to figure out just what to send the policy maker and what not to
send him. The more senior the officer the more time and thought that
goes into it.
The most direct way of finding out what the senior policy maker
needs is to ask him. Fortunately, except for one bleak period after
the Bay of Pigs incident, all of the Agency directors have had frequent,
direct access to the President and have not been reluctant to ask him
what he wanted. The Director meets with the Chief Executive in person
or talks with him by phone more often than most people, including
Washington political insiders, realize. To cite some examples, Bedell Smith
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met with President Truman every Friday morning delivering to him
a weekly situation report devoted to communist activities throughout
the world. Allen Dulles met with President Eisenhower every Thursday
morning at the National Security Council session and delivered a brief-
ing on significant current developments. John McCone met every
morning with President Johnson throughout the first few weeks of his
administration to deliver an early morning intelligence brief. I can
assure you that these men never came back from any of these meetings
without some work for us to do generated by the President.
In sum, one way of determining what the President needs is to ask
him or be told by him without asking in the course of frequent, periodic
meetings. But there is of course a limit on access to the President
and the time he has available. Different avenues of approach are
necessary. We are in frequent touch with the other senior policy
makers. They not only have a pretty good idea of their own needs but
also those of the President himself. In addition, communication and
rapport with the President's immediate staff are of great importance.
These men are close to him and in the best position to make his needs
known. These days the staffers usually do this by telephoning the
Director or the Deputy Director for Intelligence. To takeone example,
Mr. Moyers called recently to say he felt that an article on what makes
the Chinese Communist leaders tick would be of particular interest for
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the President at this point.
We are constantly receiving requests for information and analysis
from Mr. Rostow and his staff who handle national security affairs.
In our contact with this group we are particularly fortunate in that
some of our former officers have served or are serving on this staff,
For example, when Mr. Komer received his special assignment tc25X1 X4
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he felt we could
best meet his needs. His response was that he would like a periodic
summary of significant economic and pacification developments in
South Vietnam, important information that tends to get buried in the
welter of military reporting on Vietnam. We now prepare a special
weekly publication tailored especially for him.
Moving from the White House staff to the department heads, the
Agency has an intelligence officer serving in the office of Secretary
of Defense McNamara. He is attuned to the Secretary's needs and
levies many requirements on us for the Secretary. Of course, require-
ments also come directly from Mr. McNamara as the result of frequent
meetings between him and the Director.
Over at State we now have the newest mechanism in operation for
making known the needs of the senior policy maker. It is called the
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Senior Interdepartmental Group (SIG) and is chaired by the Under
Secretary of State, Mr. Ball, with representation at the same level
from the other agencies of government dealing with foreign affairs,
including the Director. The SIG is responsible for insuring that
important foreign policy problems requiring interdepartmental attention
receive full, prompt, and systematic consideration.
There has also been established a series of Interdepartmental
Regional Groups chaired by the Assistant Secretary of State for each
particular region.' Intelligence is represented on each of these groups,
too. The Chairman is responsible for the adequacy of US policy for the
countries in his region and of the plans, programs, resources, and
performance for implementing that policy. These groups usually meet
weekly to thrash out new policy recommendations before they move on
to the Senior Group and then to the Secretary. In essence, the new
system attempts to apply the country team approach of a large American
embassy abroad to regional planning in Washington. In time we expect
to find these groups becoming particularly important in the slower
moving policy problems. (The big, Class A type flaps tend to by-pass
the set institutional framework and generate their own high level task
force directly responsive to the President. )
Moving on from State, there are the several statutory or ad hoc
committees that have been assigned special tasks in the field of foreign
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affairs. Intelligence is represented on many of these bodies. For
example, we have a representative on the Economic Defense Advisory
Committee which deals with US policy in the international economic
arena and on the Advisory Committee on Export Policy which deals
with US trade with individual foreign nations.
Last but by no means least, to discover the needs of the policy
maker there is always the "old boy" net: people we have known, gone
to school with, worked with, played with, fought with, people we are
in constant contact with both on the policy level and in the intelligence
components of State, Defense and elsewhere. To take one good example,
eight years ago at the first Inte lixeAvaMethods Conference
one of our representatives was who delivered a paper
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on "The Guiding of Intelligence Collection". At that time he was a member
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These people know us and we know them. From them we get a
constant stream of suggestions as to the needs of the men above them
and we usually hear quickly when we fail to produce something that meets
those needs - so that we can try again.
So far we have been talking mainly about the needs of the senior
policy maker, how we find out what questions he has, or how we help
him to ask the right question. We have also spoken of the way in which
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these needs are made known through direct question, through partic-
ipation in the interagency boards and committees, and through constant
informal communication.
The question arises how do these so-called national requirements
differ from departmental requirements. To my mind they can be
distinguished in two ways: first, when they involve more than one
department's interests and it is either too difficult or just plain impos-
sible to separate these interests and give them to the departments
having primary responsibility; second, when the policy maker's intelli-
gence needs are so critical that the judgment of more than one department
is desired.
Another way of looking at it would be to say when any of the people or
groups we have been talking about so farasksyou something, you know
it is a national requirement because they are all involved- -either indi-
vidually or collectively - -in assisting the President make national policy,
or in some cases making it for him. It is almost impossible today to
identify a national policy matter that lies solely within the sphere of one
governmental department.
What level of detail is required to supply the policy maker's require-
ments for intelligence? No clear cut answer can be given. In the Cuban
missile crisis one did not have to be a clairvoyant to know the President
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was personally handling all the details of the naval quarantine and
that he personally wanted to know the exact location of every Soviet
merchant ship that might be bound for Cuba. We did not wait to be
asked, we simply sent the information on as fast as we obtained it.
At certain points in the Laotian crisis in the Spring of 1961 it also
became obvious that, in Ambassador Winthrop Brown's words, the
President was the "Laotian desk officer. " And everyone knows how
greedy desk officers are for all the information they can get.
There are some other guidelines. Any time the lives of a country's
nationals, civilian or military, are endangered in foreign countries the
highest level wants to know about it quickly and in as much detail as
possible. Communist kidnapings in Latin America, helicopter shoot-
downs in the Berlin area, or for that matter shootdowns anywhere -
in all these cases the President wants to get the complete word. These
days the President must spend a great deal of time with the Vietnamese
war and in this field we have found that it is wise to err on the side of
giving too much rather than too little.
Beyond these cases where it is obvious that you shoot the works,
there are only rules of thumb. We have come, fortunately or unfortu-
nately, a long way from the good old days of the one-page precis so
favored by General Marshall. If we are specifically asked for some-
thing by a senior policy maker and no length is mentioned, we write as
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much as we think required to do the job - no more. Then we ask some-
one to review it and cut it in half for us. If this cannot be done-or even
if it can - we still put a comprehensive summary up front.
If we have not been asked specifically by the senior policy maker
for something but feel a desperate need to get some information or
analysis across to him, brevity is the over-riding virtue. Conclusions
and judgments are the objective; argumentation can come later. If his
appetite is whetted, if he wants to know more, or if he violently dis-
agrees, we expect to pick up some feedback somewhere along the line
so that we can follow through with more detail if required.
It is here that the role of the regularly scheduled publication -- the
daily or the weekly -- comes into play. By and large we find that such
publications prepared for senior policy makers should take a fairly broad
approach. It is not necessary that they should put forward all the classi-
fied news that is fit to print. Rather, they are designed primarily to
alert the national policy maker to developments across the board in
international affairs which might affect the nation's security, directly
or indirectly. These publications take such soundings at regular intervals.
In the course of preparing them every bit of information that the intelli-
gence officer can get his hands on is reviewed and then put through a very
fine sieve. If the policy maker wants more on a given subject or if the
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intelligence officer thinks the policy maker needs more, a separate
memorandum or paper is written.
There are of course always difficulties in maintaining contact with
the policy maker. One difficulty arises when a senior policy maker is
on the road - how do you get to him in an emergency, how do you keep
up his continuity on his area. We have partly solved this through a
system of briefing cables tailored specifically for the high-level
traveler. They consist in the main of a synopsis of material appearing
in our daily publication supplemented by material in which the traveler
may have a special interest because of the area he is visiting or the
people he is meeting.
Sooner or later, the time seems to come when the demands on the
time of the senior policy maker are just so enormous as to preclude our
getting through to him in any way, shape, or form. In these cases we
can only wait for an opening and hope he may be able to give a quick scan
to our regularly scheduled intelligence publications. In these we note
the things that he really should not let go by even if he is spending 100%
of his time on the Vietnamese war or the Dominican Republic.
Then there is that really crushing occasion when a senior policy
maker or the senior policy maker loses his confidence in intelligence
either because of a monumental gaffe or because the circumstantial
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evidence seems to point that way.
I doubt if I am revealing secrets out of school when I note that this
was the case with the President and the Agency immediately after the
Bay of Pigs tragedy. The primary daily, publication at that time was
the Central Intelligence Bulletin. This had been expressly asked for
by President Truman'. Then it was specially adapted to meet President
Eisenhower's needs, and it had been altered further to meet President
Kennedy's style. President Kennedy relegated it to the dust bin.
For the first time in eleven years contact had been broken. We
were without a daily link or any periodic link with the President in
which to carry out the critical alerting function. We bent every effort
to restore it. Finally we did so through the medium of a new publication
different in style, classification, format and length but not different in
fundamental concept - a device whereby we can present to the President
in the tersest possible form what he should know about the play of the
world for that day, particularly as it impinges on US national security
interests.
There remains one other basic problem involving contact with the
policy maker. That is that the desk level analyst, the fellow at the
heart of the intelligence process, is never going to have all the clues
as to what is making the high-level world go round. He does not sit
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in on the National Security Council sessions. The Director does,but
for various reasons - security or the "need-to-know" problem, the
sheer physical impossibility of spreading the correct word and feel
down far enough -- the analyst is never made fully aware. I submit,
however, that the intelligence analyst is not thereby relieved of his
responsibility to be alert to developments in national policy. The
daily press and the favored columnists are excellent sources. If
the President or the Secretary of State delivers a speech on foreign
policy, that speech is fully reported and should be read. My feeling
is that the percentage of intelligence analysts who read such speeches
is still far from 100%. One hears the argument that the less one knows
about policy, the more objective his analysis is. However, the counter-
argument that you cannot produce intelligence in a vacuum, you cannot
recognize threats to your policy interests unless you know what those
interests are, seems to me over-riding.
These then are some thoughts on the questions of requirements for
intelligence at the national level. Some conclusions that we can state
in brief are these: In large and complex governments, there are no
simple ways to determine the full range of the policy maker's needs
for intelligence. His needs are changing as situations emerge, develop,
and subside. Communication -- free and easy contact in an atmosphere
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of confidence -- is essential to the smooth workings of the intelligence-
policy relationship. Mechanisms can be established to speed the flow
of intelligence up and requirements down, and these mechanisms are
essential. But nothing is so valuable as an effective person-to-person
relationship. In each of our countries, all policy authority and decision
comes to rest ultimately in one man. It is he that intelligence must
serve.
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