THE LAW AND CUSTOM OF THE NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE ESTIMATE

• Document Type: FOIA
• Collection: FOIA Collection
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): 06046432
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: U
• Document Page Count: 185
• Document Creation Date: December 28, 2022
• Document Release Date: August 9, 2018
• Case Number: F-2013-02252
• Publication Date: February 1, 1976

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Cuntrollcd by CT A R-intnry Staff and DDA
THE DCI MISCELLANEOUS STUDIES
MS-12
THE LAW AND CUSTOM OF THE
NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE ESTIMATE
by
Sherman Kent
February 1976
Copies:
#1 - CIA/HS
2 - CIA/HS
3 - OTR
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An Introductory Note
This essay's present form owes much to the acci-
dents of its life.
It was begun in the summer of 1965 to serve the
purposes of a momentary crisis. As I started to dic-
tate a hasty first draft I had in mind a paper of a
dozen pages. The very act of composition revealed a
much more complicated subject matter than I had orig-
inally contemplated and
draft grew to more than
crisis would have to be
even in dictating, the short
twenty pages. Clearly the
served by some less cumbersome
method. It was. But with the crisis now met, what
to do about the now fairly substantial but still far
from complete memo. I hesitated to junk the whole en-
terprise, so I took a familiar tack--I passed copies
to two revered colleagues, Abbot Smith and Ludwell
Montague, who were well-established aficionados of the
constitutional law and custom of the NIEs,
for their comments.
In due course from them and others I received
enough comment to indicate that I had taken on a much
bigger job than I could accomplish while carrying my
regular duties. So I put the manuscript, my notes, my
and asked
ft
,
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critics' suggestions into the deep-freeze for the dura-
tion of my active duty in the Agency and for several
years of my retirement.
Last year (1974) I resuscitated the project.
One of the things which moved me, beyond the natural
desire to wind up a piece of unfinished business, was
the realization that the Agency's very considerable
history program was drawing to a close with compara-
tively little written about either the Office of Na-
tional Estimates or the NIEs which had absorbed its
attention. Perhaps by slightly changing the tight
legalistic frame of reference of my original plan I
could give my essay a bit more of the juice of discur-
sive and analytical history. This is what I have tried
to do.*
In terms of chronology the essay deals most fully
with �the years which coincide with my association with
the Office of National Estimates (November 1950 to
31 December 1967). I have made no systematic effort to
cover developments that occurred between the time of
I have consigned to the historical document file
a folder of papers which will serve the purposes of some-
one in search of some of my primary sources. It bears
the designation HS/HC #884.
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my departure and the end of the office six years later
(1 November 1973).
In all enterprises of this sort one collects a
very large burden of indebtedness to old friends and as-
sociates. To
Paul Borel, Keith Clark,
James Cooley, Charles Cremeans, Harold Ford, John Huizenga,
Lawrence Houston, Wayne Jackson, Ludwell Montague, Abbot
Smith and Karl Weber my heartfelt thanks for reading,
criticising, and amending some or all of the manuscript,
or making written contributions to it sight unseen.
To Bernard Drell and Walter Elder, successive
chiefs of the History Staff and their
editor-in-chief, all thanks for their careful reading
of earlier drafts. The present text owes much to their
editorial talent and their own ability to recall the past.
Working here (in the Key Building) as a consultant
to the Agency's history project I have had access to the
magnificently filed and indexed collection put together
by the genius of
and his successor
With this sort of research tool at hand, difficult jobs
have been easy and even impossible ones, manageable. To
them and to
my admiration and thanks.
the now-retired Agency archivis
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Thanks too to
who transformed my long-
hand into the first typescript and to
typed this, the final, from what had become a tortured
who
script. To her my special gratitude for undertaking the
chore of putting the footnotes and reference notes at the
bottom of the page Where they belong; not at the end of
the manuscript where few readers would bother to look.
Sherman Kent
25 April 1975
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Contents
Page
An Introductory Note iii
I. The Institutional Framework 1
A. The Director of Central
Intelligence and the NIE 1
B. The Office of National Estimates 24
C. The Representatives of the Other
Intelligence Agencies 33
The Making of an NIE 37
A. Scheduling 37
B. Terms of Reference 42
C. Contributions 48
D. Drafting in the ONE ..... � � 65
E. Coordination of the Draft
with the Reps 74
F. Production of NIEs Under
Conditions of Urgency 94
G. Final Clearance of the NIEs
at the USIB 98
H. The Dissent - Final and Formal -
USIB 109
I. Post-Mortems: The Identification
of Intelligence Deficiencies 120
J. Validity Studies 126
K. The Numbering of Estimates . . 128
L. Dissemination Within the
US Government 134
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Page
M. Dissemination to Foreign
Governments 139
N. Consultants: The Princeton Panel. 146
0. Epilogue 154
Appendix
Glossary of Abbreviations 168
Attachments
A. CIA Organization and
The Office of National Estimates
B. The Office of National Estimates
Membership of the Board of
National Estimates
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THE LAW AND CUSTOM OF THE
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NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE ESTIMATE
An Examination of the Theory and Some
Recollections Concerning the Practice of the Art
I. The Institutional Framework
A. The Director of Central Intelligence and the NIE
The National Intelligence Estimate--spelled thus
Footnotes:
1. The following general histories contain the es-
sential background and a wealth of elaborating detail of
the subject of this essay.
Arthur B. Darling, The Central Intelligence Agency:
An Instrument of Government, to 1950 (12 vols) 1953. (HS-1)
George S. Jackson and Martin P. Claussen, Organiza-
tional History of the Central Intelligence Agency, 1950-53
(10 vols) 1957: (HS-2)
Ludwell L. Montague, General Walter Bedell Smith as
Director of Central Intelligence, October 1950-February 1953
(5 vols) 1971. (DCI-1)
Wayne G. Jackson, Allen Welsh Dulles as Director of
Central Intelligence, 26 February 7953-29 November 1961
(5 vols) 1973. (DCI-2).
George S. Jackson, Office of Reports and Estimates,
1946-51 (5 vols) 1954., (MS-3)
Hereafter I will cite the first four of these works
as Darling, The CIA; Jackson and Claussen, History; Monta-
gue, Smith; Wayne Jackson, Dulles.
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with capital initial letters--was one of the major in-
novations of General Walter Bedell Smith, the fourth
Director of Central Intelligence, whose incumbency
2/
bridged the period 7 October 1950-24 January 1953.
2. There can be no question that the NIE, spelled
with capital initials, was a Smith innovation. This is
not to say that the CIA, and the CIG before it, had not
produced finished intelligence utterances which con-
tained estimates and which met most or all of the cri-
teria of the word national as used in the context. The
unit of the Agency which produced such papers was the
Office of Reports and Estimates. It was a large office
which engaged in a number of intelligence research and
analysis tasks. It published, inter alia, a current in-
telligence daily and current intelligence briefs, straight-
away intelligence research studies on a wide range of
subjects--world wide--, situation reports, and an other-
wise undesignated series known as "ORES". As a general
rule, "OREs" were designed for consumption by policy
makers at the national level and hence narrowly focused
on problems of prime import to the national security.
Further they represented not only the best effort of the
originating office, but also were coordinated within the
community. They constitute the nearest thing to the pre-
Smith national intelligence estimate.
They did however differ considerably with the suc-
cessor institution (the NIE): 1) they contained much
more narrative and descriptive data and probably less
estimative material; 2) the coordinating process which
attended their completion was quite different from and
almost certainly less effective than the one which be-
came possible under General Smith's leadership. That
the DCI did not personally "submit" them to the NSC and
that the IAC members did not personally, and in solemn
conclave, approve them (with or without dissent) robbed
them of a certain cachet enjoyed by the NIE. Further-
more and perhaps more importantly, the absence of this
high level review permitted a certain amount of captious
(analyst's) dissent and an undue (analyst's) discursiveness.
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The title itself proclaims at least two important
messages. First, the use of the word "estimate"--as dis-
tinct from "report" or "study"--shows the Director's con-
cern to emphasize this particular form of intelligence
utterance and its importance in his thinking. In this
General Smith reflected a similar bent of his deputy,
William Harding Jackson, who as an intelligence officer
during World War II had had a first-hand experience with
estimates, had made a deep study of the institution as
practiced at high levels of British intelligence, and had
himself written a section on national estimating in the
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Dulles-Jackson-Correa report.
3. The full title of this report, usually cited as
The Dulles Report is: Allen W. Dulles, William H. Jack-
son, and Mathias Correa, Report to the National Security
Council on the Central Intelligence Agency and National
Organization for Intelligence (1 January 1949).
Upon receipt of The Dulles Report, two principal
officers of the NSC (the Secretaries of State and De-
fense) solicited comment from all parts of the intelli-
gence community and in the light of the: Report and com-
ment wrote and submitted to the NSC A Report to the Na-
tional Security Council by the Secretaries of State and
Defense on the Central Intelligence Agency and National
Organization of Intelligence, 1 July 1949. The President
accepted this report and issued it as NSC #50. One of
its principal recipients was General Smith who always
referred to its group of recommendations as his marching
orders from the President.
The importance of what I am calling the NIE in
this essay received its due (though not in (continued)
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The second, the use of the word "national" was
employed with equal purpose. It not only designated a
type of subject matter suitable for purposes of national
security policy formulation, and a hoped-for quality ap-
propriate for use at highest levels of government, but
more especially an intelligence production effort which
would engage the knowledge and talent of the national in-
telligence community over which the DCI was the presiding
officer. Indeed that thing often referred to as "national
intelligence" had been declared to be one of the three
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principal charges on the DCI. He and he alone was under
obligation to produce it. Terming the estimates-to-be
national would put them clearly within the larger canopy
of "national intelligence" and as such within the per-
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sonal jurisdiction of the DCI.
(continued) these exact words) in both The Dulles Report
and NSC #50. The latter clearly ascribed to the DCI the
personal responsibility for the issuance of national in-
telligence.
4. The other two (in shorthand) were the coordination
of the intelligence community and the undertaking of cer-
tain services of common concern.
5. Readers-of this essay will not miss the distinction
between national intelligence on the one hand and depart-
mental intelligence on the other. The early texts are
signally emphatic in identifying departmental intelligence
as something gathered, evaluated, and issued in support of
departmental missions and functions and not to be trifled
with by a supra departmental intelligence authority such
as the DCI and his Agency.
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Thus the first, and by all odds most important,
legal and constitutional aspect of the National Intel-
ligence Estimate is that it was and
estimate, and its findings are his.
perts from perhaps all
community participated
in the NIE series, and
intelligence
is the Director's
Although many ex-
components of the
in the production of the papers.
although the intelligence chiefs
themselves formally passed on the final text, they could
not bend its findings to s(uit their own judgments con-
trary to the will of the DCI. They could try to win him
to their sides by full and free discussion, but they could
not outvote him and force him to join them, nor could they
make him dissent from them, even though they constituted
a clear majority of the Intelligency Advisory Board, Intel-
ligence Advisory Committee, or the United States Intelli-
gence Board as it was successively known. By the same
token, the DCI could not oblige them to join him in a
matter at dispute. They could of their own accord concur
with his findings, or, not being able to, they could dis-
sent and make their alternative views known in footnotes
to his text.
In his very first full dress meeting with his IAC
on 20 October 1950 General Smith tactfully but forcefully
made the matter clear.
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The minutes for that historic meeting are grati-
fyingly full; they contain a verbatim rendering of a
memorandum which General Smith read to his colleagues.
6/
He began with the title: The Responsibility of the Cen-
tral Intelligence Agency for National Intelligence Esti-
mates and went on to read: "One of the principal duties
assigned to the CIA--is to 'correlate and evaluate intel-
ligence relating to the national security and provide
for its proper dissemination'." The memo elaborates
the intended significance of this phrase from the Na-
tional Security Act of 1947, and continues: "The CIA
is thus given the responsibility of seeing to it that
the United States has adequate central machinery for
the examination and interpretation of intelligence, so
that the national security will not be jeopardized by
failure to coordinate the best intelligence opinion in
6. IAC-M-1, 20 October 1950.
The memo in question had been composed a few weeks
earlier by the DDCI, William H. Jackson, who had had Wal-
ter Lippmann in mind as a chief recipient. At some time
before 20 October Mr. Jackson had shown a copy to Lawrence
Houston, General Counsel of the CIA. Mr. Houston pointed
out to Mr. Jackson that the memo erred in its attribution
to the community of the "responsibility" for the NIEs.
Mr. Houston emphasized the all-important point that this
was a "responsibility" of the DCI alone. One document
shows where exactly this correction was made in Mr. Jack-
son's typescript. Note: passages in single quotation marks
are from the National Security Act of 1947.
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the country, based on all available information."
The logical construction goes on abuilding:
Although the National Security Act provided that the
departments and agencies of the government shall con-
tinue to collect, evaluate, correlate, and disseminate
departmental intelligence, it does not limit the duties
of the CIA vis-a-vis its intelligence mission except by
the standard of national security. In fact, "the Act
apparently gives the CIA the independent right of pro-
ducing national intelligence. As a practical matter
[such national intelligence emanating in the form of]
estimates can be written only with the collaboration of
experts in many fields of intelligence and with the co-
operation of several departments and agencies of the
Government. A national intelligence. . . estimate as
assembled and produced by the CIA should reflect the
coordination of the best intelligence opinion based on
all available information."
The memo went on: The concept of national intel-
ligence estimates underlying the statute is that of an
authoritative interpretation and appraisal that will
serve as a firm guide to policy-makers and planners.
A national intelligence estimate. . . should be compiled
and assembled centrally by an agency whose objectivity
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and disinterestedness are not open to question. "Its
ultimate approval should rest upon the collective judg-
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ment of the highest officials in the various intel-
ligence agencies." Finally, it should command recogni-
tion and respect throughout the Government as the best
available and presumably the most authoritative estimate.
Although the task is made more difficult by a lack of
general acceptance of the concept of national intelli-
gence estimates in the Government, it is, nevertheless,
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the clear duty and responsibility of the Central Intel-
ligence Agency under the statute to assemble and produce
such coordinated and authoritative estimates.
The "statute" to which General Smith had referred
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was, of course, The National Security Act of 1947,
notably its section 102, subsection (d)3, which reads:
7. In Mr. Jackson's text this word "judgment" had
been "responsibility."
8. General Smith (or Mr. Houston) added this "and
responsibility" to the Jackson text.
9. The effective date of the Act was 18 September
1947. Though the Act was signed into law on 26 July
1947, section 310 states that it would not be fully in
effect until the day after the day upon which the Secre-
tary of Defense, first appointed, takes office or the
sixtieth day after the date of the enactment, whichever
is the earlier. Mr. Forrestal was sworn in on 17 Sep-
tember 1947.
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(d) For the purpose of coordinating
the intelligence activities of the several
Government departments and agencies in the
interest of national security, it shall be
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the duty of the Agency, under the direc-
tion of the National Security Council--
(3) to correlate and evaluate intel-
ligence relating to the national security, and
provide for the appropriate dissemination of such
intelligence within the Government using where
10. Back in 1965 when I began putting down my thoughts
on this subject I sent a memo to the General Counsel ask-
ing him inter alia how was it the Congress had used the
word "Agency" in this context rather than the "DCI- as
had appeared in all prior texts. Mr. Houston answered
me at length:
The most important thing about the Act itself
is the congressional intent behind it, and no
matter how ambiguous the wording of the Act, it
is crystal clear that what the Congress wanted to
do was place the responsibility at one single
point for the coordination of intelligence and in-
telligence support to the policymakers. Also, it
became clear that by one point the Congress meant
one person. They were strongly influenced by the
lessons brought out by the congressional investi-
gation of Pearl Harbor, and while they were not too
interested in organization or techniques, they had
seen that the information by and large which would
have warned of the Japanese attack was available
and in the hands of various components of the ex-
ecutive branch and no one brought the pieces to-
gether and made an adequate evaluation to warn
the President. They had received some testimony
that such evaluation should be arrived at through
board or committee action, but it is quite clear
that they discounted any such dispersing of re-
sponsibility and were thinking of (continued)
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appropriate existing agencies and facilities . .
Had General Smith desired, he could have given the
background to those cryptic and not wholly satisfactory
words of section 102 (d), (3). The fact is that Presi-
dent Truman used almost these exact phrases in his let-
ter of 22 January 1946 addressed to the Secretaries of
State, War, and Navy and in which he designated them the
so-called National Intelligence Authority and directed
them (and a fourth officer to be named by him) to plan,
develop, and coordinate "all Federal foreign intelligence
activities so as to assure the most effective accomplish-
ment of the intelligence mission related to the national
security." His letter went on to say that the addressees
would assign persons and facilities from their departments
(continued)responsibility placed in one man.
This led, among other things, to their desig-
nation of this man as Director of Central Intel-
ligence, rather than as Director of the [Central
Intelligence] Agency, to connote his over-all re-
sponsibility. Thus, when you look at the Act you
have behind it a pretty clear expression of the
intent of the Congress, which has for the most
part been consistent with the organizational con-
cepts of the various Presidents.
I have studiously avoided getting into a
legal hassle on the question you raise that in
the Act the duties are given to the Agency yet
responsibilities in the NSCID's are put on the
Director. Since the Director is the head of
the Agency and the Agency responds to his di-
rection and control, I could see nothing incon-
sistent with the Act giving the responsibility
to the Agency, particularly when (continued)
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"which persons shall collectively form a Central Intel-
ligence Group" under a Director of Central Intelligence,
"who shall be designated by me."
The immediately following text says that the new
DCI shall:
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Accomplish the correlation and evaluation
of intelligence relating to the national
security, and the appropriate dissemination
within the Government of the resulting stra-
tegic and national policy intelligence. In
so doing, full use shall be made of the staff
and facilities of the intelligence agencies of
your [i.e. State, War, and Navy Departments.
(continued) you knew the legislative history.
11. These unfortunate words, "correlation and evalua-
tion," themselves have an interesting history. The word
"synthesize" would have done the trick and indeed was
used in an early draft which Admiral Sidney Souers (the
principal draftsman of the President's letter) had sub-
mitted to Mr. Truman. Souers had relied heavily upon
the thought and language of a document relating to a
future central intelligence service which the Joint
Chiefs of Staff (JCS 1181/5, 19 Sept 1945) had forwarded
to the President. From their text, Souers had borrowed
the phrase that the director of the service "shall ac-
complish the synthesis of departmental intelligence re-
lating to the national security...." Mr. Truman didn't
like "synthesis" or "synthesize." Souers told Ludwell
Montague that he thought Mr. Truman did not know the in-
tended meaning of the word. Souers guessed that he
thought it sounded derogatory (cf. synthetic). (Memo to
SK from Ludwell Montague, 26 November 1965.)
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A few paragraphs later on the President ordained
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an Intelligence Advisory Board --the first name given
to the body which in General Smith's time was known as
the Intelligence Advisory Committee. The letter did not
describe the right of Board members to register dissents
to decisions of the DCI, but that came soon in the very
first directive which the National Intelligence Authority
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issued.
The President's letter and the NIA directive were
given additional strength (perhaps) and precision (certainly)
in the first intelligence directive issued by the National
Security Council a few months after the passage of the Act
which called it into being. Paragraphs 4 and 5 of NSCID #1
(12 December 1947) read thus:
12. "The Director of Central Intelligence shall be ad-
vised by an Intelligence Advisory Board consisting of the
heads (or their representatives) of the principal military
and civilian intelligence agencies of the Government having
functions related to national security, as determined by
the National Intelligence Authority."
13. National Intelligence Authority, Directive #1
(8 February 1946). Paragraph 6.
The Central Intelligence Group will utilize
all available intelligence in producing strategic
and national policy intelligence. All intelligence
reports prepared by the Central Intelligence Group
will note any substantial dissent by a participating
intelligence agency. (emphasis added)
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4. The Director of Central Intelligence
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shall produce intelligence relating to the
national security, hereafter referred to as
national intelligence. In so far as practi-
cable, he shall not duplicate the intelligence
activities and research of the various depart-
ments and agencies but shall make use of ex-
isting intelligence facilities and shall uti-
lize departmental intelligence for such pro-
duction purposes. For definitions see NSCID
#3.
5. The Director of Central Intelligence
shall disseminate National Intelligence to the
President, to members of the National Security
Council, to the intelligence chiefs of the IAC
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agencies, and to such governmental departments
and agencies as the National Security Council
14. Some hero finally bit the bullet and substituted
the word "produce" for "correlate and evaluate." By this
time the CIA was very much of a going concern with a signi-
ficant capability to collect a good deal of raw information
through its own efforts. Hence it did not need to confine
itself to simply synthesizing what it learned from other
intelligence organizations of the community.
15. The Act failed to mention an Intelligence Advisory
Board or Committee, although it had had an important place
in the President's letter and in the history of national
intelligence from January 1946 ton. The first (continued)
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from time to time may designate. Intelligence
so disseminated shall be officially concurred
in by the intelligence agencies or shall carry
an agreed statement of substantial dissent.
(Emphasis added)
Fast on the heels of this document came NSCD #3.
(13 January 1948) which reiterated the DCI's duty to pro-
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duce and disseminate national intelligence, and two of
the early DCIDs which set forth the Standard Operating
(continued) paragraph of NSCID #1 rectifies matters with
a note on the composition and advisory functions of the
(now) IAC:
1. To maintain the relationship essential to
coordination between the Central Intelligence
Agency and the intelligence organizations, an
Intelligence Advisory Committee consisting of
the respective intelligence chiefs from the De-
partments of State, Army, Navy, and Air Force,
and from the Joint Staff (JCS), and the Atomic
Energy Commission, or their representatives,
shall be established to advise the Director of
Central Intelligence. The Director of Central
Intelligence will invite the chief, or his repre-
sentative, of any other intelligence agency hav-
ing functions related to the national security
to sit with the Intelligence Advisory Committee
whenever matters within the purview of his agency
are to be discussed.
A revised edition of this NSCID (7 July 1949) di-
rects that the DCI shall be the IAC chairman and that the
Director of the FBI will be on the Committee. (He was
always represented by one of his officers, a matter offi-
cially recognized some nine years later - NSCID #1 of
25 April 1958).
16. See esp. paragraph 1 (e) National Intelligence.
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Procedures for Departmental Participation in the Pro-
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duction and Coordination of National Intelligence and
Policy Governing Departmental Concurrences [and Dissents]
in National Intelligence Reports and Estimates.
18/
In other words, when General Smith told his col-
leagues of the IAC how he construed his powers under the
National Security Act, he could have invoked a number of
other forceful and explicit texts (which antedated the
Act and followed it) to bolster his position. Of course,
he did not need them, nor did he need them to support
three other decisions which were essential parts of his
new deal for national estimates.
First was his announcement of his formation of
a new office, the Office of National Estimates, whose
only concern would be the production of national esti-
mates and closely related matters. General Smith set
great store by this office and indicated that "in his
opinion it would become the heart of the CIA and of the
19/
national intelligence machinery."
17. DCID 3/1, 8 July 1948.
18. DCID 3/2, 13 September 1948.
19. IAC-M-1, 20 October 1950, para 7. In the context
of the chairman's remarks, Mr. Jackson indicated (continued)
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Not revealed in the official minutes, but in a
memo for the record drafted by Col. Hamilton Howze, USA,
an aide to the G-2 who was present at the meeting, was
General Smith's mention of the future Board of National
20/
Estimates. Col. Howze's memo reads:
9. Within the new Estimates Division of
ORE [sic] there will be a panel of five or six
individuals constituting the top brains. Gen-
eral Smith is looking hard for a retired Gen-
eral or Admiral to head. He tried to get
Admiral [Leslie] Stevens (recent Naval Attache,
Moscow) and asked Admiral Johnson [Felix John-
son, the DNI] to talk once more to Stevens in
an effort to persuade him. General Smith also
said he was anxious to get General [Clarence
(continued)
"that the fact that the [former] Office of Re-
ports and Estimates has in the past produced
both national estimates and miscellaneous re-
ports in various fields, which could not pos-
sibly be construed as national estimates, had
blurred and confused both the product and
function of the Office of Reports and Esti-
mates. There has been insufficient differen-
tiation between the form and the coordination
procedure in connection with the two products
and in their methods of production."
20. A copy of the Howze memo is on file in HS/HC 266.
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Ralph] Huebner to be a member of the panel,
and possibly to head the Division.
(Be it said that General Smith did not get the services
of Leslie Stevens, nor did he put General Huebner in
charge of the new office. Huebner did accept a place
on the Board, and the distinguished Harvard historian,
William L. Langer, became its first chairman.) With
this sort of official announcement, the ONE With its
own administrative machinery was off to an auspicious
start.
Second, the National Intelligence Estimate would
be known as just that, not an "ORE" with a number, nor
yet an "ONE," nor a "CIA" for that matter. It "would
be published under a cover showing plainly that the esti-
mate was a collective effort, the result of which would
21/
be labeled as a national intelligence estimate."
Third, General Smith indicated his intention of
holding IAC meetings "more. often and for longer periods,
21. Quoted from para 8 of IAC-M-1 above, note 9.
In actual fact the cover of NIE 1 (3 November
1950) did not plainly show that it was the result of a
collective effort. The lay-out of the cover was National
Intelligence Estimate/The title/The CIA Seal/NIE-1/Pub-
lished 3 November 1950/Central Intelligence Agency.
The first page immediately after the cover contained
the dissemination and distribution notices. (continued)
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although as chairman he would make every effort to
keep the meetings as brief as possible. He stated
that the IAC must be geared for rapid cooperative
22/
work." In this he was true to his promise; the
LAC began meeting regularly (and once a week) with
the DCI seldom absent from the chair. As the NIEs
moved into production, NIE business--whether the lay-
ing on, the clearing of scope notes, or pronouncing
upon a finished product--became a staple of IAC fare.
This was of course in marked contrast to the Hillen-
koetter regime, where IAC meetings were rarely called
and when called, never to participate in any phase of
�the pre-Smith brand of national estimates.
At this first IAC meeting, there was another
piece of NIE business which was not exactly an innova-
tion. It was in large measure a reminder of the pro-
duction procedures which had first appeared two years
earlier in DCID 3/1 and DCID 3/2. General Smith's
(continued) The next page was the proper title page:
NIE-1/National Intelligence Estimate/The title/followed
by "The intelligence organizations of the Departments of
State, Army, Navy, and the Air Force participated in the
preparation of this estimate and concur in it."
Perhaps a year passed before this latter bit of
text appeared on the front cover.
22:' Quoted from para 5 of IAC-M-1.
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restatement of these procedures was official notice of
23/
his desire to have things done according to the book.
23. As reported in IAC-M-1:
9. After discussion the following procedural
steps were agreed upon in the production of
national estimates:
a. The Intelligence Advisory Committee
will adopt an intelligence plan, or more speci-
fically, a list of required national estimates
in an order of priority.
b. In the case of a particular estimate,
a frame of reference and the assumptions on
which the estimate is based will be discussed
and approved by the Intelligence Advisory
Committee.
c. Work on the estimate will be referred
in the first instance to the Office of Reports
and Estimates, or to the Office of National
Estimates when it is established in the Central
Intelligence Agency, and the several intelligence
agencies will be consulted and a time-table fixed
for contributions to the national estimate within
the fields of their respective interests.
d. On the basis of these contributions, the
Central Intelligence Agency will produce a first
draft of the proposed national estimate.
e. This draft will be sent back to the
agencies for comment and modification and for
further discussion if required. On the basis
of such comments and discussion, the Central
Intelligence Agency will produce a second draft
of the estimate.
f. This second, or later drafts if required,
will be submitted to the Intelligence Advisory
Committee for final discussion, resolution of
differences and approval. (continued)
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Perhaps to maintain the momentum which he had
already given to the NIE, General Smith ended by calling
for another meeting in five days to discuss "national
estimates priorities and the frame of references and as-
sumptions to form the basis of an intelligence estimate
24/
Of the situation in Indo-China."
In his rendering of the established procedures
for doing NIE's General Smith added something new and
important to the law as it was then understood. It was
the content of his first sentence (paragraph "8 a" in
the Minutes): "The Intelligence Advisory Committee will
adopt an intelligence plan, or more specifically, a list
of required national estimates in an order of priority."
(continued)
g. If differences cannot be resolved and
approval obtained, the estimate will be pub-
lished with notation of substantial dissent and
reasons therefore.
It was made clear by General Smith that this pro-
cedure would not and could not be followed in the case
of so-called "crisis estimates." In the event of need
arising for a quick or crisis estimate, a procedure
similar to that used in the recent instance when the
President called for a series of estimates prior to
his departure for the meeting with General MacArthur
would be followed. That is, a special meeting of the
Intelligence Advisory Committee will be called and
representatives of the various intelligence agencies
assigned at once to the production of a draft of the
required estimate for immediate submission to the
Intelligence Advisory Committee for discussion, revi-
sion and approval.
24. IAC-M-1, para 10.
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With this came into being two significant de-
velopments. The first had to do with the initiation
of the NIEs.
Henceforward NIEs would be formally initiated
by IAC action. Requests could come in from many quar-
ters and did: a few times from the President himself,
often from the members of the NSC (especially from the
Secretary of Defense in Mr. McNamara's time) or from
25/
the NSC Staff's chairman,-- often from the second eche-
lon in the Departments of State and Defense, from the
DCI, IAC members, from the Board of National Estimates,
and others. Such requests were usually referred to the
BNE in the first instance, which would put the item on
the agenda of the next IAC meeting or get an IAC authori-
zation by telephone if time pressed. Upon occasion,
when a request came in which was clearly not a suitable
topic for the NIE treatment (something more akin to a
25. In the Eisenhower years, the staff work for the
NSC was conducted along military lines and with military
precision. Mr. Cutler, who was the President's man in
charge of NSC business, took the chairmanship of what
was called the NSC Senior Staff. One of his activities
was a continuing tour of the horizon of US foreign re-
lations and security policy and the identification of
situations which called for policy adjustment. Another
was seeing to the preparation of coordinated policy pa-
pers (with recommendations) relating to all of the likely
trouble spots. Mr. Cutler planned his papers for months
in advance and relied upon the intelligence community to
produce an NIE on each upcoming subject. (continued)
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National Intelligence Survey or a research study) the
chairman Of the BNE would try to deflect it to another
component of the CIA. Failing this, the chairman of the
BNE was bound to take the request to the IAC and try to make
his case there for declining the honor. The point is, of
course, the actual initiation of an NIE which would engage
the talents of scores of people throughout the community
(continued) Deadlines for the NIE were set so that it
would be ready when the Senior Staff began its policy
deliberations. The Staff's finished paper often quoted
liberally from the NIE. During Mr. Cutler's time and
that of Mr. Dillon Anderson who succeeded him, upwards
of perhaps 80 percent of NIEs were produced for this
particular account.
This is not to say, however, that Mr. Cutler and
the NSC, or the NIEs for that matter, had an important
role in all major foreign policy decisions of the Eisen-
hower administration. There were those situations of
particular concern to Secretary of State Dulles. These
he watched over personally and made his recommendations
to the President without reference to Mr. Cutler's com-
plicated staff machinery and its equally complicated in-
telligence support.
The Kennedy administration changed matters very
considerably. Nevertheless with McGeorge Bundy as the
President's Special Assistant for National Security Af-
fairs, many NIEs were produced at his request for the
consideration of the President and members of the Coun-
cil, and as well for Mr. Bundy's own NSC staff.
The sort of relationship between Mr. Bundy and
the ONE continued with Mr. Rostow who served in the
Johnson years. Mr. Kissinger, President Nixon's man
in the same job, seems to have had considerably less
interest in the NIE.
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was the decision for the community's highest body.
The second institution General Smith set in
motion was that of planning the program of NIEs to
26/
come. At the next meeting of the IAC, that of 26
October 1950, a program of 11 estimates was adopted
in the following order of priority: the Philippines,
Indochina, Soviet Capabilities and Intentions, Ger-
many, Chinese Communist Capabilities and Intentions,
Yugoslavia, Iran, Greece, Turkey, India, and Austria.
At this moment there was not yet an ONE nor a BNE.
General Smith turned to Ludwell Montague, who had
handled the burden of the estimating in ORE, and an-
nounced
that pending the establishment of an
27/
tague would be in charge.
ONE,
Mon-
In the next four weeks, while the ONE was in its
formative stage, Montague placed six coordinated esti-
mates before the IAC for final clearance. Three of them
were from the original program, and three others were
crash estimates related to the Chinese Communist inter-
vention into Korea. By the end of November the ONE was
well established and Montague handed over the charge to
26. See pp. 37-42 about the scheduling of the esti-
mates.
27. See Montague, Smith History, II, 36 and ff.
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Mr. Langer, who had the twin titles of Assistant Direc-
tor for National Estimates (and as such was in charge
of the new ONE) and Chairman of the Board of National
Estimates.
My own appearance dated from about this time, and
I well remember Montague turning to his new colleagues
on the Board and suggesting pointedly that they begin to
share the burden.
28/
B. The Office of National Estimates
From this time forward until 1 November 1973, the
Office of National Estimates acted as the Director's ex-
ecutive agent for the acquital of his responsibility for
the production and dissemination of national intelligence
estimates. One may date the Office's formal legal be-
ginnings from the appointment of its chief, William L.
Langer (13 November 1950). In these days before the
creation of the Office of the Deputy Director/Intelligence,
the AD/NE (along with five other AD's of the so-called
28. For a discussion of the formative period of the
ONE, see Jackson and Claussen, History, IX, 32-51. I
succeeded Mr. Langer on 3 January 1952 as the AD/NE and
held the position until 31 December 1967. Abbot E. Smith
was my successor (1 January 1968-17 April 1971). John
Huizenga followed him (17 April-June 1973). For the
last months of ONE's existence (June-November 1973) Ramsey
Forbush was the acting chairman of the Board of National
Estimates.
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overt offices) reported to the Director through his dep-
uty (the DDCI). Mr. Langer's mission and functions were
spelled out in "CIA Regulation No. 70" of 1 December 1950.
With the exception of one of its paragraphs, this docu-
ment described the duties which he, his successors, and
the office they presided over followed in guiding the
procreation of more than 1,500 National Intelligence
Estimates over 23 years. The paragraph which became
inapplicable was #6, which had assigned to the AD/NE
the current intelligence task and the issuance of the
Daily Summary. In a matter of a few weeks, Mr. Langer
had disengaged from this responsibility to concentrate
his resources on the main task of the estimates.
29/
The Office of National Estimates-- took shape
speedily. It should be viewed as consisting of three
components: The Board of National Estimates, the pro-
fessional staff, and
The Board was
had gone before. In
the support staff.
the principal departure
the thinking of General
from what
Smith and
Mr. Jackson, the Board was to consist of an indetermi-
nate number of senior officers (say, more than five and
29. See Attachment A for the official description of
the organization and mission and functions of the ONE.
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less than twelve), who came from a variety of profes-
sional backgrounds, and who, paid handsomely in the
supergrade categories, had, (contrary to normal civil
service practice) no administrative duties whatever.
Their task was wholly substantive. Their days were
spent in individual and more often collective efforts
on every aspect of the estimates. They met first thing
in the morning to hear the day's news and perhaps dis-
cuss it in terms of NIEs in the works or to come; they
met again often with the ONE staff, often with repre-
sentatives of the IAC agencies to talk about the schedule,
to produce terms of reference, to review drafts, and to
arrive at duly coordinated texts suitable to present to
the Director and the IAC. They invited and listened to
ambassadors, officers of the foreign aid program, attaches,
members of the numerous military assistance groups (MAG,
later MAAG), CIA officers in from the field, and many
others., Above all they studied the new intelligence.
Each day their reading room received a wide spectrum of the
daily take which ranged from routine items like the FBIS
reports, CIA, attache, and State Department cables to the
most sensitive materials that lay in the arcane codeword
areas on the far side of Top Secret. This was the daily
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grist for thought and discussion. Indeed, almost as
much as the labor on the draft estimates, the reading
of the highly privileged news made its contribution to
the collegial nature of the Board. And it was this
very group effort that so often resulted in the posing
of the right questions and the struggling for the best
answers. As one Board member has pointed out, the col-
legial spirit also made its contribution to a finished
product of high quality. There were always, he remarks,
one or two colleagues who had not been so immersed in a
paper as to be bored with it and willing to let it go
forward irrespective of flaws. Seemingly there was al-
most always one of these fresh brethren who stepped in
as a potent "no" man.
At the start, the Board consisted of Mr. Langer,
myself who was named his deputy early in 1951, General
Clarence Ralph Huebner and Admiral Bernard Bieri (Gen-
eral Smith here deferred to his own background and the
important role of the military in the intelligence com-
munity), Maxwell Foster (a Boston lawyer nominated by
Mr. Jackson), Raymond J. Sontag and Calvin B. Hoover
(Mr. Langer's choices: two outstanding professors of
modern history and economics respectively), and DeForest
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Van Slyck and Ludwell Montague (senior officers of CIA's
Office of Reports and Estimates fORE]). The latter two,
who had had many years of intelligence experience includ-
ing three or four as estimators in ORE, brought with them
a high competence for the task, and a rich first hand
knowledge of the grandeurs and miseries of coordinating
30/
speculative intelligence at the national level.
Along with Van Slyck and Montague, ONE inherited
a much broader legacy from ORE. Most obviously, we re-
cruited our full staff, both the professional and support
components, from ORE. Let me speak of the professionals
first.
In the beginning there were about 25 of them, two
decades later, a few more than 30. Most if not all of
. them had had graduate school work in history or the social
30. See Attachment Bfbrtwo charts relating to the
Board of National Estimates. The first shows the chang-
ing membership of the Board between 1950 and 1963 with a
graphic indication of each member's professional background.
There were a number of members of the Board who do
not show up on either of these documents. Among them were
Admiral Jerauld Wright whose last active service in the
Navy had been as CINCLANT, Livingston Merchant, who had
held many important positions in the Department of State
including Undersecretary for Political Affairs and Ambas-
sador to Canada, and Llewellyn Thompson, one of the na-
tion's leading Sovietologists and twice our Ambassador to
the USSR.
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sciences, and most if not all had served in wartime
intelligence work (with one of the military intelli-
gence organizations or OSS). They had improved their
regional or functional competences in their duties
with CIA. They also, like Van Slyck and Montague,
knew a lot about the post-war intelligence community,
its strengths and weaknesses, and how to do business
with it. They set a pace for a quality of workmanship
that we were able to maintain during the lifetime of
the Office. For 20 years they were the best staff in
town and so proclaimed by a good number of very knowledge-
31/
able outsiders.
The support staff, also recruited from ORE, was
made up of about the same number of skillful women (grow-
ing eventually to about 35) who controlled the distribu-
ting in ONE of the daily flood of incoming intelligence
31. Almost from the beginning, the organization of
the staff followed regional lines: Western Europe,
Middle East, East Europe (which included the USSR),
and Far East. As the demand grew for NIEs concerning
Latin America and Africa small staffs were formed to
handle these accounts. Later still when the number
of NIEs devoted to Soviet military and technical mat-
ters (e.g. atomic energy, space exploration) grew, we
formed a special Soviet Military/Technical Staff.
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materials, ran the ONE library, did the general secre-
tarial work for the Board and the professional staffs,
and attended to the reproduction in multiple copies of
the endless stream of NIEs in every stage of their cre-
th
ation, first, second, third, and n draft right up to
the final manuscript for dispatch to the printer. The
capabilities of our little reproduction staff were a
nine-days' wonder throughout the community's band of
estimators.
Thus the ONE at the beginning owed much to what
had gone before. If all of us in the office had been
newcomers like the members of the Board, and if all of
us had had to learn the complicated trade from scratch,
our fast start and speedy accomplishment would not have
been.
With time there were great changes in the manning
of both Board and staff. We were careful about replace-
ments and maintained the standards of excellence. One
thing greatly in our favor was a refusal to try to build
an empire and stretch our table of organization to imr-
perial dimensions. In the beginning our T/O was set at
85, a figure we never reached. For 1951 we had fewer
than 60 people aboard. Ten years later, with a consider-
ably larger work load, we reached a total of something
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under 70, perhaps a dozen of whom were on the Board.
Some of the latter were new recruits from outside and
some were former members of our staff or other CIA
staffs whom the Director raised to Board status.
The original concept was that Board members
should be "generalists" without specialized expertise
in, or estimative responsibility for, particular geo-
graphic or functional areas. Over the years, certain
specialization began to emerge informally. A Board
member by virtue of being assigned to chair a succes-
sion of papers on a particular area, or by reason of
his own growing interest and study, would become more
knowledgeable than his colleagues about a particular
problem or part of the world.
Furthermore, as members of the staff, which was
organized on a regional basis, began to become members
of the Board, they of course brought with them the more
profound knowledge of the areas to which they had been
assigned. Papers on "their" areas were more often than
not given to them to shepherd through the trials of ex-
amination by the Board and coordination with the Reps.
Thus, without any very conscious plan, a sort of special-
ization developed within the Board. This had the notable
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advantage of enabling the Board member so qualified to
be more useful in the various stages of drafting and
coordination.
Some anomalies developed, for example, Middle
East specialists from the staff were appointed to the
Board in numbers out of proportion to the other area
experts so that, to the extent Board members were ad-
mitted to have specialties, we were over-endowed with
Middle Easterners. But the unsystematic system worked
pretty well. The chairman of a paper would see to it
that a couple of his colleagues would follow its develop-
ment closely enough to be able to lend a hand if trouble
developed in a Reps' meeting, and most of the other Board
members would have had their say before then.
Later, when Abbot Smith took over as head of the
ONE with John Huizenga as his deputy, a more formal ef-
fort at specialization was launched. Board panels were
established, each responsible for a particular area, and
each with a Board member in charge, with two of his col-
leagues also assigned. This was well enough, but there
was a corollary:
Board members were at least tacitly
discouraged from concerning themselves with the doings
-of a panel to which they were not assigned. Doubtless
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this saved time in the Board consideration of an esti-
mate, but it also narrowed the range of inspection to
which an estimate was subjected. In this situation,
the views of a panel chairman sometimes came to have
inordinate weight.
C. The Representatives of the Other
Intelligence Agencies
With the beginning of the ONE came a marked
change in the manner of coordinating estimates with the
other members of the intelligence community. In the
days of ONE's predecessor (CIA's Office of Reports and
Estimates) man-to-man contact between ORE analysts and
their opposite numbers in the community had been ir-
regular. A good deal
had been achieved via
conducted in writing.
of the coordination of estimates
a challenge and response ballet
ORE would initiate an estimate
and request contributions. Not receiving adequate help,
ORE would draft the paper on whatever resources avail-
able and send it out for comment. When the comment
came in it was often given in written form. ORE would
attempt to conform its text to well-founded exceptions
and forget the rest. It would circulate the paper once
more--this time for concurrence or dissent. Throughout,
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the bulk of the transaction was conducted by memo.
When General Smith asked Ludwell Montague to
serve as the CIA officer to coordinate a number of
NIEs, and in a great hurry, he insisted upon a man-
to-man contact with his opposite numbers in the IAC
agencies. Thus Montague was able to get a far higher
degree of helpful compliance than heretofore. The six
papers which he shepherded were thrashed out around a
table with living representatives of the four princi-
pal intelligence services (State and the three mili-
tary services).
By the time I had entered on duty in late No-
vember, the meeting of representatives (the Reps) to
coordinate a text was a going institution. Through-
out the history of the NIE, between 1950 and 1973, the
Reps were one of the elements which made the whole
enterprise a success.
A word about the Reps: IAC members, perceiving
that the NIE was a deadly serious undertaking by General
Smith, and cheerful at the way the account was being
handled, gave ready support. Of their officers, they
continued to designate one who would be their principal
staff operative for the NIE account. We, as ORE before
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us, recognized these officers as the IAC Senior Repre-
sentatives. They were the ONE's first point of contact
within the IAC agencies for all business affecting the
NIE.
Below each of these Senior Reps was a pool of
intelligence officers most of whose duties included the
area of the NIE.
women with
They were usually experienced men and
a regional or functional specialty and an
ability to discuss the
substance and the rhetoric of
draft estimates. They attended the
was coordinated and where agreement
possible. They were the people who
not possible, were the articulators
meetings where text
was achieved when
when agreement was
of tentative dissent.
The institution of the Reps, which had had its
informal beginnings in the ORE days, flourished with
the coming of the ONE and its heavy schedule of NIEs.
Its existence rested solidly upon the stuff of the cus-
tomary law. I can so assert because there is no refer-
ence to "Representatives" in DCID 3/2 (8 July 1946) de-
voted to the standard procedures of
gence production nor, of course, in
tember 1948 devoted to concurrences
national intelli-
DCID 3/2 of 13 Sep-
in national intel-
ligence. In General Smith's rough outline of procedures
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there are references to "discussion" between "ORE, or
. . the ONE when it is established" .
. . and the
several intelligence agencies," but no word of "Repre-
sentatives." However all NIE's produced from that point
on involved the Reps in one way or another. It was not
until the issuance of DCID 3/5 of 1 Sept 1953 (which
superseded DCID 3/1 cited above) that the word "Repre-
sentatives" (and the institution) passed from the cus-
tomary to the statute law. Paragraph 3 (c) reads:
Consideration by Representatives of the
IAC Agencies. -- Representatives of the IAC
Agencies will meet with the Board to review,
32/
comment on and revise the draft as necessary.
Of the scores or even hundreds of Reps that we
encountered, two things may be said: (1) They were in-
,
dispensable to the production of NIE's, and (2) there
was no other uniformity. Some were skilled intelli-
gence professionals; others were unhappy time-servers;
most fell between these poles. I will have more to say
about them in a later section.
32. This identical language is repeated in para 3c
of DCID 1/1 of 21 April 1958 which superseded DCID 3/5,
and in para 3c of DCID 1/1 of 5 Aug 1959 which super-
seded the version of 21 April 1958.
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II. The Making of an NIB
Now for the rules that governed the process of
producing an NIE: The first dealt with the advance
planning and scheduling of the estimate.
A. Scheduling
The minutes of General Smith's first full-dress
meeting with the IAC show that there was general agree-
ment to a proposal to adopt "an intelligence plan, or
more specifically, a list of required national estimates
33/
in an order of priority." When the committee met six
days later, it considered and approved a list of 11 es-
timates which had been prepared in the ORE, almost cer-
tainly by Ludwell Montague and his colleagues. During
the first half of November the list was twice expanded
34/
to embrace a total of 20 NIEs.--
By this time the Office of National Estimates
had come to life and took as an early chore working out
of a program for calendar year 1951. For basic guidance
33. IAC-M-1 (20 October 1950), para 9a.
34. IAC-M-2 and 3. See also IAC-D-1 (1 November 1950)
and 1/1 (15 November 1950).
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the Office relied heavily upon a range of policy papers
which the so-called Senior Staff of the NSC had blocked
out for consideration by the Council. This guidance
continued during the Truman and Eisenhower years when
the President used the Council as a principal source
for policy formulation. The orderly procedures de-
veloped under Admiral Souers (whom Mr. Truman had re-
called to Government service to be executive secretary
of the new NSC), and under Robert Cutler (to whom
Mr. Eisenhower had entrusted the same task with the
title: Special Assistant for National Security Affairs)
greatly facilitated the programming of estimates. As a
general rule we prepared an NIE as the intelligence back-
up for each NSC policy paper.
During 1951 our program was of course disrupted
time and again by emergencies, and their calls for esti-
mates to be done on unforeseen topics and often to be
done in a rush. But we did service the NSC's require-
ments as a matter of high priority.
For 1952 we followed the same method, that is,
the Board of National Estimates took what guidance it
could from Admiral Souers and the Senior Staff. The
liaison was of course closer than this suggests, for
General Smith was present at meetings of the Council.
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Loftus E. Becker, the first DDI, was a member of the
NSC Senior Staff, and one or more officers of the ONE
served with the junior NSC group known as the Staff
Assistants. The Board also received requests from the
State and Defense Departments and from the military
services. It also had some good ideas of its own. In
meetings with representatives of the IAC agencies, the
Board put together another year's schedule of under-
35/
takings which it presented to the IAC.
So frequently were these long-range plans upset
that the IAC ruled early in 1953 that we should plan
firmly for the proximate quarter and only tentatively
for the next three quarters--a process which was to be
36/
repeated as each new quarter came around.-- Before
the year's end the IAC changed its mind and went back
to attempting a firm schedule for the entire next year
with a list of tentative estimates tagging along at
37/
the end. Over the next few years, there was more
35. Jackson and Claussen, History, Chap IX, pp. 68-93
contains some important insights into the relationship
between the NSC apparatus and the NIEs.
36. IAC-M-94 and IAC-D-1/2.
37. IAC-M-134 and IAC-D-1/6.
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changing of signals; in 1956 the IAC ruled that we
should plan for the next two quarters, but skip on
ahead to perhaps the last quarter in the exceptional
case of the annual estimates on Soviet military mat-
ters which we all knew would have to be completed in
38/ /
o
November or December to conform to the budget cycle. V
After 1956 there were other changes, none of them of
sufficient moment to alter the basic principle that one
should always try to plan the NIEs as far ahead as was
feasible.
To do so in the Eisenhower years had been easier
than in the years that followed. This was because of
the routine of the NSC with its own elaborate staff
planning. When President Kennedy dismantled the old
apparatus (one might even include the formal NSC it-
self) the Board and the USIB had to look elsewhere for
the same sort of high-level guidance. They found it,
of course, very close by. They found it in McGeorge
Bundy, the new Special Assistant, and in his own NSC
Staff which picked up where the inderdepartmental Senior
Staff of the Eisenhower days left off. NSC business
was conducted quite differently, but conducted nevertheless.
38. IAC-D-1/17.
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There was, for example, a considerable decline in the
number of NIEs specifically requested for NSC use, but
no falling off in a willingness on the part of Mr. Bundy
and his successors and their staffs to give close at-
tention and essential guidance to the program of NIEs.
From the Kennedy years on there were no dramatic
changes in the scheduling procedures. As each new quar-
ter rolled around the Board of National Estimates would
meet with the ONE Staff and later with the Reps to pro-
gram ahead for the next half year. The Chairman of the
Board always presided over these meetings. Often the
agencies would be represented by their own Senior Reps.
One overriding problem beset the matter of schedul-
ing and that was how to keep the quantity of worthwhile
undertakings within the limits of feasibility. Years of
experience indicated that the estimating machinery could
handle about one full-dress NIE a week or about 50 a year.
In some years of crisis we produced upwards of 70, a num-
ber of which were short papers which had been rushed
through via crash procedures. Prudence clearly indicated
that to program deliberately for this sort of load was
sheer madness. Even if we working stiffs could grind
out the papers, the USIB members could not find the time
to clear them. So the Chairman's principal problem at
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these meetings was to say "No" to a good many sugges-
tions and say it convincingly. If he could not pre-
vail, he could only make his negative a tentative one
and urge the Rep in question to get his principal to
reopen the matter at the USIB meeting. A decision
there, of course, was final. If the resultant load
was clearly beyond our capacity, we would evoke some
of the emergency procedures for certain of the papers
and hope to satisfy the customer with short estimates
in which the argumentation and factual backup was re-
duced to a bare minimum.
Scheduling was an important first step; now for
the succeeding ones in NIE production.
B. Terms of Reference
After an estimate had been requested and after
its production had been authorized by the USIB, the
Office of National Estimates took charge. Its first
duty was the preparation of a document which soon came
39/
to be called "The Terms of Reference" (TR).
39. See IAC-M-1, para 9b. In setting forth the pro-
duction procedures General Smith phrased it ". . . a
frame,of reference and the assumptions on which the es-
timate is based will be discussed. . . ."
DCID 3/1 (8 July 1948) in para 3(a)2 says (continued)
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The object of this paper was at least two-fold:
it aimed to define the subject matter of the estimate,
its scope, and time frame; it aimed to focus the forth-
coming estimate on the few major points which were dis-
cerned as the principal concern of the requester; it
aimed to ask those questions (irrespective of anyone's
ability to supply factual answers) which would direct
research and cogitation to the general area of these
major points. In a word it was a statement of pre-
cisely what was wanted and a polite message to the
community's expert research analysts, telling what
was wanted of them.
Oftentimes the overriding concern of the re-
quester was unclear; sometimes he did not really know
what it was he wanted from the NIE. In these cases,
some senior officer--usually a Board member or the
Chairman of the Board--was free to go back to the re-
quester with a draft TR to see whether or not the proj-
ect was on course.
In the early 1950's when the NIEs were new, and
(continued) the CIA will notify each departmental intelli-
gence organization of: (2) "The nature and scope of the
report or estimate involved."
The formal adoption of the phrase "Terms of Refer-
ence" occurs first in DCID 3/5 (1 Sept 1953), para 3(a).
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when--in spite of General Smith's amiable concord with
the IAC members--IAC Reps down the line still harbored
suspicion and disapproval of the CIA and its ONE, the
clearing of the TRs had its problems. Many of the Reps
of this era came from the research components of their
agencies and bore the researchman's contempt for esti-
mating, which they regarded as no more than feckless
speculation about unknowns and unknowables. To these
individuals the establishment of a whole new office in
CIA to engage in such idle wool-gathering was something
to be met without approval, let alone joy.
Akin to these Reps were those who refused to per-
ceive any real difference between the NIE and the NIS.
To them the NIE in hand would be a sort of baby NIS.
They fought the TRs of, say, the NIE on Prospects [for
France] in Indochina on the ground that it did not call
for studies of the Indochina ports, or railroads, or
telecommunications. This particular problem did not go
away. It persisted for months in meeting after meeting
on a sequence of TRs, until finally Mr. Langer conveyed
the message to General Smith, who brought the matter up
at an IAC meeting. From then on things got straightened
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out, but not all at once.
The TRs, especially in the beginning, did more
than highlight the principal questions that the NIE
should seek to answer. They came also to be looked on
in many cases as an injunction to intelligence collectors
to spur their efforts. Often times the ONE would indi-
cate to appropriate components of the DD/P (DD/O), the
Contacts Branch of 0/0 (later the Domestic Collection
Division) and/or to the FBIS the desirability of cer-
tain specific collection chores. Reps from INR in the
State Department might see that the right embassies
were alerted; Reps from the military might go to the
field and lay some new requisitions on their attaches.
The short of this is that when an NIE was scheduled for
an important subject with an adequate lead time to com-
pletion, the TRs served as special guides for collectors
at home and abroad.
Furthermore, as each of the agencies had its own
40. Ironically, it was the BNE which a year or so
later itself asked to have the agencies prepare ar-
rays of certain factual materials appropriate to be
included in appendixes or "Tabs" to the NIEs. Al-
though such were reminiscent of parts of an NIS, this
time the Reps wanted no part of such appendixes.
Once again the matter was settled at the IAC and in
the Board's favor.
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area of primary concern, the TRs would bundle together
all requisitions on, say, political matters with the
aim of making clear what was expected from INR in State,
all requisitions on ground force matters for the bene-
fit of G-2, etc.
No matter how we tried to compartmentalize, we
seldom prevented, say, Air Force Intelligence from in-
cluding in its contribution sections relating to mat-
ters far removed from its primary concern. Early in
the game we even stopped trying, and at a meeting on a
given TR, after getting agreement from the Reps as to
which part of the document was devoted to the special
interests of each component and would be coverd by that
component, we would end up with a willingness to accept
any agency's contribution to any part of the TRs upon
which it wished to volunteer its views--expert or not.
The frictions associated with coordinating these
early TRs gradually--almost imperceptibly--eased. By
the end of the 1950's clearance of the TRs became for
the most part a perfunctory business, sometimes accom-
plished in a few minutes.
Upon many an occasion a highly placed policy of-
ficer or group would call upon the community and its
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estimating brotherhood for their best judgment as to
the :probable consequences of certain possible courses
41/
of action being contemplated by the US Government.
The unwritten law from the date of the first of such
papers established that the "courses of action" at
issue must be stipulated by the policy echelons; they
must not be possible courses of action dreamed up by
42/
intelligence.-- The obvious reason for intelligence
to deny itself a role was its reluctance to enter the
policy arena--at least in this particular phase of in-
telligence work.
41. See the excellent article by John T. Whitman,
"On Estimating Reactions", Studies in Intelligence,
(Vol. 9, No. 3, Summer 1965) pp. 1-4.
42. Upon one occasion (July 1965) the DCI (Admiral
Raborn) undertook to initiate one of these contingency
estimates, himself furnishing the contemplated U.S.
courses of action. The TRs tabled at a USIB meeting
raised two sorts of objections: one having to do with
substantive issues and the other, by far the more im-
portant, to the impropriety of self-originated courses
of action in such estimates. More than one USIB member
expressed serious misgivings. As a result the Director
agreed to submit the courses of action to McGeorge Bundy
(the President's Special Assistant for National Security
Affairs) for approval. When seized of the problem,
Mr. Bundy indicated that the Secretary of State was the
proper official for such clearance. So the TR went to
Mr. Rusk who reviewed the courses of action and changed
them in several important respects. In the end the sub-
ject itself was overtaken by events and the estimate was
killed. In the ONE development file it is (continued)
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The TRs of a contingency estimate offer a number
of special problems. More, perhaps than any other
species of NIE, would these TRs have to be taken back
to the requester for further elaboration. Had he in-
deed meant to include such and such within this or that
possible course of action? Had he deliberately neglected
to mention another course of action (or two or three)
which suggested itself? What time frame had he had in
mind, when would he propose to initiate his first course?--
soon? Had he clearly in mind the situation in the coun-
try at issue against which the courses would be brought
to play? If so what was it?
Once these and other questions had been treated
by the requester there would be others when the TRs came
before the Reps. In these cases difficulties with the
TRs persisted, and legitimately so.
C. Contributions
As already indicated, one function of the Trs was
to instruct the research specialists within each of the
(continued) known as SNIE 10-8-65. (See footnote 43
following.)
Parenthetically it was this particular incident
which stirred me to drafting a first version of this
essay. I had in mind an audience which I hoped would
include our Director.
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IAC agencies to begin the preparation of their written
contributions to the forthcoming NIE. The formal texts
dealing with this matter probably begin (somewhat murkily)
with the first Directive of the NIA (8 February 1946)
whose paragraph 9 reads:
You [the DCI] are authorized to request
of other Federal departments and agencies any
information or assistance required by you in
the performance of your authorized mission.
[i.e. the production of national intelligence]
DCIC 3/1 of 8 July 1948 gives a deal more
precision to the matter. Paragraph 3(a)(4) states:
3. National Intelligence Reports and Estimates:
a. Upon initiation of a report or esti-
mate, other than under exceptional circumstances
as described in paragraph (e) below, the Central
Intelligence Agency will notify each departmental
intelligence organization of: .
(4) The requirements for departmental
contributions in each case, in accordance with
departmental responsibilities and capabilities,
taking into consideration departmental material
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already in the hands of the Central Intelligence
Agency. (emphasis added)
And 3(c)(1) goes on to give a bit of confirmation:
C. Under Normal Procedures:
(1) The Central Intelligence Agency
will prepare an initial draft of the report or
estimate, utilizing available departmental con-
tributions. During this period departmental per-
sonnel will be available for consultation with
CIA analysts with due regard to internal Agency
demands and commitments under existing liaison
arrangements. (emphasis added)
This wording reflected two significant concepts.
First, the contribution to an estimate might take the
form of departmental intelligence already published as
part of an IAC agency's own production program, or of a
written piece specially prepared in response to the Terms
of Reference, or of an informal oral communication. Second,
failure on the part of an agency to contribute would not
prevent CIA from going ahead with the production of an
estimate. Thus these old texts sufficed to validate the
43/
new demand for contributions for all NIEs, SEs, and SIEs,
43. SEs (Special Estimates) and SIEs (Special Intelli-
gence Estimates) had the standing of the NIEs. (continued)
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except a few produced under circumstances of varying
degrees of urgency.
The DCID (3/5 of 1 September 1953) which super-
seded the old 3/1 did add some precision and bite to
the former text. Its relevant passage is:
Nolmal Preparation
Estimates will normally be prepared in four
stages:
a. Terms of Reference and Contributions--
[The Board of National Estimates], after consulta-
tion with the IAC agencies, will circulate Terms
of Reference indicating the scope of the esti-
mate and the intelligence material needed. The
agencies will then prepare contributions and
submit them to the Board. (emphasis added)
But in actual fact the new language changed
nothing in either attitudes or institutions. The
written contribution had been so well established in
the customary law under the Smith rule that the new
DCID was not really necessary except as a precaution
against future backsliding.
(continued) As subsequently explained in Chapter K (Number-
ing of Estimates), ultimately the designation Special Na-
tional Intelligence Estimate (SNIE) replaced the SEs and
SIEs, embracing everything which for one reason or another
varied from the normal dissemination of the NIEs.
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For the first.decade of the National Intelligence
Estimates (1950-1960) the written contributions which
the IAC agencies made to the institution were a highly
important ingredient. They were the product of intelli-
gence research organizations which had experienced staffs
and rich files. Often they were solid, scholarly pieces
of work well beyond what could have been produced in the
CIA. This was particularly the case with respect to the
contributions of the State Department's Bureau of Intel-
ligence Research. The contributions not only lent a
solid factual underpinning to the estimates, but were as
well a tangible sign of a collaborator's participation
in a community enterprise. Analysts in every IAC agency
began to talk about "our estimate on Taiwan . . ." and
"what we said in the last NIE on Egypt."
With the passage of time some changes occurred.
Two resulted from bureaucratic shake-ups in the first
years of the Kennedy administration. The first of these
was the establishment of the DIA, which brought a wither-
ing away of the research staffs in the service intelli-
gence organizations, and this well before the DIA could
compensate for the loss. The other was a drastic re-
duction in the strength of the Bureau of Intelligence
Research in the State Department which had been the
principal contributor to the non-military sections of
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all of the estimates. During the fifties it had enjoyed
something close to an exclusive in political and so-
cial intelligence matters worldwide and in all economic
intelligence matters outside the Sino-Soviet Bloc. With
its decline its main effort had to go to the fulfillment
of its strictly departmental obligations. Contributions
to the NIEs received a much lower order of priority.
Both INR and the service intelligence organiza-
tions, which had already become a bit weary of compos-
ing long contributions only to have small fragments of
the work show up in the finished NIE, were happy as we
began to put greater stress upon the use of oral contri-
butions. This device substituted an afternoon's dis-
cussion (with the Board and the ONE Staff) for days or
weeks of research and writing.
There was another factor in the decline of out-
side contributions. As intelligence research and anal-
ysis capabilities
declined (and DIA
components of the
of the State and military departments
was slow to fill the void), analytical
CIA gathered strength principally to
service the needs of the Agency in general and the DCI
in particular. We in ONE became a beneficiary. We were
well pleased when ORR expanded its economic expertise to
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embrace the non-Communist world and got more heavily
involved than heretofore in Soviet military matters.
With these changes the importance of written contri-
butions to the NIEs as made by sister agencies waned
considerably in the last half of our second decade--
and that irrespective of what the DCIDs had ordained.
The written contribution did not of course dis-
appear. It still remained the essential ingredient in
a few categories of the NIEs: the military estimates
(especially those centering on Soviet and Chinese mili-
tary hardware), the estimates dealing principally with
scientific and technical matters (the series on space
exploration, nuclear energy, etc.), the estimates with
important economic aspects.
As the DIA gained strength its written contribu-
tions to the military estimates grew in importance.
But meanwhile in CIA, early successes by ORR in costing
the Soviet military establishment had led ORR to broaden
its interest. With a growing expertise it branched out
into a number of aspects of the Soviet military includ-
ing military manpower, order of battle, and the produc-
tion and deployment of advanced weapons. In the mid
60s, ORR's team of military analysts became the nucleus
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of a new office, the Office of Strategic Research. The
OSR's support of the NIE program and its excellent writ-
ten contributions to the military estimates were of con-
tinuing importance.
The purely economic functions of ORR which in
the beginning had been largely confined to matters re-
lating to the economics of Bloc (Communist China included)
countries expanded in time to cover the non-Communist
world as well. As the State Department's capability for
economic research and analysis in this area declined, ORR
and its successor, the OER, moved in. It made an increas-
ingly authoritative contribution to virtually every NIE
44. With ORR's founding in the early days of General
Smith, it assumed a primary responsibility for this func-
tion and fulfilled it for four years without benefit of a
formal directive. This finally came with DCID 15/1
(14 September 1954) whose relevant parts are:
Pursuant to the provisions of NSCID Nos. 1, 3,
and 15, and for the purpose of strengthening
the over-all governmental intelligence struc-
ture for the production and coordination of
foreign economic intelligence relating to the
national security, the following policies and
operating procedures are hereby established:
2. Allocation of Primary Production Re-
sponsibilities.
c. Production of all economic intel-
ligence of the Soviet Bloc is the responsibility
of the Central Intelligence Agency (continued)
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which had an economic dimension.
Contributions on scientific and technical sub-
jects continued an essential ingredient in a number of
the NIEs. These were furnished by the analytical of-
fices of CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology,
and by some of the USIB committees.
Less formally, the CIA Clandestine Services were
also contributors. In Mr. Dulles's day and at his
order, the then DD/P was often requested to cable its
appropriate foreign stations for a substantive input
to a given NIE.
(continued) except as indicated herein. In addition,
it will supplement the intelligence produced by other
agencies by conducting such independent analyses and
studies as may be necessary to produce integrated eco-
nomic intelligence on the Bloc.
A footnote added: "As used herein, Soviet Bloc
includes the USSR, Communist China, Poland, Czechoslo-
vakia, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, Albania, Soviet-
occupied portions of Germany and Austria, and Communist-
dominated portions of Korea and Indo-China."
45. NSCID #3 of 17 February 1972 stated flatly, "The
[CIA] shall produce economic, scientific and technical
intelligence." Period. No qualifying phrase, no geo-
graphical or ideological limitation. Earlier versions
of NSCID #3, however, all the way back to 13 January
1948, came equipped with loopholes providing the neces-
sary authority, e.g., that any of the IAC agencies could
produce economic intelligence "in accordance with its re-
spective needs," or that the CIA could produce as wide a
range of intelligence "as may be necessary to discharge
the statutory responsibilities of the [DCI]."
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Conducted with even less formality was ONE's
relationship with the CIA Office of Current Intelli-
gence. I recall no formal written contributions from
OCI, but the fruitful man-to-man relationship between
staffers in the two offices, the active role played by
OCI experts in many coordination meetings, plus the
full range of OCI's publications was in more than one
sense an important contribution to the NIEs.
46/
Contributions to NIEs by USIB Subcommittees
Joint Atomic Energy Intelligence Committee
The role of the most senior of the IAC sub-
47/
committees, the JAEIC, in the production of NIEs was
for long a special one. In a very important yearly
46. See Wayne Jackson, History, II part I (esp pp.
64-69, re JAEIC; and pp. 34-58, re GMIC/GMAIC) for an
excellent treatment of coordinated national intelli-
gence in the areas being discussed in the next pages
of this essay.
47. The germ of the JAEIC was the "Intelligence Unit"
of the wartime Manhattan Engineer District. It moved
to the CIG in the early days and led in a community-wide
intelligence effort on foreign atomic energy matters.
By the end of 1947 there was a Joint Nuclear Energy In-
telligence Committee which two years later (21 November
1949) became the Joint Atomic Energy Intelligence Com-
mittee under the canopy of the community's Scientific
Intelligence Committee (see DCID 3/3 - 28 October 1949).
In 1952 it emerged from the SIC canopy, (continued)
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estimate relating to all phases of the Soviet nuclear
energy program, the JAEIC was far more than a contribu-
tor. It was the drafter, both before and after General
Smith's arrival. Before 1953, JAEIC supervised inter-
departmental research on Soviet atomic energy matters,
drafted the estimate, and presented the finished docu-
ment directly to the DCI and through him to the IAC
without reference to the Board of National Estimates.
In 1953 Mr. Dulles as DCI nominally altered these
procedures. He ruled that henceforth the Chairman of
the JAEIC would complete action on the Soviet atomic
energy estimate and pass it to the Board of National
Estimates for presentation to the IAC. There were sev-
eral reasons for this decision, the most important of
which was essentially editorial. For the JAEIC, with
all its expertise in the mysterious reaches of atomic
energy and in its talent for wringing sense out of the
difficult and fragmentary evidence relating to the
Soviet program, was in the habit of writing highly tech-
nical papers comprehensible mainly to a highly sophisti-
cated audience of scientists. Since the NIE audience
(continued) Paragraph 2,c,1 of DCID 3/4 (14 August 1952)
reads: "The Joint Atomic Energy Intelligence Committee
is hereby reconstituted as a permanent interdepartmental
committee with the same structure and functions as before."
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was anything but that, the Board of National Estimates
felt that the JAEIC should write the body of the paper
in any way it pleased and permit the Board to preside
over the drafting (with JAEIC's approval) of the sum-
mary and conclusions which would probably be the only
part of the estimate that its important lay audience
would have time to read.
Needless to say, such a decision was poison to
the Chairman of JAEIC, and in cavalier insubordination
he refused to take it. The JAEIC estimate of 1953 went
to the IAC in time for its deadline, but without bene-
fit of the ONE's editorial skills. The next year eva-
sion was more skillfully arranged--the JAEIC draft was,
to be sure, sent to the Board of National Estimates, but
without enough time for the Board to do more than read
it before it was due at the IAC. The next year, under
a new Chairman of JAEIC, the Board was able to fulfill
the DCI's intent of two years back. And in 1956, the
whole procedure was given legal standing in a new An-
nex ("C"-24 January 1956) to a long-standing DCID (3/4 -
48/
14 August 1952). Henceforth the JAEIC went on
48. Relevant paragraphs of the DCID read:
1. The mission of the Joint Atomic Energy Intel-
ligence Committee (JAEIC) is to maintain the (continued)
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producing its draft paper on nuclear energy matters in
the USSR, which stayed in draft status until the Board
and the Reps cleared it for transmission to the DCI and
the IAC/USIB.
The Guided Missile and Astronautics Committee
An interdepartmental committee comparable to
JAEIC was set up in 1956 to deal with intelligence re-
lated to guided missiles. Its creation had not been
easy. The DCI's motion to establish such an entity led
to a long controversy between the military intelligence
(continued) community approach to problems in the field
of atomic energy intelligence and to give added impetus
to individual efforts. To this end, the responsibilities
of the JAEIC include the following: . . .
f. Preparing coordinated drafts of national
estimates on atomic energy intelligence
and producing appropriate scientific con-
tributions in this field of intelligence
for other national intelligence estimates
as requested. (emphasis added)
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organizations and the rest of the community and was
finally settled in the Director's favor by the Secre-
tary of Defense. The functions assigned to GMIC (which
later added the study of astronautics to its charter
and changed its acronym to GMAIC)appear in an annex to
that long-standing DCID 3/4 (14 August 1952). This is
49/
Annex D and dates from 31 January 1956. Unlike the
charter of JAEIC, that of GMIC/GMAIC directs that the
organization, inter alia, make "coordinated contribu-
tions to [NIEs]." It has done so.
The Economic Intelligence Committee
During the first years of ONE's existence (1950-
1952) the Economic Intelligence Committee of the IAC
50/
made coordinated contributions to five NIEs. This
49. The relevant' text is:
1. The mission of the Guided Missile Intel-
ligence Committee (GMIC) is to strengthen the
community approach to problems in the field of
guided missile intelligence and to give added
impetus to individual efforts. To this end,
the responsibilities of the GMIC include the
following:
c. Preparing coordinated contributions
in the field of guided missile intelligence for na-
tional intelligence estimates. (emphasis added)
50. These were:
SE 27, Probable Effects of Various Courses (continued)
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work presented formidable problems of coordination:
that relating to NIE #40, for example, involved tasking
more than 20 departments and agencies of the government
and required a year to complete. Participants soon tired
of the bureaucratic complexities. The ONI refused to
make its contribution to NIE #56 through the EIC chan-
nel and submitted it directly to the ONE instead. There
were other defections in the case of NIE #59. With this
the EIC pretty well withdrew as a collective contributor
51/
to the NIEs.
(continued)
of Action with Respect to Communist China; SE 37,
Probable Effects on the Soviet Bloc of Certain
Courses of Action Directed at the Internal and
External Commerce of Communist China; NIE #40,
Relative Strategic Importance of East-West Trade
to the Soviet Orbit and to the Rest of the World;
NIE #56, Potential Insecurity of Foreign Areas of
Strategic Importance to the US; NIE #59, Relative
Effects of a Complete Severance of East-West Trade
on the Economic Capabilities of the Sino-Soviet
Bloc and the West.
51. The EIC made three more appearances in the NIE ef-
fort in 1956 and 1957.
It made contributions to two NIEs:
11-6-56, Capabilities and Trends of Soviet Science
and Technology, and 30-2-57, Near East Developments
Affecting US Interests. The EIC also coordinated a
footnote to SNIE 11-10-56, Soviet Actions in the
Middle East, and coordinated ORR's contribution to
NIE 11-1-57, Sino-Soviet Bloc Air Defense Capabili-
ties through Mid-1962.
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The Scientific Intelligence Committee
The Scientific Intelligence Committee, on the
other hand, was an iNmportant contributor to the NIEs
almost from the beginning. What follows is from a memo
from Karl Weber, the director of CIA's OSI and for many
years chairman of the SIC which was established by DCID
3/3 on 28 October 1949. The charter at this time
called only for the "preparation of coordinated reports,
showing IAC concurrence or rion-concurrence, which pre-
sent the best available intelligence.- Few, if any,
national-level reports appeared under this provision.
On 14 August 1952 DCID 3/3 was superseded by DCID 3/4
which renamed the Committee the Scientific Estimates
Committee (SEC) and gave it the function of integrating
"scientific and technical intelligence, as and when re-
quired for the production of national intelligence. . ."
This directive also handed over responsibility for
atomic energy intelligence to the JAEIC which was es-
tablished by the same directive. Again, except for sup-
port to the NIS, little national-level intelligence re-
sulted from this charter responsibility.
In February 1959 DCID 3/4 was replaced by DCID 3/5
(and the name "SEC" changed back to "SIC") which removed
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from the SIC the responsibility for guided missiles and
astronautical intelligence and directed the SIC "to pro-
duce: (1) drafts of National Intelligence Estimates,
(2) contributions to National Intelligence Estimates,
and (3) other interdepartmental intelligence as circum-
stances required." This is the first direct reference
to a role for the SIC in the NIE process.
The principal fields in which SIC contributions
to National Intelligence Estimates are made are in the
characteristics and performance of aircraft and naval
systems, radars and otherrelectronic devices, and in
biological and chemical warfare, biomedicine, R&D de-
cision-making, and scientific resources. Contributions
in these areas were made to NIEs 11-3, 11-8, 11-14, 11-1,
13-3 and 13-8 routinely. (These were the NIEs devoted
to highly important aspects of the Soviet and Chinese
military establishments. Most of them were issued an-
nually.) Contributions covering other technical and
geographical areas were made when requested, (including
Soviet military research and development).
The Scientific Intelligence Committee (then being
called the Scientific Estimates Committee) undertook its
first national-level study on Soviet science and tech-
nology in 1956. The Terms of Reference were prepared
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in cooperation with ONE; no separate SEC issuance was
planned. JAEIC and others shared in the product which
was published as NIE 11-6-56, Capabilities and Trends
in Soviet Science and Technology. Updatings of this
NIE were prepared in 1959 and 1962.
D. Drafting in the ONE
In the pre-Smith days the CIA's responsibility
for doing a first draft of the National Intelligence
(Report or) Estimate was clearly established in DCID
52/
3/1 of 8 July 1948. So it continued in the Smith
regime.
Although the formal directive was not altered
for three years, there were changes with the early NIEs
of General Smith's time. Most obviously, since CIA's
52. Relevant paragraphs of the 1948 DCID read:
3. National Intelligence Reports and
Estimates: . . .
Under Normal Procedures:
(1) The Central Intelligence
Agency will prepare an initial draft of
the report or estimate, utilizing available
departmental contributions. During this
period departmental personnel will be avail-
able for consultation with CIA analysts with
due regard to internal agency demands and
commitments under existing liaison arrange-
ments. (emphasis added)
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Office of Reports and Estimates which had done the
drafting in the Hillenkoetter days no longer existed,
the new Office of National Estimates took up the func-
tion. Less obviously, the tentativeness in the DCID
about the drafters "utilizing available departmental
contributions" disappeared. With General Smith making
clear his desire for full community cooperation he got
it. There was no question of contributions not being
available. The language of the new DCID (3/5 of 1 Sep-
53/
tember 1953) reflected what had become the invariable
rule for all estimates except those composed under con-
ditions of great urgency.
As to the drafting itself, there were no rules
except the unwritten rules to keep the paper as short
as possible, focus on the principal concerns of the
policymaker, and forgo excursions into any factual data
except those necessary to sustain an important agrument.
Perhaps the most important unwritten rule was that which
53. The relevant paragraph of the 1953 DCID, entitled
Production of National Intelligence Estimates, reads:
b. Drafting and Board Consideration--
After considering the contributions, and
such consultation with any contributing
agency which may be appropriate, the Board
[of National Estimates] will prepare a draft.
(emphasis added)
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ordained that any paper longer than just a few para-
54/.
graphs be led off by a set of very short conclusions.
Within the ONE, there were other conventions
which attended the writing of this draft. After some
-experimentation with the Office's organization we adopted
a regional breakdown of the staff. One of these staffs
would undertake the drafting of papers appropriate to
its area. A member of the Board of National Estimates
was designated as the officer in charge. He discussed
the TRs with the staff, presided over a meeting of his
colleagues on the Board and later over a meeting with
the Reps for their clearance. He now stayed in touch
with the staff as it wrote the draft and presided once
again over a session with the Board to perfect the draft
prior to its dispatch to the USIB agencies. In sessions
devoted to estimates of special interest to the DD/P
(DD/O) and to which it had made important contributions,
officers of the Clandestine Services were present. As a
54. In the early years of the NIE we almost always
did draft conclusions as a part of the draft estimate.
In time we found that this was often a complete waste of
time, for as the paper was altered in the coordination
session, a new set of conclusions was necessary. Ac-
cordingly we would frequently omit doing the conclusions
until the paper was in final form, and then do them as
a last piece of business with the Reps.
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general rule they felt freer to discuss the paper within
the family than at subsequent sessions with the Reps in
attendance. Often, such family gatherings would be at-
tended by the knowledgeable specialists from the overt
analytical offices who might themselves have composed
a written contribution.
Drafting - the Estimative Vocabulary
There was a convention for which I personally
struggled: this was in behalf of a consistent usage of
words of estimative probability. What for example did
we mean by "possible," what by "probable," "doubtful,"
"almost certain," "almost impossible" and so on? Any
piece of writing devoted to something imperfectly known,
not known, or even unknowable--which after all is the
very matrix materna of an intelligence estimate (whether
spelled with a small "e" or capital "E" as in National
Intelligence Estimate)--is certain to draw upon the lexi-
con of probability. Early in the game (in March 1951 to
be exact, and in the context of the twenty-ninth NIE in
the series - NIE 29), a colleague on the Board (Maxwell
Foster) and I began to worry as to whether or not the
language of the NIEs was actually conveying to our reader-
ship the kind of odds (or chances) for and against that
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we intended. Our concern had been galvanized when we
realized that an expression we had used in NIE #29:
"that an attack on Yugoslavia . . . should be considered
a serious possibility," had meant many different things
to the ONE staff and the Board and perhaps as well to
the IAC Reps and their Principals. A poll of the Board
of National Estimates revealed that one member thought
that the odds were about 80-20 for an attack, another
member 20-80, and the rest put the odds scattered be-
tween these extremes.
Foster and I set about trying to compose a table
of numerical odds such as would be permissible within the
inexact intelligence data we used and a list of words
which would correspond to five gradations or bands of
55/
odds. Our most important determination was to define
55. See my article "Words of Estimative Probability,"
Studies in Intelligence, (Vol. 8, No. 4, Fall 1964) pp.
49-65. It contains the following table:
of Possibility
100% - Certainty
93%,
give or take about
6%
Almost certain
75%,
give or take about
12%
Probable
50%,
give or take about
10%
Chances about even
30%,
give or take about
10%
Probably not
7%,
give or take about
5%
Almost certainly not
0% - Impossibility
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the "possible" as the large area between "certainty"
and "impossibility;" that is, the area of the whole spec-
trum of odds between 99-1 and 1-99. We decided that
our greatest disfavor was to slip into common usage
and make "possible" do duty for some statement of odds
by giving it a modifier and writing such expressions
as "a serious possibility," "barely or remotely pos-
sible," "a good possibility.." "Possible" should never
be so used; it should stand naked of modifiers and con-
vey that the thing we had in mind could happen (it was
neither certain nor impossible) but that we were unable
to cite odds on its likelihood of happening.
Varying degrees of likelihood or probability
should be conveyed by a use of the words in the table
56/
or by one of the synonyms in everyday usage.
Needless to say my endeavors to standardize the
vocabulary of estimative words did not meet with uni-
versal approval. My principal adversaries were those
56. Ibid. pp. 58-59. For example "conceivable" can
do duty for possible, as can "perhaps" and such verb
forms as "could," "may," "might." "Virtually certain,"
"highly likely," or "overwhelming odds (or) chances" can
legitimately serve for "almost certain." I will go no
further with these synonyms. Interested readers should
see pp. 58-59 of my article.
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to whom I have referred as poets: "Their attitude to-
ward the problem of communication seems to be funda-
mentally defeatist. They appear to believe the most
a writer can achieve when working in a speculative
area of human affairs is communication in only the
broadest general sense. If he gets the wrong message
57/
across or no message at all--well, that is life."
In opposition, I have ranged my supporters whom I have
called the mathematicians. These are people who real-
ize the difficulties of conveying intended meaning and
are determined to overcome these difficulties by rigor-
ously holding to a limited vocabulary of odds even at
some sacrifice of artistic elegance. As one of the
leaders of the mathematicians I did gain some adherents,
however, and gradually, during years of guerrilla war
both within the ONE and in our dealings with the Reps,
the NIEs showed that whereas no ironclad rules had been
58/
established, convention had taken root.
57. Ibid. p. 57.
58. The most willing followers of my recommended vo-
cabulary were our military colleagues. Years later when
the DIA reorganized its estimates work under General
Daniel Graham, my table of values was printed on the
inside cover of DIA estimates and the vocabulary rigor-
ously used in the substance of the document.
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Throughout the coordinating proceedings the
Board was acting in behalf of the Director. It was
mindful of its responsibility to formulate judgments
and estimates which it not only felt duty-bound to
recommend to the Director but which it could also sus-
tain in evidence--as far as it went. Usually the Board
would cheerfully carry the burden of making such judg-
ments in the Director's name up to the eve of the USIB
meeting or until the DCI could study the finished co-
ordinated text. If at such a moment the DCI was not
convinced and desired to alter things, it was the Board's
job to make the necessary amendments to the text.
On some occasions, however, the Board hesitated
to commit itself--let alone the Director--without alert-
ing him to the issue at hand and getting his guidance.
Needless to say this sort of issue had to be a block-
buster: e.g., was the USSR probably or probably not
competing with the US for the first manned lunar land-
ing? Was the USSR's so-called Tallin system probably
being designed primarily as a defense against ballistic
missiles or against air breathing vehicles? Clearly on
such matters the boss should be briefed into the problem
from the beginning, and just as clearly the Board ought
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to have his preliminary thoughts before it began its
meetings with the Reps.
Our endeavors in this twin objective were often
frustrated by circumstances beyond normal human control.
From the point of view of the Board, a Director ought
to see the importance of a decision he would have to
make in, say, two months. He ought, accordingly to
find the time to be briefed on the substance of the sub-
ject, the evidence, the favored conclusion, plus the most
obvious alternative conclusions. For Directors--'always
short on time--to spend two hours with a team of briefers,
and many more than that with hundreds of pages of recom-
mended reading--from the text books all the way to the
highly classified intelligence studies--was silly, it
not downright impossible. All the more so when such
Directors Julea: a) that the final decision was a long
way off, and b) that in the interim new evidence, new
hypotheses, and even new conclusions were highly prob-
able. Why invest this amount of time so early in the
game? The Board's reply (had it ever been given) would
have denied none of these distressing probabilities, but
would have tried to make a point more acceptable to schol-
ars than to busy executives: namely, that topics as
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complicated as this one are not usually mastered in a
single sitting and that time supposedly wasted in pre-
liminary briefings and open discussion was time invested
in the best sense of the word. What we on the Board
really wanted was for the Director to drop everything
else and sit with us during the critical phases of the
preparation of the paper. What the Director for his
part really wanted was a Board which could master the
subject and just before the deadline fill him with in-
stant widsom. It is not surprising that neither party
got its druthers.
In matters of less importance we put our draft
before the Reps pretty much as if it had the Director's
blessing. We played it that way to the end, and if the
Director, at the climactic session of the USIB, decided
it was not to his taste--that was life. In actual fact,
matters were not quite so brutal as this. I will deal
with the softener, that is, our pre-USIB briefing of the
DCI a little later in the essay.
E. Coordination of the Draft with the Reps
The important moments in the life of all NIEs
came sometime after the Board draft had been perfected
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and sent to the agencies. Upon receipt of the draft,
their experts went over it and readied their comments.
These theReps\orouldbringwith them to the first coordi-
nating session.
Up to this point the draft was a CIA Board of
National Estimates draft, though resting in some way
or another upon contributions from the agencies. From
now on, it started to become a community draft. The
object of both the Board and the Reps was the same: to
produce a new draft to which, without hedges or fudges
or ambiguities, all parties could subscribe as contain-
ing the best agreed judgments on the substantive im-
59/
ponderables to which the paper was addressed. Should
success crown this objective, the paper could go on to
the USIB principals and win their concurrence. But in
59. Keith Clark, who served on the Staff and Board
of ONE for 20 years, read an early draft of this manu-
script and offered the following as a useful commentary
on my use of the word "agreed" in this sentence.
--There was another trend in the 1960s which
I have always considered a very healthy and
important one which is not mentioned here. I
refer to the idea of stating various sides of
a question rather than coming out with a single
most probable judgment. I always thought that
Allen Dulles, for all his great qualities, did
a certain amount of lasting damage with his dic-
tum that national estimates had necessarily (continued)
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the event that any of the Reps found bits of the esti-
mate in which he could not concur, he was free to plead
his case before the Board of National Estimates and his
colleagues and, if he failed to sway them, to take a
dissent or a reservation.
Dissenting views of the Reps can be put into
three classes. First, there were minor differences
between what the Rep believed and the text of the pa-
per under consideration. These differences were argued
(continued) to give a single best answer to every question
addressed on the grounds that we were paid to estimate,
and if we did not do it, someone else would. I well
remember a feeling that we had made a breakthrough when
estimates began, some time in the mid-60's, to use the
device of offering a judgment, giving the reasons for
it, and then proceeding to acknowledge that it might
prove wrong and going ahead to explore what appeared
to be the short end of the odds. I feel it was often
more useful to treat the variable factors in discus-
sing the future than to offer a prophecy about the out-
come. This trend came to a head in the Helms philos-
ophy that he was responsible for producing and circu-
lating these estimates but that he need not take a po-
sition on every substantive question addressed in them.
This approach, whatever its bureaucratic merits, was
realistic and intellectually honest. It showed a de-
cent awareness of the uncertainties and Hunanswerabili-
ties" of many of the problems we wrestled with. After
all, it is hard to square the fiction that the DCI per-
sonally believed every judgment written in the text of
an NIE with the fact (alluded to later in this manuscript)
that General Smith had often not read the text prior to
the USIB meeting.
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out at length and in many cases were amicably resolved
by textual changes which were not too fuzzy and yet
satisfied all parties.
Second, there were differences which came from
the opinions of some important component of the Rep's
organization, for example from one of the political
desks in State. The Rep might or might not share the
view he put forward, but felt bound to make a good try.
In such a case, when the Board member in charge of the
paper felt that the subject had been discussed long
enough, he would terminate it, offering to the Rep the
right to register a dissent. In such cases, the Rep
might be offered a Tiger Medal or the Order of the Lion,
a symbol of his having put up a good fight for a col-
league's viewpoint with which he himself may have had
little personal sympathy.
Third, there were differences which came up in
our meetings with the Reps which were not minor at all.
The Rep might content himself with a so-called reserva-
tion, but the nature of the subject and the forcefulness
of his defense indicated that here was an irreconcilable
conflict of view that was destined to mature into a full-
blown dissent at the level of the USIB.
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Anyone wanting to discuss such conflicts without
being preachy must insist that his reader understand a
few fairly self-evident truths:
1. The cause of the disagreement was rarely,
if ever, a matter of one party knowing more than the
other, or being privy to convincing evidence denied
to the other. There is no case in my remembrance when
all parties to the dispute did not have full access to
all of the relevant available information.
2. The disagreements, in short, arose not in
the area of the knowable and known, but invariably in
the zone of the knowable and still unknown, and in that
ultimate zone of the literally unknowable. In other
words, they were disagreements in judgment; judgment
as to the relevance and reliability of the evidence;
judgment as to what conclusions the evidence seemed to
support; judgment as to which of several possible con-
clusions seemed soundest and best.
3. The matter of judgment was not necessarily
a function of the relative IQs of the disputants. Both
sides were frequently represented by people of high
ability.
4. To claim that one side had a corner on Jovian
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objectivity while the other was consumed by an ignoble
subjectivism is downright silly in its unprovability.
At best it can only lead to another intractable dif-
ference of opinion and at worst, a fist fight.
Having said all this, some of what follows will
nevertheless sound preachy, nay offensive to the one-
time dissenters. Bear in mind that they were speaking
for their USIB Principals, and that the we, in this
case, were the members of the DCI's Board of National
Estimates. They were dissenting from us, which is not
the same thing as saying that they were dissenting from
some awesome universal truth comparable to the speed of
light or the force of gravity. We ourselves would ac-
knowledge fallibility, while always holding that we had
the better case.
Of several kinds of irreconcilable differences,
one might begin with those which a man from Mars would
have settled with a flip of a coin.
In these cases, neither party could sustain his
position with anything more substantial
ated argument from analogy or a feeling
sonal viscera. For example, one of the
to answer a silly hypothetical question
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provided by the
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requester: How would country X (an important member
of the Third World) behave in the event of an armed
conflict between the US and the USSR? The Board of
National Estimates first tried to duck the question;
failing that, the Board and later the DCI gave a care-
fully hedged judgment that country X almost certainly
would not voluntarily align itself with the Soviet
side. One USIB member, surely with no more to go on
than we had had, took the contrary view: "Yes, country
X would probably support the Soviets," he felt. There
was no readily identifiable ulterior purpose behind
the dissenter's position. He just didn't believe the
estimate in the text and, in conscience, had to say
as much.
There was, however, a much more serious range of
dissents which to us seemed to spring full-blown from
that year's budget of the dissenting service. If it
was a time in which the USAF hoped for an appropriation
for, say, R&D funds for a nuclear-powered aircraft, any
comment on Soviet coolness towards such a Soviet project
would draw an Air Force dissent. The obvious, though
perhaps unfair, inference was that the USAF felt it was
likely to get funds for its own project if it were esti-
mated that the Soviets were on a comparable track.
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Similarly, in the late 1950's the NIEs carry
some important dissents relating to probable Soviet
intentions with respect to the future strength of their
jet heavy bomber force (the Bison force). There were
those, led by the Board and staff of the ONE, who thought
the Soviets would probably augment the force in future
years but augment it very modestly. To this view the
USAF dissented, holding that the Soviets would continue
to give a high priority to the Bison force and enlarge
it very considerably. It was difficult at the time to
dissociate this estimate completely from our Air Force's
own policy which favored a large inventory of B-52s.
Still another range of dissents seemed to der-
ive from an understandable desire to defend the mission
of the dissenter's service. Consider the attitude of
Naval Intelligence in cases when the absence of a Navy
dissent might be considered as the Navy's admission of
a failure in one of its missions. This had to do with
the DRV's (North Vietnam's) capability to resupply its
own and associated forces in South Vietnam. A state-
ment in an NIE intimating that the DRV was capable of
running supplies south via shore-hugging junks would
bring a dissent from the USN. One of our Navy's very
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Important missions in the Vietnam war was the inter-
diction of exactly this sort of traffic. Naval obser-
vers in the theatre kept a scrupulous account of their
service's inshore operations (Market Time). According
to their own figures, nothing, repeat nothing, got
through their blockade. Yet the very large quantitites
of material turning up in the south and in areas near
the sea did invite a presumption that the blockade was
not perhaps absolutely watertight. No such intimation--
however lightly and tentatively worded--could be made
without provoking a dissent from the ONI.
Often dissents arose not so much in defense of a
service's good name but in defense of some piece of
firmly held service doctrine. For example, the USAF
would for a period of time have dissented to an esti-
mate that the Soviets might be considering a mobile ICBM
system. Our airmen would have taken this stand because
the highest policy echelons of their own Air Force had
decided that a rail-mobile system was impractical for
the SAC missile force.
Along a somewhat similar line, an estimate that
the Soviets probably would not fight an indecisive con-
ventional war without invoking the use of nuclear weapons
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in the early 1960s brought a dissent from Allay Intel-
ligence. For some time, it was the view in certain
high quarters of the Army that all-out conventional war
between NATO and Warsaw Pact forces need not escalate
to a nuclear war. Indeed, the consequences of being
the first to use nuclear weapons would be so horrendous
that Army Intelligence, knowing that the US would not do
it, was willing to estimate that the Soviets would like-
wise refrain. Hence, an estimate allowing for the con-
trary invited an Army objection. To draw a permissible
inference is to point out the obvious. If postulated
armed conflict, say, in Europe could lead to the sort
of large-scale fighting of World War II and with con-
ventional weapons, the Army had a very good reason
(budgetary, doctrinal, pride of service) to keep press-
ing for a full strength ground force. Per contra, an
estimate that held that small, conventional wars between
the nuclear powers would inevitably and perhaps speedily
escalate to all-out nuclear conflict (largely the mission
of the USAF) would be virtually to estimate the US Army
out of business.
But pause here and reflect. Is this sort of de-
fense of Army doctrine to be handled with pejoratives?
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In this case, as in others, the Army Rep and his col-
leagues and his chief and his chief's chief had for
years equated the capabilities of the US Army with
nothing less than the national security. This was
a tradition all of them had grown up in; it was the
air they breathed from infancy. In their scale of
values, first came the country, and second, the force
necessary to protect and preserve it. They could not
question the necessity of the latter, given their high-
minded patriotism. Hence, to speak of all of their
dissents as born of a narrow parochialism is not to tell
the full story. But unfortunately from where I sat not
every one of their dissents seemed to grow out of a self-
less love of country. Some, as I have indicated, were
pretty hard to swallow in this coating.
There was still another range of dissents--and
nonmilitary ones--which were seemingly straight policy-
oriented in the usual sense of the word. In the State
Department, INR was under instruction to "coordinate"
draft NIEs with the relevant policy desks and take the
desks' views into consideration. Since the latter com-
manded the department's heavy artillery--far heavier
than that of the intelligence arm--INR Reps upon oc-
casion came to interagency meetings as apologists for
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a policy that the department was championing. If the
NIE swerved in a direction which seemed to disfavor the
policy, the Rep would take .a reservation and his Princi-
pal a dissent.
In the first year or two of the Smith incumbency,
the matter of reservations and tentative dissent was an
institution not light-heartedly accepted by the Reps.
Many of them were long in understanding that the paper
being coordinated was the DCI's, and that the Board of
National Estimates was his collective spokesman. Upon
occasion when the Reps from, say, three IAC agencies
would agree upon a position at variance from that held
by the BNE, they would engage the chairman, claiming
that since theirs was the majority view it should take
its place in the text and that of the Board drop to the
role of a footnote of dissent. However reasonable such
'a procedure might sound, the Board would not, indeed
legally could not, yield to the pressure of majority
rule.
Those of us who engaged in the coordination of
the NIEs throughout the years recognized the dissent as
the indispensable corollary to the DCI's primacy. If
controversial NIEs had had to be coordinated by nego-
tiating out a generally acceptable compromise, they
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would have emerged as meaningless platitudes. If they
had had to be forced bodily down the throats of the dis-
approving Repsand U-Kj.r Principals, they would have led
to open rebellion soon followed by a disintegration of
the idea of national intelligence and its organizational
apparatus. It was the dissent which made possible the
safe navigation of these twin perils. It was the dis-
sent which permitted the issuance of a paper whose main
thrust was reasonably clear (though unfortunately not
invariably correct) and which could be studied in the
light of conflicting views expressed in the dissenting
footnotes.
No Rep who held a position at variance with the
Board draft would want to acknowledge defeat without a
fight. None would peacefully subside into a footnote
of dissent. In fact, that footnote was the very last
place he wanted to be. Finding the chairman too strong
for frontal attack, he would try various flanking man-
euvers. On his part, the chairman, well aware that he
was in the presence of a true difference of opinion,
had the duty to try to identify the difference, isolate
it, and oblige its champion to state it as a dissent.
As already indicated, this took some doing. In the
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process it was all but inevitable that some of the crisp
formulations of the draft would have been rounded to ac-
commodate still other potential dissenters whose views
were different, well-founded, and not too far from the
text of the draft.
I will return to the matter of the dissent in the
section of this essay devoted to the final action on a
given NIE: its day before the USIB.
As for any rules for the conduct of interagency
sessions devoted to the coordination of a draft NIE,
there were none in the formal sense. There were, how-
ever, many conventions which the Board chairmen tried
to enforce.
Meetings usually began with a solicitation of
general comments; was the draft a viable document? Any-
one feeling that it was not was asked to explain his ob-
jection. However laudable the attempt to get general
reactions, it was not often fruitful. Almost instantly
the objector-in-general was citing specific sentences
in specific paragraphs to make his point. When other
Reps followed this general procedure, the chairman would
cease his quest for general comments and move to consider
the paper paragraph by paragraph, starting at the begin-
ning. Reps could bring up their specific differences at
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the appropriate moment.
What went on from there depended largely on the
chairman and his ONE staffers, Board members concerned
with the paper, and the men and women around the table.
Consider first the Rep.
Over the years we met with hundreds, and not sur-
prisingly they were of many kinds. The best were old
intelligence pros, who knew their subject matter, the
case they wished to make, and could draft text that was
spare and clear. They would know when to compromise
and when to dig in and fight. They would come armed
with mimeographed sheets, one sheet to a paragraph or
two. The text which they bore showed the unsatisfactory
Board language reproduced but crossed out, and then the
substitute formulations, underscored or otherwise identi-
fied. With such preparations there was no doubt about
what the Rep wanted changed and how
effected. They were always able to
orally and defend it. If they came
the change could be
state their case
to the point where
they saw that they would have to take a dissent, they
would take it and permit the paper to move on.
There were Reps from the other end of the spec-
trum. Often they were unhappy time-servers in intelli-
gence with little substantive competence and no real
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feeling for what the NIE was all about. The most try-
ing of them would object to a paragraph on such grounds
as "it made him uncomfortable." Why? Well he couldn't
exactly say. In addition they would be long-winded,
short-tempered, and not being Willing to dissent, would
cheerfully settle for simple obstructionism.
Somewhere between was the Rep who was the city's
greatest expert on the subject at hand and who wanted
to write into the NIE everything that he knew. The bob-
tailing of descriptive and expository material character-
istic of the NIE was anathema to him. He never under-
stood why a policy maker could make up his mind about
some phase of Middle East oil without knowing a great
deal about the tribal customs of a small clan of Saudi
bedouins. An exasperated chairman once told such an ex-
pert, "See here, Harold, we aren't going to write into
this paper everything that you know; we're not even go-
ing to include everything that I know."
In such terms the chairman could stop time-consuming
discussion. There were however two considerations which
moderated the chairman's use of his power. One was the
force of good sense. The essence of the chairman's task
and that of the whole of the ONE was to produce coordinated
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intelligence papers. You cannot make good on such an
undertaking if you are being high-handed with your col-
laborators. In fact, if the alternative is multi-front
war, you must suffer a lot of fools. No one should be
permitted to leave a meeting without having had his op-
portunity to plead his case. A Board of National Esti-
mates which took too abrupt an attitude with the Reps
could have wrecked the NIE on the shoals of simple bad
public relations.
The other moderating force was the Rep's right
to appeal his case to his boss, and the boss's right to
bring it up at the USIB. Small matters which had a cer-
tain validity and which could be settled at the coordi-
nation session ought to be so settled. One of the chair-
man's duties was to reduce to a minimum, if not to zero,
matters which would be a waste of the top echelon's time.
Hence in the chairman's mind a rapid calculation took
place: how important was the point at issue? if merely
of marginal importance, how tenaciously was the Rep hold-
ing to it? if he lost the case, marginal or not, would
he take the matter to his boss to bring it before USIB
and losing, make it the subject of a formal footnote of
dissent? Obviously the chairman would prefer to settle
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minor matters at the meeting, �and just as obviously he
would not budge toward compromise on a matter of real
import to the sense of the paper. This would be the
point at which he would urge the Rep to table his dis-
60/
sent and let the task move forward.
In writing of
the NIEs, the matter
emphasized. It was,
the procedures of coordinating
of disagreement must perforce be
after' all, something of greatest
importance. Yet at the same time, in giving it its due,
one is led to neglect that other aspect of coordination--
the useful amendment, the helpful amplification of some-
thing skimped, the correction of a flat-footed error,
etc., all made possible by a wise and knowledgeable Rep.
Simple acceptance with thanks is not so much of a pro-
cedural point to warrant a separate paragraph. But just
this
were
were
is a point that must
improved from having
not improved or were
be made. Many, many more NIEs
passed through the process than
damaged.
This is, of course, not a fashionable view. There
60. Charles D. Cremeans, who served for many years in
the ONE as staffer and member of the Board of National
Estimates, has written an excellent article on the lore
of coordinating the NIE's. See his "Basic Psychology
for Intelligence Analysts," Studies in Intelligence
(Vol 15, No. 1, Winter 1971) pp, 109-114.
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has been at least one from the ONE itself who behaved
as if anything done to alter his draft damaged it.
His work was a perfection, he thought, and he resented
changes by his fellow staffers, members of the Board,
and above all by the Reps. Needless to say, the man
was as wrong as he was vain.
But suppose it resulted in a paper which was not
that much better; suppose that the draft had actually
lost something as.a result of passing the critical ob-
stacle race of coordination. In my view any losses suf-
fered were many times compensated for from the fact that
the finished paper was an agreed community document. Ob-
viously this sort of essay is not the place to extol the
virtues of the NIE, but in rehearsing the laborious pro-
cess which attended its production, I should say that in
61/
my opinion it was manifestly worth while.
So much for the details of how a coordination
session was conducted. It is far more important to em-
phasize the underlying value of the process taken as a
whole. A good coordination meeting was not simply a
61/ See Ray S. Cline, "Is Intelligence Over-Coordi-
nated?", Studies in Intelligence (Vol. 1, No. 4, Fall
1957) pp. 11-18, and the reply in the same issue by R. J.
Smith, "Coordination and Responsibility," pp. 19-26.
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comparison of rival texts; it (and the study and prepa-
ration that preceded it) constituted a serious exami-
nation by informed people of issues agreed to be signifi-
cant.
It was of basic importance for the ONE, as modera-
tor of the coordination process, to have a reputation of
nonpartisanship and fairmindedness. This reputation had
not only to be earned in the early years; it had to con-
tinue to be deserved by succeeding members of the Board
and ONE Staff, and recognized by a succession of Agency
Reps. By and large, I think we managed to establish and
maintain this reputation over the years, so that the basis
for a cooperative venture within the intelligence commu-
nity was a solid one.
Given this foundation, the process of coordinating
a paper could be rewarding. The atmosphere became uncon-
genial to special pleading and to the urging of a paro-
chial point of view by a particular agency. On many oc-
casions, we saw a Rep come to a meeting prepared to ad-
vance some far-out line of argument, and watched his
proposition wither and die in the cold blast of inter-
agency debate and joint examination of the evidence.
Thus, a major contribution of the NIE was its usefulness
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in elimination of absurdities.
But in addition to knocking down parochial preju-
dices, the process had a more positive aspect. It was
a forum where people from all over town could exchange
views, add to the store of community knowledge, and
refine and sharpen their assessments of the course of
events.
F. Production of NIEs Under Conditions of Urgency
The process I have discussed above would have re-
quired six to eight weeks for the average NIE. With,this
sort of time allowance, no one engaged felt that he was
coasting. For what we called the big papers--those de-
voted to various aspects of the Soviet military establish-
ment--the time often ran to six or eight months. Was it
possible to shorten things when necessary?
Starting with the earliest DCID dealing with the
production of national intelligence, there was a full
realization of the need for special procedures of haste.
DCID 3/1 of 8 July 1948 prescribes for two degrees of
urgency: what would be a normal rush job, and what we
62/
later called "crash."
62. Relevant paragraphs of the DCID read: (continued)
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Later DCID's carried a very considerably-shortened
(continued)
(3) d. Under Urgent Procedures:
(1) The Central Intelligence Agency
will, at the earliest opportunity, notify
the departments that it is undertaking an
urgent project.
(2) Upon notification by the Central
Intelligence Agency that an initial draft
paper has been prepared, appropriate depart-
mental or agency specialists and consultants
will meet to consider the paper.
(3) The Central Intelligence Agency will
prepare a final paper for concurrence or sub-
stantial dissent by the departmental agencies.
(4) After receipt of all replies, the
Central Intelligence Agency will publish the
statements of concurrence or substantial dis-
sent with the final paper.
e.
Under Exceptional Circumstances:
(1) The Central Intelligence Agency will
prepare and disseminate most urgent reports and
estimates immediately upon completion and with-
out formal coordination within the departmental
intelligence organizations.
(2) Reports and estimates so disseminated
will include a statement to the effect that nor-
mal departmental coordination has not been ac-
complished in each case.
(3) Such reports and estimates will sub-
sequently be subject to normal coordination
procedures cited in paragraph 3c 'the section
on "Normal Procedures"] above, and, if (continued)
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63/
version.
As General Cabell (DDCI, 1953-1962) once put it:
There are only two essentials to the production of an
NIE: "it has to be written, and it has to be acted upon
by the USIB." There was one case when matters were
actually shortened to just these two steps. The occa-
sion was the Middle East crisis of 1956, and the paper
in question was SNIE 11-9-56, Sino-Soviet Intentions in
the Suez Crisis (6 November 1956). British, French, and
Israeli forces had begun a military attack upon Egypt.
This was not to the taste of the Kremlin. Late in the
day of 5 November, we received word that Premier Bulganin
had sent a stiff, indeed a threatening, note to the Prime
Ministers of Britain and France. Mr. Allen Dulles was
(continued)
necessary, redisseminated upon completion
of this process.
63. The language of DCID 3/5 (1 September 1953) and
of DCID 1/1 (21 April 1958) and DCID 1/1 (5 August 1959 is:
4. Preparation under Exceptional Circumstances:
Any of the steps listed in 3a, b, and c,
above may be omitted under exceptional or un-
usually urgent circumstances. [3a relates to
the "TRs and Contributions," 3b relates to the
"drafting and Board consideration," and 3c to
"consideration by IAC/USIB agencies."]
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out of town, and General Cabell, as Acting DCI, sum-
moned an IAC meeting for 9:30 p.m. The objective was
a community appraisal of just how tough the Soviets
were ready to get. Not until about 9 p.m. did we in
ONE receive from the State Department the official
translated version of the Bulganin message. Abbot
Smith drafted the estimate in about 30 minutes with
some minor kibitizing by knowledgeable analysts of the
Agency and by his colleagues of the Staff and Board of the
ONE. The paper went speedily from the typewriter to
the IAC which discussed it until almost midnight and
64/
cleared it.
This was our speediest paper.
In actual fact there was a whole spectrum of
urgencies and a whole spectrum of procedures to fit
them. The customary law governing such matters was
very elastic.
If the rush was only slightly less than that of
November 1956, the Board and Staff of ONE would draft
the paper without benefit of TRs or contributions and
64. Just as the IAC members had arrived at an agreed
text, Mr. Dulles arrived (he had been in New York with
the intention of voting the next day). He read the
draft, and taking the time into account, decided to
hold up issuance until all had slept on it.
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coordinate it with the Reps. If a little more time was
available, the Board and Staff would speedily issue TRs,
and summon a meeting of the Reps to discuss the general
thrust of the paper it had begun to think out; if pos-
sible, the Board Chairman and ONE Staff involved would
devote an afternoon to the hearing of "oral contribu-
tions." Useful relevant information which turned up
in such sessions would, of course, play its role in the
Board draft. In almost every sort of crash job we would
do our best to coordinate the draft with the Reps before
it went to the USIB.
The penalties of rush procedures were obvious.
No one ever spoke truer than he who said, "if they want
it bad enough they'll get it bad enough." Without time
to identify well-formulated views which clashed with
others, without the time to try for the best consensus
and force dissenters into clearly-stated dissents, hastily
composed papers were often marred by any or all of the
characteristics of sloppy writing.
G. Final Clearance of the NIEs at the USIB
Meetings of the IAC/USIB took place on a midweek
morning. By well-established right the DCI, or Acting
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DCI was in the chair. Probably from the very begin-
ning the chief of intelligence in the State Department
65. Not until after the passage of the National Se-
curity Act of 1947 was there any formal notation of the
existence of the IAC (the Act itself makes no mention of
it). The first paragraph of NSCID #1 (12 December 1947)
is devoted to the membership and functions of the IAC:
1. To maintain the relationship essential
to coordination between the Central Intelligence
Agency and the intelligence organizations, an In-
telligence Advisory Committee consisting of the
respective intelligence chiefs from the Depart-
ments of State, Army, Navy, and Air Force, and
from the Joint Staff (JCS), and the Atomic
Energy Commission, or their representatives,
shall be established to advise the Director of
Central Intelligence. The Director of Central
Intelligence will invite the chief, or his repre-
sentative, of any other intelligence agency
having functions related to the national secur-
ity to sit with the Intelligence Advisory Com-
mittee whenever matters within the purview of
his agency are to be discussed.
There were those who felt that this text neglected
to state that the DCI himself should be noted as a parti-
cipating member and chairman of the IAC. A revised ver-
sion of NSCID #1 (7 July 1949) rectifies matters in its
first paragraph:
1. To maintain the relationship essential
to coordination between the Central Intelligence
Agency and the intelligence organizations, an
Intelligence Advisory Committee consisting of
the Director of Central Intelligence, who shall
be chairman thereof, the Director, Federal Bur-
eau of Investigation, and the respective intel-
ligence chiefs from the Departments of State,
Army, Navy, and Air Force, and from the Joint
Staff (JCS), and the Atomic Energy Commission,
or their representatives, shall be established
to advise the Director of Central Intelligence.
The Director of Central Intelligence (continued)
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sat on his left. Then after the merger with the old
US Communications Intelligence Board (USCIB) (15 Sept
1958), came the director of NSA. Then for the first
few years in the. new headquarters building, came the
chiefs of intelligence in the three services (Almy,
Navy, Air Force in that order) and the director of in-
66/
telligence of the Joint Staff.-- When the DIA was
formed late in 1961 its director sat at the foot of
the table facing the chairman. Down the other side
of the table came the representative of the OSD for
67/
intelligence,
an officer representing the director
of the FBI, and the chief of the AEC's intelligence
(continued)
will invite the chief, or his representative,
of any other intelligence agency having func-
tions related to the national security to sit
with the Intelligence Advisory Committee when-
ever matters within the purview of his agency
are to be discussed. (emphasis added)
All subsequent versions of NSCID #1 designate
the DCI in one formulation or another as chairman of
the IAC/USIB.
66. In the years when the director of intelligence
of the Joint Staff was a member of the IAC he sat with
the other service chiefs. His job disappeared with the
establishment of the DIA.
67. He, like the J-2, disappeared with the establish-
ment of the DIA.
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unit. Then came the seat or seats reserved for offi-
cers of CIA who had a role in one of the items on the
Committee's agenda. When an NIE was up the chairman
of the Board of National Estimates sat in one and the
Board member who had presided over the NIE in the other.
Last and on the chairman's (the DCI's) immediate right--
starting in December 1961 and enduring till this day--
sat the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence.
As with Mr. Dulles before him, Mr. McCone had
been belabored by higher authority (notably the Presi-
dent's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board--the PFIAB)
to lift himself above the day-to-day administration of
his Agency and to concentrate his attention upon the
proper "coordination of the intelligence community."
I have been reliably informed that a spokesman for the
PFIAB suggested to Mr. McCone at the very start of his
incumbency that he should do just that. Apparently he
�
went on to indicate that Mr. McCone should not only di-
vorce himself from Agency activities but physically
move himself to a downtown office, say, in the Execu-
tive Office Building. According to this line of reason-
ing, the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence would
act as the principal executive officer of the Agency,
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and the DCI as the effective chief of the community.
Quite obviously Mr. McCone could not see his way to a
literal observance of this suggestion, but by way of
an earnest of his good intention, he elevated his dep-
uty to full membership in the USIB with the duty of
representing the CIA in such community matters as came
before that body. He made a formal statement to this
effect to his USIB colleagues at his very first meeting
with them (30 November 1961). A memorandum from Presi-
dent Kennedy (16 January 1962) not only approved this
action, but also confirmed and strengthened the DCI's
authority to coordinate community activities. It is
beyond the scope of this essay to comment upon any
aspect of this action save one--the presumptive role of
the DDCI as the Agency's spokesman for the NIEs.
As I saw things there were two sorts of business
which came before the USIB: they were national intel-
ligence, notably the NIEs on the one hand and on the
other, just about everything else. To me it was pos-
sible for the DCI to depute his responsibility to his
deputy in the area of the everything else. But the law,
the NSCIDs, the early texts of constitutional standing,
Presidential directives and executive orders made it
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impossible for the DCI to waive his responsibility
for the national intelligence whose highest exemplar
was the NIE. The NIEs were, by definition, his papers;
their issuance his responsibility. Hence to speak as
if his deputy were free to dissent from the Director's
own utterance in the name of the Agency seemed to me
as something out of the land of Oz. The Agency in
whose name the DDCI would speak had in almost every
case been thoroughly canvassed by the Board of National
Estimates before it put the draft NIE before the Director.
To be sure not every knowledgeable officer of the Agency
was wholly satisfied with every phase of the paper, but
that was not because he hadn't been consulted through
one medium or another.
Happily neither of the DDCIs I served under after
Mr. McCone's innovation ever saw fit to quarrel with an
NIE once it had reached the USIB. The DDCI was an im-
portant officer of the agency, and his views on the NIEs
in progress (when he had such views) received the full
attention of the BNE. I do not know how I would have
handled an unexpected dissent should the DDCI have raised
68/
one at the USIB.--
68. Early in 1974--and well beyond the terminal date
I've set for this essay--the DDCI actually (continued)
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There is another matter relating to the composi-
tion of the USIB that had its significant effect on the
NIEs. This was the establishment of the Defense Intel-
ligence Agency. It had had its conceptual beginnings
in the work of the Joint Study Group and took positive
legal form when President Eisenhower, as one of his last
acts in office, signed the NSC document
effect this (and other) recommendations
The day was 18 January 1961. In theory
which put into
of the Group.
at least, there
would be a single intelligence component for the Depart-
ment of Defense and a disappearance of the group as-
signed to the intelligence work in the Joint Staff,
another much smaller group serving the Special Assis-
tant to the Secretary of Defense for intelligence matters,
and most importantly the intelligence organizations of
the three military services. But first the new DIA had
to get itself a duly authorized charter. This did not
happen until 1 October 1961.
During the next two years and more, the DIA stead-
ily expanded its functions and its table of organization.
As it did so, the service intelligence organizations shrank,
(continued) tabled such a dissent. The DCI accepted it, and
there in the cold print of NIE 91-74 is an "Agency" footnote
to a finding of the DCI himself.
69. The JIC and its staff disappeared early; so did the
Special Assistant to the Secretary of Defense (continued)
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but these latter did not give up their participation
in the national estimating process, nor did their chiefs
give up their membership on the USIB. The untidiness of
this situation concerned a number of high officials of
the government. There were conversations between
Mr. McCone, Mr. McNamara, Mr. Gilpatric (the Deputy
Secretary of Defense), General Carroll (the first direc-
tor of the DIA), and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. From
the record, one gathers that Mr. McCone favored a prompt
purging of the service intelligence chiefs from the ranks
of the USIB, but realized that General Carroll was hav-
ing his administrative difficulties in readying the DIA
to carry the full load of military intelligence.
Mr. McCone was also well aware that the Joint Chiefs were
not the DIA's first champions and were, moreover, firmly
opposed to having the director of DIA the only military
man on the USIB. What to do about the service intelli-
gence chiefs was something that Mr. McNamara was going
to have to settle within his official family.
By the end of 1963 Mr. McNamara seems to have had
things sufficiently in order to take the matter to Presi-
dent Johnson, who issued a directive (5 January 1964) to
(continued) for intelligence matters. The J-2 and the
Special Assistant no longer attended USIB meetings.
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proceed forthwith with the reorganization of intelli-
gence work within the Defense Department. One may guess
that with this the secretary could cope with the Joint
Chiefs. In all events this troubled situation soon
ended in an artful compromise which surfaced in an ex-
change of correspondence between General Carroll and
Mr. McCone and takes its formal reflection in a revis-
70/
sion of NSCID #1. The settlement resulted in the
70. Sec Carroll to McCone 26 Feb 1964 (ER 64-1444);
McCone to Carroll 3 March 1964 (ER 64-1444a); and
Carroll to McCone 16 March 1964 (ER 64-1949).
The fruits of this arrangement appear obliquely
in the revised NSCID #1 of 4 March 1964.
In the first sentence of its para 2a there is
reference to a "fully coordinated intelligence commu-
nity." A footnote describes the "intelligence commu-
nity" as including: "The Central Intelligence Agency,
the intelligence components of the Departments of State,
Defense (Defense Intelligence Agency, Army, Navy, and
Air Force), National Security Agency," the FBI, and the
AEC. . . . (emphasis added)
Paragraph 2.b. gives the membership of the US
Intelligence Board. The directors of intelligence of
the three services are not included. They enter the
legal domain by a side door, however. Para 4.a., de-
voted to national intelligence, ends with the sentence,
"Intelligence so produced shall have the concurrence
. . . of the members of the US Intelligence Board or
shall carry a statement of any substantive differing
opinion of such a member or of the Intelligence Chief
of a Military Department." (emphasis added)
Apparently Mr. McNamara continued to be dis-
pleased. His annoyance broke through a (continued)
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service intelligence chiefs losing their formal member-
ship of the USIB, but retaining almost everything else.
As "observers," they not only attended USIB meetings,
but received the right to send Reps to the usual working
level meetings attendant upon the production of the NIEs.
Furthermore they retained "the right to express diver-
gent or alternative views on USIB documents such as the
National Intelligence Estimates, Special National Intel-
ligence Estimates .
0. �
From the point of view of the ONE, this solution
was a good one. With the establishment of the DIA, we
feared that we would have access to the Pentagon through
(continued) year and a half later and in the presence of
Director Raborn. He had before him a recently issued NIE
(one of the Soviet military papers) and he had noted some
dissents from the service intelligence chiefs. As usual,
their footnotes began with the formula, "The Assistant
Chief of Staff, Intelligence, [e.g.] USAF . . . disagrees
with . . . this paragraph." "Who is this nameless dissenter?
he asked of Admiral Raborn. From the tart way in which
the question was put, Admiral Raborn decided that hence-
forward, titles would not be enough. He decided that he per-
sonally would sign the cover of each new NIE, and that the
USIB secretary, Mr. Lay, would authenticate his signature.
He did more. He directed that the names of all USIB mem-
bers concurring in the issuance of the estimate would ap-
pear on the verso of the cover along with their titles,
and that the names of members and observers alike would
appear wherever they took a footnote of dissent.
The first estimate in the new format is NIE 1-65,
The Future of the United Nations, 26 November 1965.
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a single pipeline and a single source of knowledge and
analytical skill. Countless times in the past the NIEs
had benefited greatly from slightly differing informa-
tion and greatly differing interpretations thereof
from the three services. To be sure this added to our
troubles and often produced footnotes of dissent. But
obviously, self-serving footnotes apart, we all learned
something we would not have thought of, and more impor-
tantly for the institution of the NIE as a whole, there
was no intelligence chief who could say he had not had
his full day in court. To me this latter aspect was of
crucial importance. For if the chief had his footnote
to demonstrate that he had been heard, he had,the less
reason to complain of unfair treatment and less reason
to embark upon bootleg measures to get his views before
71/
his masters higher up the line.
71/ An incident in the Eisenhower administration of-
fers the school solution to the problem of bootleg intel-
ligence and a President's perfect handling of a dispute
which centered in an NIE.
The President was being briefed on one of the
important NIEs on Soviet military capability. A high
officer of the USAF interrupted at one point to tell
the President that he disagreed with this particular
finding of the estimate. The President asked if his
dissenting view appeared in a footnote to the (continued)
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H. The Dissent - Final and Formal - USIB
Dissents to a given NIE which had been discussed
and tabled at the coordination sessions came up for a
final review at the relevant meeting of the USIB.
Presumably each principal met with his staff on
the eve of the meeting and made his decision to dissent
flat-out, alter his position slightly to align himself
with some other principal whose views were close but not
identical to his own, or make a last try to sway the
chairman (the DCI) into softening his position suffi-
ciently to allow for a compromise.
I say "presumably" this happened because, of
course, none of us in the ONE was ever present at such
a conference. However, we had our own pre-USIB meetings
(continued) estimate. When the general said "No," the
President turned to the DCI (Mr. Dulles) who was doing
the briefing and asked "Why not." Mr. Dulles had to re-
ply that he had been unaware of the view until that mo-
ment. The President then asked that Mr. Dulles withdraw
the paper, recoordinate it taking the general's view in-
to account, and resubmit it. This was, of course done.
The generalisview was discussed in ONE at working-level ses-
sions with the Reps and at the next IAC meeting. Since
it had no takers other than the Air Force intelligence
chief, it found its proper place in a footnote. The cup
of intelligence would indeed be full if all Presidents
knew as much about intelligence as General Eisenhower
and knew as well as he how to handle uncoordinated scare
information.
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with the Director to brief him on the NIE at issue, its
major points of difficulty, and the conflict of views.
The pre-IAC briefing began in early 1952 and
gathered strength in succeeding years. At least as far
as the NIEs were concerned, it came about as a result of
a youthful foible on my part and a roguish prank played on me
by General Smith.
Our Director had not always been able to give
draft NIEs a thorough reading before the IAC meeting,
and on some occasions had not found time for us to brief
him about impending trouble. It happened that one day,
just before the IAC was to convene, I heard from a friend
in the Pentagon that the Deputy G-2, who would be substi-
tuting for his chief at the day's IAC meeting, was switch-
ing from an agreed position and coming in with an un-
expected dissent. Despairing of reaching General Smith,
I wrote an indecorous note of warning in longhand, and
laid it, folded, at his place at the table. In came the
General, picked up the paper and without a pause to ex-
amine its content began reading it aloud to the gathering.
Out came my uncomplimentary phrases about so and so welch-
ing on the position I thought had been firm with hisser-
vice. I will not try to reconstruct what I had written,
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but I know that it was not intended to be read to the
Deputy G-2, John Wecherling.
From then on, we prepared proper briefing memos
and saw to it that they were in General Smith's posses-
sion well in advance of the IAC meeting. Their princi-
pal message was to inform the boss of specific diffi-
culties we had encountered in coordinating the paper
and exactly which ones we had not been able to resolve.
These we would signal as likely candidates for a dissent
when the USIB members met to clear the paper. In the
days of Mr. Dulles and his successors, such memos in-
variably accompanied the final coordinated text of an
NIE to the DCI. Mr. Dulles and those who came after
always had it in the USIB book which the secretary had
readied for the pre-USIB briefings. The form and sub-
stance of these memos became in time one of the impor-
tant little codicils to the customary law governing
the production of the NIE.
It was not custom which governed the right of
USIB members to dissent, but the law itself as writ-
ten large in the formal texts. It first appeared a
year or more before the CIG produced its first national
72/
intelligence report or estimate. With some verbal
72. It will be recalled that the President's letter
of 22 January 1946 creating the NIA and (continued)
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verbal additions and changes, this sentiment was in-
73/
corporated into NSCID #1 of 12 December 1947, and
with some changes (to be noted later) into succeeding
(continued) addressed to its charter members, the Secre-
taries of State, War, and Navy, stipulated the establish-
ment of an Intelligence Board:
7. The Director of Central Intelligence
shall be advised by an Intelligence Advisory
Board consisting of the heads (or their repre-
sentatives) of the principal military and civil-
ian intelligence agencies of the Government hav-
ing functions related to national security, as de-
termined by the National Intelligence Authority.
(emphasis added)
Within a few days, the NIA issued its Directive
No. 1 (8 February 1946) whose paragraph 6 touches upon
the matter of dissent. It reads:
The Central Intelligence Group will utilize
all available intelligence in producing stra-
tegic and national policy intelligence. All in-
telligence reports prepared by the Central Intel-
ligence Group will note any substantial dissent
by a participating intelligence agency.
(emphasis added)
73. See paragraph 5:
The Director of Central Intelligence shall disseminate
National Intelligence to the President, to members
of the National Security Council, to the Intelli-
gence Chiefs of the IAC Agencies, and to such
Governmental Departments and Agencies as the Na-
tional Security Council from time to time may
designate. Intelligence so disseminated shall
be officially concurred in by the Intelligence
Agencies or shall carry an agreed statement of
substantial dissent. (emphasis added)
These words are repeated in para 5 of NSCID #1
(7 July 1949), para 5 of NSCID #1 (10 January (continued)
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74/
revisions of that document and various DCIDs.
As a general rule, a reservation of tentative
dissent taken by a Rep during the coordination sessions
was the tip-off to a possible formal dissent to be taken
by his principal at the USIB meeting. One knew upon
entering the conference room how many dissents were in
fact being tabled by the size of the little sheaf of
documents already put at the members' places by dutiful
staff officers who had preceded them to the meeting.
In almost all cases we had known what to expect and had
briefed our director. There were occasions when we were
wholly taken by surprise. The two I remember most vividly
were when one of the members chose to dissent from the
paper as a whole. One took place during General Smith's
time and he took it with good grace.
(continued) 1950), para 5a of NSCID #1 (28 March 1952),
para 6 of NSCID #1 (21 April 1958), and para 4a of NSCID #1
(15 September 1958).
74. Paragraph 3c of DCID 3/1 (8 July 1948) which deals
with the formal procedures of producing national intelli-
gence (TRs, contributions, etc.) ends with (3,c,4)". . .
the Central Intelligence Agency will publish the Statements
of Concurrence or substantial dissent with the final paper."
(emphasis added)
A second DCID (3/2 of 12 September 1948) is devoted
in its entirety to a spelling out of the "Policy Governing
Departmental Concurrences land Dissents] in National Intel-
ligence Reports and Estimates." The first two (continued)
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The other occurred some ten years later. The
subject was Laos and the dissenter Roger Hilsman, the
(continued)paragraphs quoted below are considerably
elaborated in the balance of the paper.
The lead-in paragraph which cites the NSCIDs
etc., ends "...the following policies are established:
1. Purpose. Departmental participation
in the preparation of national intelligence re-
ports and estimates is undertaken to insure that
authorized recipients:
a. are presented with national intel-
ligence which comprises all the best available
expert knowledge and opinion;
b. are aware, in the case of disputed
points, of the views of the departments on
substantive matters within their special fields
of responsibility and interest.
2. Basis of Comments. In consideration of
any individual national intelligence report or
estimate departmental agencies should take action,
as promptly as possible, in one of the following
ways:
a. concur;
b. concur with comment;
c. dissent.
The text goes on with what sounds like a mild ex-
hortation:
These actions should be based upon consideration
of the following factors:
(1) factual errors;
(2) validity of conclusions reached;
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State Department's Chief of Intelligence. During the
preparation of the estimate Hilsman had been present at
a meeting at the White House and had heard President
Kennedy say something about US policy towards Laos
which Hilsman construed as making the NIE not only ir-
relevant, but perhaps offensive to the President. A
talkative fellow always and sometimes a blusterer, he
suggested rather abruptly that the paper be withdrawn.
When the Chairman, General Carter (in Mr. McCone's ab-
sence) would not acceed, Hilsman was brash enough to
say that he would return to the White House to get a
presidential order to withdraw the paper. General
Carter said, "Roger, why don't you put that sword back in
the scabbard?" Then he indicated that Hilsman could
dissent from the whole paper if that was his choice,
(continued)
(3) omission of relevant considerations;
(4) matters of emphasis which produce mis-
leading implications.
See also paragraph 5 of DCID 3/5 (1 September 1953)
Dissents:
Any agency may dissent to any feature of an
estimate. Such dissents identify the dissenter
and will state the dissenter's position on the
matter. (continued)
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but the USIB business would continue. It ended with
75/
Hilsman taking the dissent and sheathing the sword.
In addition to the formal law of the right to
dissent, there was a considerable customary law govern-
ing the form and substance of the actual footnotes as
published in the NIEs. In very large measure a dis-
senter's footnote was his own. The 1947 version of
NSCID #1 had required that a statement of dissent be
-agreed, but subsequent issuances omitted this word.
Some of us believed that the purpose of a dissent was
not merely to identify a difference of opinion, but to
define that difference with as much precision as pos-
sible. Hence, both the main opinion and the dissent
should be as lucid as they could be made, and both par-
ties had an equal interest in the clarity of both texts.
(continued)
This identical language appears in the super-
seding DCIDs (1/1 of 21 April 1958, para 5, and 1/1
of 5 August 1959, para 5).
75/ The paper in question is SNIE 58-2-62, Conse-
quences of Certain US Courses in Laos (11 April 1962).
Its cover bears this rare departure from the usual in-
scription: "Submitted by the [DCI]/Concurred in by the/
[USIB]/with the exception of the/ Director of Intelligence
and Research/ Department of State/ As indicated overleaf."
At overleaf, the problem itself is footnoted indi-
cating that Hilsman "dissents from this entire estimate.
The reasons for his dissent are set forth at the end of
the estimate," (in almost one thousAd words).
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FT
IT
LI
Accordingly, there was some regret at the latitude given
to dissenters. Be that as it may, the custom came to be
that, as one director said, the dissenter could say any-
thing--even the Lord's Prayer--if that was what he wanted.
And he could say it at almost any length. Practice did
however impose certain curtailments.
For example, there was the case where a dissenter
composed a very long footnote (several hundred words) to
a passage of the text in one of the NIEs of the Soviet
military series. It so happened that this very passage
appeared in shortened form as one of the conclusions at
the front of the paper. The dissenter wanted his entire
dissent to be reproduced as a footnote to that conclu-
sion. He wanted it where it would be sure to strike the
eye of the reader whose reading might not include the
body of the text. The chairman objected, saying that
to run "up front" a footnote of this length--perhaps
as long as the entire set of conclusions--was to give
it undue prominence as well as to destroy the rhetori-
cal symmetry. The chairman pressed the dissenter to ab-
breviate his footnote for purposes of the conclusions and
be satisfied to cross-refer the reader to his extended
argument where it appeared in the text. The chairman
prevailed and set a precedent of sorts.
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At least two other limitations on the rights of
the dissenter became accepted. One was that he did not
have the license to point out in a footnote that he had
once been forced to dissent in behalf of a viewpoint
which had since gained currency within the community.
The "I told you so," and "if you'd only listened to me"
motifs were rather strongly discouraged as footnote
material.
Just as strongly discouraged were footnote formu-
lations which impugned the sanity and morals of those
who held to the text. I recall Mr. Dulles once ex-
plaining his objection with: "If you write a footnote
such as you propose, I will have to write a footnote to
your footnote, indicating that your allegations are
wrong. You may then wish to do a footnote to my foot-
note, then I to yours, and so on. I suggest that we
put a stop to such a piece of business before it gets
started." Dissenters soon found that they could say a
great many unkind things about those who supported the
text if they were careful to begin all tendentious sen-
tences with the disarming "It is the opinion of (the
title of the dissenter)" or "The (title of dissenter)
feels that."
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Both the law and custom made it constitutionally
impossible for the DCI to find himself in the dissenting
role. General Smith once told colleagues on the IAC
that "he would be willing to publish an estimate to
which every member of the IAC dissented, and some day
it might be necessary to do that in order to present a
76/
good estimate [but that he had no desire to do so]."
Several years later, Mr. Dulles encountered the
sort of problem General Smith had had in mind. The
estimate in question, SNIE 30-56, Critical Aspects of
the Arab-Israeli Situation, (28 February 1956) was for
the most part a "contingency estimate" relating to the
probable response to a US decision to send arms to
Israel. The staff of the ONE and the Board drafted a
paper which held that any arms assistance would meet a
very strong and united Arab opposition. The Reps agreed
with the Board's position and so, it turned out, did
their principals. But not Mr. Dulles. He agreed that
the shipment of a substantial amount of arms would
probably cause the reaction described in the draft, but
he believed that there was an even chance that the most
76. Quoted from Montague, Smith, Vol. II, p. 43.
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serious consequences could be avoided if the arms were
sent in moderate amount and if they were in fact largely
defensive in nature. His attempt for an intermediate
position found no takers among his IAC colleagues. Then
rather than forcing them all into a footnote of dissent,
he invited them in great good humor to put their views
in paragraph 5 of the text. He himself suggested that
they begin it: "The majority of the members of the IAC
believe that. .
He then followed this with his own
paragraph 6, which began: "The Director of Central Intel-
77/
ligence believes that . � � u-- In this fashion Mr. Dulles
extricated himself gracefully from a dilemma, one horn of
which would have involved an insensitive use of the DCI's
constitutional powers, the other the legal enormity of dis-
senting from his own paper.
I. Post-Mortems: The Identification of Intelligence
Deficiencies
In the early 1950s we initiated an exercise--
77. No one can blame the reader for a deep curiosity
as to which of the two sides in this debate was proven
correct. The answer here and in many another such mat-
ter is that there is no answer. For some reason--per-
haps the portentous estimate of the majority--no arms
were sent--at least in that particular constellation
of circumstances.
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collateral to the main task of the ONE--which, however
laudable, became a major pain in the neck. This was
the ex post facto examination of important estimates
with an idea of identifying the most significant gaps
in our knowledge. Almost from the start it was called
a "post-mortem." The exercise consisted of going both
to the researchers who had written the contributions and
to the ONE Staff which had composed the estimate and
requiring that they plumb the depths of their ignorance.
Having done so they were asked to make a list of the im-
portant things about which they knew little or nothing.
The idea was, of course, to highlight deficiencies which
could be rectified either by some systematic research
among intelligence materials already at hand, or by a
more pointed and urgent intelligence collection effort.
I cannot say how much of this sort of thing we
had done before June of 1952, but from that time on the
record is official and fairly clear. It starts with a
document of 3 June 1952 entitled Procedure for Reducing
Intelligence Deficiencies in the NIEs. The ONE was the
initiator, and the DCI and his IAC were the ultimate re-
cipients. The document emerged from the community's not
too happy struggle to complete Special Estimate (SE)27,
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Probable Effects of Various Possible Courses of Action
with Respect to Communist China (5 June 1952). The
posited courses of action *ere a series of measures aimed
at cutting Communist China's access to foreign imports:
embargo, blockade, and perhaps even interdiction by air
power. Obviously before you estimated the effects of
such measures on China itself, you had to know a great
deal about what was to be affected, that is, the Chinese
economy, the society, and the polity--but first and fore-
most the economy. Everyone who labored on the paper
speedily recognized our relative innocence of this vast
subject matter and the great importance of improving our
store of knowledge. To this end we took stock of what
we didn't know and sent up to our Director and the IAC a
document entitled, Statement of Intelligence Deficiencies
a
Revealed in SE-27 (25 July 1952). Our masters took the
paper seriously, and since the bulk of the deficiencies it
listed were in the area of economics, General Smith assigned
the greater part of the action to Robert Amory, who was in
charge of the Office of Research and Reports and chairman
78/
of the Economic Intelligence Committee.-- He also turned
78. See IAC-D-57 which includes Amory's and Reber's re-
port to the IAC on the measures which they had (continued)
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to James Reber, his Assistant Director for Intelligence
Coordination, for overseeing other collection, research,
and translation work within the community.
No question but that our post-mortem and what
followed in its wake greatly advanced the community's
understanding of Communist China. The post-mortem was
off to a fast start.
In mid-May of 1954, the IAC ruled that there
should be a semiannual post-mortem on the NIEs of the
79/
six-month period.-- In a year's time (26 April 1955)
the IAC ruled that a formal post-mortem be undertaken
on every NIE and presented to the Committee coinci-
dentally with the finished estimate. In 1957 and 1958
we did 78 of them. As with many an institution, this
began to lose its initial glamor. In the first place,
the post-mortems began to repeat themselves and to high-
light the existence of gaps that everyone knew about and
that everyone recognized as all but unfillable. The
(continued) instituted to improve our knowledge of Com-
munist China.
This is the first set of documents of the D-57
series. The next is D-57/1 and so on to D-57/107 of
10 Sept 1958, where the series ends with the demise of
the institution.
79. IAC-M-151
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collection brotherhood had had more alerts than it
needed, and besides the IAC had moved to vigorous pur-
suit of another institution which was in large measure
a duplicator of the post-mortem--the Priority National
Intelligence Objectives.
When SE-27 revealed the full scope of the com-
munity's lack of knowledge of Communist China, someone
80/
went back to NSCID #4-- and the succession of DCIDs
81/
which had descended from it. These latter were docu-
ments which encompassed the list of subjects which the
DCI and the intelligence community should be bending
every effort to find out about. Their title, as already
indicated, was Priority National Intelligence Objectives.
At the time of SE-27, the community was operating under
DCID 4/2 of September 1950, which contained no mention of
subjects beyond those relating strictly to the USSR. The
80. Issued 12 Dec. 1947. The first of its two para-
graphs told the DCI to draft and maintain a comprehensive
list of intelligence objectives, and the second to main-
tain a similar list for intelligence matters of current
concern. This NSCID has remained unchanged.
81. See DCIDs as follows: 4/1 5 Feb. 1948; 4/2 28 Sept.
1950; 4/2 (Revised) 12 Jun. 1952; 4/2 (Second Revision)
4 Aug. 1953; 4/4 12 Dec. 1954; 4/5 18 Oct. 1955; and so on.
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SE-27 exercise indicated inter alia that this DCID
should be changed, at least to include Communist China
as a priority intelligence target. DCID 4/2 (Revised)
did just that. It was followed by an annual revision
whose preparation was entrusted to the Board of National
Estimates which coordinated the document with the Reps--
much as it had coordinated the post-mortems. To our
great relief we were able to disengage from the latter,
which had become a perfunctory weekly nuisance, and con-
82/
centrate upon the annual revision of the PNI0s. ONE
was committed to this exercise until well into the McCone
days, when we were relieved of the PNIOs but not resaddled
with the post-mortems.
82/ NSCID #4 of 12 December 1947 directed that the DCI
"in collaboration with the other agencies concerned [a]
shall prepare a comprehensive outline of national intel-
ligence objectives. . .," and [b] "under the guidance of
the NSC Staff shall select from time to time and on a cur-
rent basis sections and items of such outline which have
a priority interest."
The phrasing was repeated in NSCID #4(Revised) of
29 August 1956 and with slight modifications in para 3b
of successive revisions of NSCID #1 (15 September 1958,
18 January 1961, 4 March 1964). The last revision of
this directive (15 February 1972) contains a very short
version in para 3g.
The DCI habitually acquitted his obligation for
[b] above with a DCID (many issuances in the 1/3 Series)
entitled Priority National Intelligence (continued)
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J. Validity Studies
Few things are asked the estimator more often
than "How good is your batting average?" No question
could be more legitimate--and none could be harder to
83/
answer. In the spring of 1956, IAC members, per-
haps needled once too often by outsiders, decided to
put the question to themselves. At the meeting in
which they decided to require a post-mortem for each
completed estimate they also "adopted a procedure. .
[which would endeavor] to determine how good an esti-
84/
mate was in the light of subsequent developments."
(continued) Objectives (the FNI0s). During the Smith
and Dulles incumbencies the identification of the PNIOs
was an exercise performed about once a year. Starting
during Mr. McCone's time and continuing through the
time of Admiral Raborn and Mr. Helms, the full-dress
findings were reviewed and up-dated each quarter.
83. See the admirable essay by a master estimator:
Abbot E. Smith, "On the Accuracy of National Intelli-
gence Estimates," Studies in InteZligence, Vol. 13,
No. 4 (Fall 1969) pp. 25-35. Mr. Smith shows why the
question should be asked and why it is almost impossible
to answer.
84. See IAC-D-100, '8 December 1955. The decision in
favor of the validity studies dated from the IAC meeting of
26 April 1955.
The next document of the D-100 series is D-100/1,
the next 100/2 and so on to D-68 of 10 September 1958,
when the institution lapsed.
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The resultant document would be known as a "validity
study."
What the IAC wanted was reasonable and sounded
simple. Suppose that there had been an NIE relating
85/
to Probable Developments in North Africa; suppose
that a year or so later another similar estimate was
undertaken. Completion of that second estimate would
be the occasion both to review the findings of the
first and to weigh these findings in the light of things
that had actually come to pass. And this is what the
IAC thought could be done and should be done.
We tried to obey orders for almost three years
and with respect to upwards of a hundred NIEs (often
more than one would be subject to review in a single
validity study). We did find ourselves in a number of
significant good and bad estimates, especially in those
matters which involved quantifiable things like esti-
mated growth in GNP, probable dates of initial oper-
ational capability of a new weapons system, etc. We
were a lot less successful in our evaluations of our
estimates of less tangible things. For example, we
not only found it hard to give a crisp meaning to what
85. NIE 71-54 (31 Aug 1954).
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we had written but also even harder to evaluate our
performance. This was because all too often we real-
ized that we were lacking in the single most important
facet of a criticism: i.e., a clear conceptual notion
of where we stood now. All too often the only objec-
tive reality
formance was
We in
we had with which to guage our past per-
just another estimate.
ONE were dismayed at our failure to do a
more convincing job of the validity studies and much
86/
relieved when the IAC let the enterprise peter out.
K. The Numbering of Estimates
The first of the national estimates issued under
the new order was National Intelligence Estimate #1,
Prospects for Communist Armed Action in the Philippines
During November (30 November 1950). From then on until
the end of 1953 we numbered the NIEs consecutively ac-
cording to the date they were laid on and irrespective of
their subject matter. In the three and afraction years
we published 102 papers in this series. Certain numbers
are blank, e.g., NIE #13 which was cancelled after it was
86/ Anyone interested in reviving the institution should
go to the IAC-D-100 series and read through the folder. It
will tell him a great deal more than I thought proper to
introduce in this essay.
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well under way; certain other numbers, e.g., NIE 63,
are used a second time with a slant, (NIE 63/1) which
indicated an updating of the earlier paper.
In these years we issued two other series; the
Special Estimate (SE) and the Special Intelligence
Estimate (SIE). There were 54 SEs and 4 SIEs.
Exactly why we devised these series is a story
full of complexities and, I fear, illogic. After we
had been in business a couple of months and after the
issuance of a dozen or more consecutively numbered
NIEs (each of which had had a fairly substantial circu-
lation) we undertook a paper on a seemingly extra sensi-
tive subject. Its title was: International Implica-
tions of Maintaining a Beachhead in South Korea. Al-
though the title is discreetly blank as to who was main-
taining the beachhead, the text made no bones about the
US involvement in South Korea and the role of its armed
forces there. This had gone down badly with a number
of our military colleagues who had been reared on the
doctrine that intelligence did not deal with "own" forces,
"own" capabilities, etc., which were operational matters
and none of our business. We were, however, under in-
structions to write the paper and the only compromise
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we could make with the objectors was to assure that the
paper be identified for special handling and given a
limited distribution. Were it to appear in the regu-
lar NIE series, this would be difficult. We feared,
for example, that those on the regular NIE distribu-
tion list who did not receive this paper would notice
a gap in their file, and would be on the phone to re-
quest the missing document. To avoid this sort of
situation we invented the new series and christened
the "Beachhead" estimate SE-1 (11 January 1951).
Some of the later SEs were so termed because
of their intimate relationship to US policy; these were
the contingency estimates I have already discussed:
Probable Consequences of Certain Possible US Courses
of Action in. .
. One such SE which I will come back
to dealt with Albania.
So far so clear. Then came the inevitable in-
consistencies. Some estimates became SEs because they
dealt with very sensitive subjects not necessarily US-
policy-related; others because the papers were of a
short half-life or because they were highly technical
and of limited appeal or because they dealt with a
specialized fragment of some large and important subject.
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I recall
as illustrative of
still another rationale. This paper began as a proper
NIE and as such went all the way to the IAC. When
General Smith realized what was before him and his col-
leagues, he blew a gasket. One might paraphrase his
remarks like this: "Why do we have to do this sort of
paper? If I wanted to know about such things I'd call
In the embarrassment which followed, someone
salvaged the paper by suggesting it be put in the SE
series and given a limited circulation.
The Special Intelligence Estimate (SIE) series
has a less involved explanation.
no means all the normal Reps were cleared; we ourselves
were closely restricted to a single room for the storage
of the materials and to an adjoining conference room for
their perusal. In short, security regulations ordained
that these papers be rigorously compartmented from be-
ginning to end . The
usual inventories of the national estimates contain no
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reference to the four we completed. Only two do I re-
member:
I am quite sure this was our
last in this series.
By the end of 1953, some of the ONE Staff and
Paul Borel, my deputy, perhaps moved by a change in
the numbering of NSC papers being advocated by Mr. Cutler
(chairman of the NSC senior staff) put forward their own
new philosophy of the numbering of estimates. Their labors
ended in the binomial scheme (cognate, at least, with
Mr. Cutler's plan) which survives to this day. The front
half--a two-digit number�stood for a geographical area;
the last part of the number, another two-digit expression,
stood of course, for the year of issuance. In between
came a digit indicating how many estimates on that parti-
cular geographical area had been written during the cal-
87/
endar year.
87/ In this system the first pair of digits (10) stood
for the Soviet Bloc; 11 to 19 for subareas of the Bloc
(e.g., 11 for the USSR itself, 12 for the European Satel-
lites - 12.1 Albania, 12.2 Bulgaria, etc., - 13 for Com-
munist China - which was not strange in 1954). (continued)
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The SEs disappeared as a separate series. Here-
after NIEs which had to be set apart for one reason or
another were called SNIEs (the "S" of course standing
for "Special") and numbered consecutively within the
fabric of the NIEs. Thus, if in 1954 we had done a
third estimate on some aspect of the Bloc and if it
were, say, a contingency paper, it would have borne the
number SNIE 10-3-54. In other words, we stopped trying
to conceal from our regular NIE customers the existence
of limited-distribution estimates which they did not
receive. We also stopped the SIE series and published
codeword estimates as merely highly-
classified NIEs and SNIEs.
For some reason or other, a good number of our
customers got the notion that the SNIE was a designator
reserved for contingency estimates. In this case the
(continued) The 20 series stood for the states of Western
Europe, the 30s for the states of the Middle East, and so
on. The last pair of digits (e.g., 54 or 59) indicated
the year of issuance. For the official documents see:
Notice to Holders of National Intelligence Estimates -
New System for Numbering NIE's, issued 1 February 1954
by the CIA. The numbers assigned to the principal geo-
graphical areas held firm, but the subareas proliferated.
By 1960 the system had to be looked at afresh and given
a considerable overhaul. A document issued 15 November
1960 by the ONE entitled NIE Code Designations contains
the revised system.
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customer was only about half right. I cannot recall a
true contingency estimate which was not an SNIE of very
limited distribution. But many an SNIE was not of this
class. There is, for example, a considerable group of
SNIEs devoted to security conditions in this, that, or
the other foreign country to which the President would
be visiting; another group concerned with small matters
of high but passing concern to a single high-level cus-
tomer; still another, which were short versions of what
had been planned and set in motion as full-dress NIEs,
but whose importance to the policy people had faded.
L.
Dissemination Within the US Government
The dissemination of the NIEs--the determination
of who should receive them and in what quantity--was
clearly within the power of the DCI. I well remember
an early IAC meeting when General Smith learned that
a sensitive NIE (on the USSR) was due to be dissemi-
nated in something over a hundred copies. The number
shocked him and he ruled peremptorily that the distribu-
tion should be substantially reduced. The IAC members
were then polled as to how many copies each desired.
Even then the total far exceeded General Smith's top
figure, a matter which he met by a merciless pro-rated
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reduction in each member's demand. Throughout the pro-
cedure there was a certain amount of good-natured grip-
ing, but that was all.
It was not often that Directors took the firm
stand that General Smith took in the case just noted.
In fact I recall no other similar case. But there are
at least two instances in which the Director received
direct orders from the President to limit dissemination.
The first came about as a result of Mr. McCone's brief-
ing of President Kennedy from the all-source version of
one of the most important and highly classified NIEs re-
lating to a phase of Soviet military strength. Mr. Kennedy
at once perceived that the paper in Mr. McCone's hand con-
tained the crown jewels of the national intelligence trea-
sury (sources, methods, and substance) and told Mr. McCone
that the dissemination should be held to an even hundred.
For the next few years, the circulation of successive
NIEs on the same subject, based upon the same sensitive
intelligence, was held to a hundred. Then as pressure
mounted the dissemination grew and towards the end of
the Johnson administration it had almost doubled. At
about this time some grievous leaks of highly sensitive
intelligence prompted President Johnson to tell Director
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Helms to make a drastic reduction in the circulation
of these papers. Needless to say, the USIB agreed to
a dissemination of less than a hundred copies outside
88/
of the CIA Headquarters building.
It was not often that such limitations seemed
necessary, and when they were, the matter was amiably
settled at the USIB, where the chairman's relationship
with the members was of critical importance.
Often, the Board of National Estimates itself
made recommendations with respect to limiting the dis-
tribution of other sensitive estimates such as those
dealing with probable consequences of certain possible
US courses of action (the contingency estimates, of
which a good number were done on Vietnam). These would,
for example, be circulated in very limited numbers in
the city of Washington and no copies would be sent to
the field.
An early estimate, SE 34, Consequences of an
Attempt to Overthrow the Present Regime in Albania,
(30 December 1952) had an initial "dissemination" in
88.
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a single copy. A few weeks later when the need for
security had slackened other copies were distributed,
but probably no more than a score or so.
In ONE's first decade NIEs of the "Secret" clas-
sification were distributed in the 200s. They rose to
the 300s and higher. A "Secret" NIE of 1969 relating
to Communist China was printed in 728 copies, the bulk
of which were distributed. Fewer NIEs of the "Top
Secret" classification were disseminated, and many
fewer of the codeword classification.
In the case of papers like
which dealt with a subject of great importance, was
broadly based, and not so highly classified to be a
risk to the distributor and major nuisance to the re-
cipients, simple demand was likely to set the upper
limits of reproduction and dissemination. Claimants
would call in for copies--usually to the ONE (or would
be referred to the ONE) and the Director of ONE or his
lieutenants would authorize distribution within certain
broad guidelines set by custom or the DCI or USIB. If
demands seemed excessive, the ONE might informally ne-
gotiate the matter or go back to the Director or USIB
for guidance.
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The administrative channel of action in the dis-
semination of the NIEs below the USIB and the ONE led
89/
to three distribution points within the CIA: one
unit of the Central Reference Services packaged and
dispatched the normal "Secret" and "Top Secret" NIEs;
another unit within the same CRS handled the NIEs of
codeword classification. The control and distribution
of NIEs containing "Restricted Data" lay with the Nu-
clear Energy Division of OSI.
These three distributors which represented the
DCI would themselves send single copies to a handful of
high-level recipients such as the President and the NSC
members, as already noted, and upon special occasions
to the Director of the USIA, when sanctioned by the USIB,
even to the secretaries of Commerce, Agriculture, or
Treasury. They would also release copies to addressees
within the CIA itself. They forwarded the bulk of the
edition to the USIB members who operated their own col-
lateral dissemination services for the benefit of their
89. A few very sensitive contingency estimates which
were issued in great haste were reproduced not by the
normal printers but by the Special Center Reproduction
Unit in OCI and distributed from OCI.
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90/
departmental customers at home and abroad.
M. Dissemination to Foreign Governments
One may recall that certain sentences of the
early texts directed the DCI to produce intelligence
relating to the national security and to disseminate
91/
such intelligence within the US Government. Nothing
was said of the Director's power to disseminate to for-
eign governments. General Smith seems to have assumed
this power.
90. Consider a "Top Secret" SNIE of about 1960: 332
copies were disseminated. Of these about 25 went to the
NSC members, White House Staff, and the NSC Planning
Board, about 60 to various components of the CIA. The
balance were sent to USIB members as follows: 35 to
the Department of State, 65 to Army, 32 to Navy, 50 to
Air Force, 25 to the JCS, 4 to the AEC, 2 to the FBI.
A few copies went to addressees elsewhere in the Govern-
ment who would not normally be on the mailing list of any
USIB member.
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� 140 �
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(b)
� 141 �
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� 142 �
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� 143 �
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� 144 �
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N. Consultants: The Princeton Panel
The institution of the so-called Princeton Con-
sultants began in the early Smith days (November 1950).
It developed its own customary law which exercised its
influence on the ONE and the business of national es-
timating.
The founding father was William H. Jackson,
General Smith's first deputy. Mr. Jackson, a New York
lawyer and businessman, who had had a valuable intel-
ligence experience in World War II, nurtured an ambiva-
lent attitude towards college professors. Like a lot
of men of affairs, he had a respect for the academic's
store of knowledge, his facility in the techniques of
research, and perhaps in his ability to write, but at
the same time he had his reservations about the ivory
tower and the stereotype of its unworldliness. When
he looked at the Board of National Estimates, as it was
shaping up, he saw Professor Langer and Langer's two
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first recruits, Professor Raymond Sontag and Professor
Calvin Hoover; he saw Professor Kent and the Messrs.
Van Slyck and Montague, a pair of ex-academics. He
may have wondered about imbalance on the Board, even
with General Smith's selection of a general (Huebner)
and an admiral (Bieri). One of the things that Jack-
son did was successfully to urge the Director to appoint
his friend Maxwell Foster (a lawyer from Boston and a
gifted amateur semanticist). Another was to begin en-
listing a panel of consultants, some of whom would be
hard-bitten men of the world, "who would be able to give
you professors a run for your money." At the time, he
said something very similar to this to me. He didn't
say "to keep you guys' feet on the ground," but I'm
sure that was what he had in mind. He named himself
and a man from the New York business community, Barklie
Henry, as charter members of the panel. He also lined
up George Kennan, Vannevar Bush, and Hamilton Fish Arm-
strong. At what I believe to have been Mr. Langer's
suggestion he also recruited C. Burton Fahs, director
for humanities at the Rockfeller Foundation and an out-
97/
standing specialist in the Far East.
97. See Jackson and Claussen History, IX, 51-55.
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The panel first met in November 1950 in Mr. Jack-
son's house in Princeton (hence its name) principally to
discuss its functions and agenda. It had its first meet-
ing on matters of substance in May 1951, again in Mr. Jack-
son's house. Dr. Bush had by this time withdrawn.
One may safely assume that Mr. Jackson's aim was
pretty much what he had said: to assemble six or eight
wise and hard-to-please outsiders of differing back-
grounds and exhort them to give the closest sort of
critical examination to a selection of the NIEs. What
he wanted from this panel is what every executive wants
from his "board of visitors"--an enlightened outside
view of the work of a tight little inner circle.
As I recall the first meeting of the panel, it
does not seem as if Mr. Jackson was getting what he
hoped. As I remember it, Mr. Langer--who presided--ran
it pretty much as he must have run his seminar in the
Harvard Graduate School. With all due respect, it seemed
to me that he pretty much told them how it was and didn't
do much in the way of soliciting comment. I do not re-
call much action on the part of the pure non-academics;
in fact I don't think Mr. Henry opened his mouth. We
did hear from George Kennan and Ham Armstrong who after
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all were both academics at heart.
The tone of the proceedings which Mr. Langer
set in that meeting
sequent ones before
Raymond Sontag, who
continued in the one or two sub-
his departure in January 1952.
moved into the deputy slot when
I succeeded Mr. Langer, was the obvious candidate to
were very happy
when he agreed to do so. Under him the panel was con-
siderably enlarged to include some more academics:
Philip Mosely of Columbia, Samuel Bemis of Yale, Joseph
take on the Princeton group. All of us
Strayer and Cuyler Young of
MIT, and some distinguished
bassadors Norman Armour and
Gray, Richard Bissell, and M
Princeton, Max Millikan of
non-academics: former Am-
Joseph Grew, plus Gordon
. Jackson himself who had
left his position of deputy director.
Mr. Sontag's approach was quite different from
Mr. Langer's. He greatly enjoyed a battle of wits, es-
pecially when he held the trump cards of the insider.
Even so, he was a good listener. He worked hard on
preparing the agendas, always trying to get the con-
sultants to focus on the principal questions of a few
NIEs that we were in the process of drafting. He saw
to it that he personally was well prepared to lead the
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discussion.
Under Sontag's leadership the meetings with the
consultants became quite a production. He arranged to
have the relevant papers delivered by courier prior to
the meetings--to the consultants' home addresses so as
to give them time to read in advance. He held four
meetings a year, no longer at Mr. Jackson's house, but
in one of the hotels of Princeton. The logistics prob-
lem itself was a formidable
by
the ONE
Sontag used the consultants
those who thought he was at
operation, admirably handled
administrative officer.
very deftly. There were
his most deft when he eli-
cited from them almost exactly what he most wanted to
hear and not much else. When successful in such cases
he could come back to his colleagues and the Director
with his own natural penchants reinforced by the views
of these outside experts.
Sontag would take with him a fair-sized Washing-
ton delegation; some ONE staffers, always a Board mem-
ber or two, and perhaps also one or more men from the
staff of a CIA sister office (ORR, OCI, OSI). Upon
occasion he would invite a Rep from one of the IAC
agencies. As a matter of course these men would be the
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the ones most heavily engaged in the NIEs to be brought
under discussion.
With Sontag's departure in mid-1953, Abbott
Smith succeeded him, not only as second-in-command of
ONE, but also as leader of the Princeton conferences.
For a number of years these sessions continued to be
stimulating and productive, and of real value to ONE
and to the members of its Board and Staff who attended
the meetings. Mr. Smith
focusing the discussions
control the consultants'
showed both skill and tact at
and keeping under reasonable
irrepressible urge to discuss
policy, which was not our business nor theirs. But as
the topics for consideration came
USSR and Europe, we suffered from
one or two of the consultants had
to extend beyond the
the fact that only
any specialized knowl-
edge of the Middle East or Latin America, and none, for
example, of black Africa. So despite Mr. Smith's best
efforts, discussions tended to revert to subjects about
which he had already received the consultants' views.
Furthermore, since the consultants were not cleared for
certain codeword material, they were severely handi-
capped in discussions of Soviet military capabilities
and the closely related military policy and grand strategy.
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So the Princeton sessions came to be more and
more a series of meetings at which ONE staffers gave
extensive briefings to the Panel members. We began
to feel that from the point of view of the bread and
butter work of the ONE, we were making a mighty out-
lay for something less than a commensurate return.
We never doubted the great practical value to a DCI
of having so distinguished a panel assisting in the
estimates, for which he personally would assume re-
sponsibility. Any one of us in his position would
have supported the institution. However, from our
vantage point we saw ourselves often doing a splendid
job of briefing the consultants on a host of important
world questions and not getting back much more than we
had pumped in. This is not said in derogation of the
consultants' qualities. There was scarcely a one who
with a few months in residence could not have held one
of our positions with great distinction. The trouble
was that they were not only not in residence, but also
that they had only a few hours of preparation to ready
themselves for the consulting stint. In the beginning,
this was not as severe a handicap as it became. But we
ourselves, after years on the job and in daily contact
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with the best--and highly privileged--intelligence,
found that we were not getting the sort of criticism
Mr. Jackson had in mind.
We began approaching our Director, first Mr. Dul-
les and later Mr. McCone, with the idea of closing out
the institution. One after the other they heard us
sympathetically and went along to the extent of reduc-
ing the number of meetings per year from four to three,
and finally to two. But neither they nor their suc-
cessors were willing to abandon the show. In fact
Mr. Helms thought to use the consultants as a means
of bolstering the Agency's contact with the academic
world, and urged the recruitment of still more knowl-
edgeable professors, who might serve to mitigate the
bad press CIA was getting in the universities.
It was about this time that Mr. Smith moved on
to be head of the ONE, and the leadership of the con-
sultants was assigned to Willard Matthias, a senior
member of the Board and oldest inhabitant of the ONE.
Subsequent activities of the consultants fall outside
the time frame of this paper. Suffice it to say that
Matthias undertook a vigorous recruitment of younger
consultants, versed in the variety of new fields that
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had emerged in the academic community over the past
fifteen years, and that the meetings assumed a renewed
vigor that lasted until the ONE came to an end in No-
vember 1973.
0. Epilogue
One might conclude this essay briefly, and withal,
subjectively. The "law" upon which the National Intelli-
gence Estimate was founded and its accretions in custom
resulted in a product which was probably close to that
envisioned by the founding fathers when they thought
about, talked about, and planned for a "coordinated na-
tional intelligence" to serve the requirements of the
national security. Of the few thousand NIEs there was
probably not one that did not bear upon a subject of
national import and not a one which had not drawn upon the
accumulated knowledge and wisdom of the intelligence
community. Just as the founding fathers had planned,
all of them emanated from a single authority -- the
Director of Central Intelligence -- who accepted the
responsibility for their factual and conjectural findings.
And just as the founders had insisted they did not go
forth until the Director's peers -- the heads of the
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departmental intelligence organizations -- having been
active participants throughout the process had had their
opportunity to concur in the papers' findings or to
dissent from them in whole or in part. Furthermore the
final documents went out to their American readers
bearing formal statement of such concurrences and
dissents.
In other words, if the founding fathers had aimed
at the creation of a more authoritative and more generally
useful national intelligence estimate than had existed
before, it can be said that they succeeded. There are
several good reasons for this:
First the Director who brought the NIE to life,
General Smith, had some very precise ideas about the
form, the substance, and overa371 character of intelli-
gence estimates designed for consumption at highest levels
of government. Secondly as chief of staff for the
Supreme Allied Commander in World War II he knew
exactly what kind of papers were required. That they
conform to his highly critical standards was one of
his musts. The achievement of this goal was not easy,
but General Smith's great talent for persuasive diplo-
macy and his power and prestige succeeded in bringing
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previously warring or uncommunicative factions within
the intelligence community into a working alliance. To
be sure he had his troubles with his colleagues, but
his leadership was seldom if ever in doubt.
Thirdly, his innovative establishment of a small
office -- the Office of National Estimates -- whose sole
function was to be the production of speculative intel-
ligence at the national level, proved an indispensable
aid. He personally gave the office top priority in its
recruitment of staff and he himself appointed the members
of the Board of National Estimates.
Fourth when the Board encountered difficulties in
coordinating the NIEs, General Smith would come to the
rescue, taking what steps were necessary to assure
community-wide cooperation.
Finally, the General's insistence that the NIEs
be formally cleared in weekly meetings of the IAC, over
which he usually presided in person, gave the whole en-
terprise a new cachet. In these circumstances those who
concurred meant something more than "the interposition
of no objection" and those who dissented had had the
satisfaction of a day in court and the opportunity to
plead their case before their peers.
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-r
General Smith's successors continued to recog-
nize the importance of the NIE. Like him, they insist-
II
edthat it meet high standards of quality, and they
backed it among their colleagues of the community and
with the principal policy echelons.
To say that the NIEs were better and more useful
documents than what went before -- the so-called "OREs"
of CIA's Office of Reports and Estimates -- is to
underline the relatively more favorable environment in
which they were produced. Under General Smith and
subsequent DCI's, the NIE and cognate high-level estima-
tive papers were produced by specialists in the art form
of the national estimate -- men and women who did nothing
else. The original cadre, most of which the ONE had
drafted from the old ORE, was of exceptional ability.
Over the years the office grew only slightly in size
but increased in talent and experience..9_3./
Its good performance and the support it received
from the top of the Agency produced sympathetic vibrations
in the community. Most of the difficulties which had
98. In this matter it paid the well-known penalty. All
too often 'its ranks were raided of high performers whose
services were deemed essential elsewhere in intelligence
work or in high policy-making echelons of the government.
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beset the old ORE began to disappear. As I have remarked
earlier, it was not long before both the chiefs of intel-
ligence and the indians who represented them In the
arduous NIE account began referring casually to our
estimate on such and such or what we had previously
estimated with respect to thus and such.
As to the superiority of the NIEs to their World
War II counterparts -- the estimates of the Joint Intel-
ligence Committee of the JCS -- I Can offer nothing from
firsthand knowledge. Although many of us in the Research
and Analysis Branch of OSS made written contributions
to these estimates, few if any of us saw the final
product. However, it was the shortcomings of these
papers -- ascribable in large measure to the absence of
a commanding chairman such as the future DCI, and the
refusal of the JCS to permit "split papers" (i.e. foot-
notes of dissent, alternative text in parallel columns,
etc.) which prompted military and civilian leaders
alike to change the system by which national intelli-
gence would be produced.
It is one thing to say that the NIE was better
than its predecessors and something quite different to
say how much better. I would like to be able to say
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far better, if for no other reason than that the insti-
tution was not strangled by the old JCS insistence lipon
"fully agreed" papers. I personally put great store by
the fact that those who supervised the composition of
the NIE's strove for agreed papers which were also
useful and respectable. And failing in this endeavor
pressed those participants who could not accept a given
judgment boldly to dissent and give up trying to jigger
the language so as to encompass and hence conceal their
disapprobation. Our most vocal detractors however have
taken the position that the NIEs suffer from this very
malady -- that the papers were coordinated to least
common denominators. I will do no more than offer my
own dissent to this view. Be it said on our side that
the NIEs received more than their share of encomia from
men at the peak of the national government. Mr. Robert
Cutler -- one of our most faithful readers while
special assistant to President Eisenhower for national
security affairs -- often spoke in highest praise of
the NIEs. Secretary McNamara, unimpressed at�the start
of his long tour in the Defense Department, later said
(andcn many occasions) that the NIEs were the best
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official documents that came before him.
Still and all, how good is good, not to say how
good is best? What did the passage of time prove with
respect to the accuracy of the NIEs? What was the NIEs'
box score? Highly legitimate as the question is, it
cannot be answered in a way to satisfy an outside quester.
Abbot Smith hasvritten eloquently on this subject.121
He points out that at the time he wrote (1969) some
1,500 NIEs had been completed and each of the NIEs
contained "a multitude of 'estimates', that is, state-
ments setting forth an explicit or clearly implied
judgment." There must be not less than 25,000 such,
probably far more. Assuming that all of these could be
checked for accuracy, and that 95 percent of them proved
correct, we would still not be "justified in swelling
with pride." For "most of them were simply too easy"
and an objective statistical tally of good and bad
guesses would in these terms not be worth doing.
Mr. Smith goes on to point out that a meaning-
ful box score of estimates must accordingly be
99. See his article in Studies in Intelligence, al-
ready cited in note 83, page 126.
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selective, "it must take account only of the important
judgments." But "in saying this, however, we have left
behind the wholly objective approach." And with this
gone, who is to determine the "important estimates"
worthy of admission to the tally? Mr. Smith points out
that the high-level consumers of the NIEs would have a
hard time agreeing among themselves as to which of the
,thousands of judgments were the important ones. Even
if they could agree in this matter, they and others
would find that they now had a selection of judgments,
a portion of which could not in any circumstances be
checked for validity.
I will go no further with Mr. Smith's exegesis,
but urge the reader to read it himself. Having myself
been in Mr. Smith's spot any number of times, I find
his essay extremely helpful. I join Mr. Smith in
his regrets that we can do no better for the outsider
in search of a box score.
I can however, and quite subjectively cite a few
NIE's which were melancholy affairs, like, for example
one or two of 1955 which did not foresee that dramatic
shift in Soviet foreign policy represented by the USSR's
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extension of military and economic aid to Egypt. Or
perhaps another couple which might have more sharply
identified the beginnings of the Sino-Soviet split but
didn't. Or more painful still our estimate of 19 Sep-
tember 1962 which carefully considered inter alia the
likelihood of the Soviets emplacing strategic offensive
weapons in Cuba and concluded that they would be unlikely
to do so.100/
The misjudgment here was doubly painful
becahse Director McCone had made his own estimate in
the matter, which was the opposite of that made in the
NIE and was, as is well-known, correct.
Unquestionably the most important of the NIE's
were those devoted to various aspects of the Soviet
military establishment. To the normal difficulties
of piercing Soviet secrecy in even the most mundane of
matters we confronted two exceptional ones. The Soviets
redoubled their efforts to conceal the nature of their
forces in being and made far greater endeavors to
obscure their plans for future changes in the scale
100. See my article "A Crucial Estimate Relived,"
Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 1-18. See
also Willard C. Matthias, "How Three Estimates Went
Wrong," Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 12, No. 1,
pp. 27-38. See esp.-pp. 29-31, for a discussion of
three other misestimates,
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and nature of the strategic attack and strategic
defense forces. Basically our task was not only to
identify and enumerate the operational forces of the
principal strategic weapons systems but also to
project the probable size and deployment of such forces
three, five and sometimes ten or more years in the
future. These flights of fancy into the outer reaches
of the unknowable were forced upon us by the exigencies
of our own planners. Let me underscore that these
undertakings were not of a sort to be volunteered for
the fun of the thing.
Needless to say �a number of these highly im-
portant estimates have been proven wrong. Albert
Wohlstetter in a recent issue of Foreign Affairs101/
has indicated that our estimates during the mid 1960's,
contrary to some popular myths did not err in over-
estimating Soviet strength in strategic forces, but
did in fact show a tendency to underestimate. Colonel'
Jack H. Taylor, who from a close personal experience
with the NIE's in question, has written an illuminating
101. Summer 1974.
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article which gives substance to Mr. Wohlstetter's
thesis.102/
One should not try to minimize errors of this
sort and yet one should point out how much worse the
errors would have been if the Estimates had been
merely pulled out of a hat which had been previously
stuffed with everyone's worst-case judgments. It
must also be said and with some force that the estimated
numbers -- under-strength as they were did not lull
our planners into fatuous complacency nor reinforce
their equally disquieting belief that the Russians stood
thirty feet high in stocking feet.
The great proportion of the NIEs were sound, useful,
and generally unspectacular. We can point with great
pride to the series on Communist China whose findings
occasioned comparatively little splash because of the
limited military threat which the Chinese offered to our
home security interests.
Another series we hope are held in respect was
that devoted to Vietnam -- many individual estimates
of which were contingency papers dealing with probable
102. See his "Wohlstetter, Soviet Strategic Forces,
and the National Intelligence Estimates", in Studies
in Intelligence; Vol. 10, No. 1, Summer 1975.
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consequences of certain posited US courses of action.
Their general thrust was pessimistic -- as revealed
in the Pentagon Papers. Their most dismal judgments,
unhappily proven correct, related to the resolve and
staying power of our Communist adversaries -- the Viet-
cong and the DRV and its military.
Other groups of NIE's which cast credit upon the
institution are those dealing with the Middle East which
reiterated the proposition that the revolutionary fer-
ment of the area sprang from the growing course of Arab
nationalism. One might cite in parallel the estimates
on Latin America which emphasized the overriding im-
portance of nationalism as a basic cause for political
instability and anti-Americanism. Needless to say this
was unpalatable news to those who saw all our misfortunes
ascribable to the powers of international Communism.
Whatever the range of sound judgments on diffi-
cult subjects, and whatever their salutary effects upon
individual policy decisions, the lasting contribution
of the NIEs probably rested elsewhere. It rested, for
example, as a demonstration of cautious workmanlike pre-
sentation of difficult speculative intelligence informa-
tion. For many a consumer -- whether or not he agreed
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with the substantive findings -- the NIE was a model
of government writing. The papers were as short as
the subject permitted. Their prose style was clear,
orderly, spare, and commendably untarnished with the
many going jargons: e.g. the economic, the scientific,
and technical. Short conclusions up front gave the
busy reader the main points in a few paragraphs.
Another of its contributions and perhaps its
most important one derived from the nature of the
collaborative effort itself. Free and reasoned dis-
cussion around a table resulted in the identification
and rejection of bald policy advocacy, unfounded belief
in scare headlines, the urge to go for worst case
estimating. In fact it is a set of invisibles -- a
set of things which might have appeared in the NIEs
and did not -- is a tantalizing but nonetheless land-
able aspect of the institution.
As to the question of how great a contribution
the NIEs made to the formulation of a successful na-
tional security policy, who can say? To begin with,
those of us with a familiarity of the processes of
policy formulation fully realize that the intelligence
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input -- far from being
is frequently of little
quality. Even in those
the single most important --
importance irrespective of its
cases where the intelligence
was studied, the matters estimated as among the "al-
most certains" were not invariably believed, let alone
those judged as "probable." Nevertheless even though
some policy people found NIE's irrelevant to their
needs and others found them
there were always those who
neither of these, and often
unconvincing or wrong,
regarded a given NIE as
important men they were.
Armed with the findings of these papers they could at
a minimum deny to their adversaries at the policy table
an easy walk-over victory. Thus in the last analysis,
if the NIEs did nothing else, they contributed to a
higher level of discourse in matters affecting the
security of the country.103/ In actual fact they almost
certainly accomplished far more.
103. See my article "Estimates and Influence," Studies
in Intelligence, Vol. 12, No. 3, pp. 11-21.
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APPENDIXES
A
Glossary of Abbreviations
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AD/NE
AEC
BNE
CIG
DCID
DDI
DDO
DDP
DIA
EIC
FBIS
GMAIC
GM IC
IAC
INR
JAEIC
JIC
JIS
NIA
NIE
NIS
NSA
NSCID
OCI
OER
ONE
ONI
0/0
ORE
Appendix A
Glossary of Abbreviations
Assistant Director/National Estimates.
Atomic Energy Commission.
Board of National Estimates.
Central Intelligence Group, precursor of CIA.
Director of Central Intelligence Directive.
Deputy Director/Intelligence.
Deputy Director/Operations.
Deputy Director/Plans.
Defense Intelligence Agency.
Economic Intelligence Committee.
Foreign Broadcast Information Service.
Guided Missile and Astronautics Intelligence
Committee.
Guided Missile Intelligence Committee.
Intelligence Advisory Committee.
Bureau of Intelligence and Research,
Department of State.
Joint Atomic Energy Intelligence Committee.
Joint Intelligence Committee--British,
Canadian, Australian, or New Zealand.
Joint Intelligence Staff, as with JIC above.
National Intelligence Authority.
National Intelligence Estimate.
National Intelligence Survey.
National Security Agency.
National Security Council Intelligence
Directive.
Office
Office
Office
Office
Office
Office
of Current Intelligence.
of Economic Reports.
of National Estimates.
of Naval Intelligence.
of Operations.
of Reports and Estimates
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ORR Office of Research and Reports, precursor
of OER
OSD Office of Secretary of Defense.
OSI Office of Scientific Intelligence.
OSR Office of Strategic Reports.
PFIAB President's Foreign Ihtelligence Advisory
Board.
PNIO Priority National Intelligence Directive.
SE Special Estimate.
SEC Scientific Estimates Committee.
SIC Scientific Intelligence Committee, successor
to SEC.
SIE Special Intelligence Estimate.
SNIE Special National Intelligence Estimate.
TR Terms of Reference.
USIB United States Intelligence Board.
USCIB United States Communications Intelligence
Board.
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APPENDIX B
CIA Organization and Functions
The Office of National Estimates
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C
ORGANIZATION AND FUNCTIONS
1. The attached organization chart of the Central Intelligence Agency is effective
1 December 1950.
2. The attached organization charts of the component units and statements of their
functions are also effective 1 December 1950. However, these are subject to
study by and comments of Assistant Directors and become finally effective
1 January 1951, unless you are notified of any changes.
3. All previous Organization charts and statements of functions in conflict with
this directive are rescinded.
4. No portion of this document may be reproduced, or distributed outside of
CIA, without prior approval of the Deputy Director or the Director.
3.0'
5. The Deputy Director for Administration is designated as the Agency Executive
for the purpose of exercising those Agency powers specifically delegated by
law to the Executive.
21
Walter B. Smith
Director of Central Intelligence
tc-k
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I. MISSION
SECRET
OFFICE OF NATiONAL ESTIMATES
The Assistant Director for National Esti-
mates is charged with (1) initiating, direct-
ing the production of, and producing national
estimates, (2) evaluating current intelligence
circulated by CIA outside the Agency and
(3) assisting.the Director of Central Intel-
ligence in the coordination of intelligence
relating to the national security and ip-1
viding for its appropriate dissemination.
>
II. FUNCTIONS a tfik
The general functions of the Assistant
Director for National Estimates are two:
(A) Estimative; (B) Coordinative.
A. Estimative Functions
1. Suggest to the Director of Central
Intelligence amendments and ad-
ditions to the schedule of priori-
ties set by LAC and carry out any
schedule of priorities as cleared
by IAC to the extent 01(a) alert-
ing the IAC agencies to the accepted
schedule of priorities and sudden
changes which may be made there-
in, (b) assigning responsibilities
within IAC agencies, (c) program-
ming in consideration of the work-
load of the IAC agencies, and (d)
setting and maintaining deadlines.
2. Initiate estimates: (a) by direction
of the IAC or (b) by direction of
the Director of Central Intelligence
or his deputy, or (c) by his own de-
cision pending clearance in CIA
and/or IAC, or (d) at the suggestion
of representatives of the IAC
agencies pending clearance in CIA
and IAC.
3. Direct the production of estimates
through the establishment of appro-
priate interdepartmental arrange-
ments. This will involve:
a. Drafting the terms of reference
for any given estimate.
b. Calling a meeting of represen-
tatives of the IAC agencies
concerned in the productiOn
of the estimate at hand.
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OFFICE OF NATIONAL ESTIMATES Cont.)
c. Discussing and fixing at such
meetings the final terms of
reference.
d. Assigning responsibility for
substantive contributions
from the IAC agencies.
e. Assuming or assigning respon-
sibility for the initial drafting
of the estimate.
f. Clearing the final draft with
the contributing IAC agencies.
4. Produce national estimates.
(This will involve taking respon-
sibility for a final draft of any es-
timate to go forward to the Director
of Central Intelligence and IAC
even though disagreements among
the contributing agencies cannot be
resolved.)
5. Be responsible for all evaluative
comment on items of current in-
telligence which are circulated by
CIA outside the Agency. (It is
assumed that responsibility for
evaluations on Office of Special
Operations raw intelligence will
rest with the Office of Special.
Operations so long as the evalua-
tions are confined to the probable
reliability of the source.)
6. Direct the operation of a current
intelligence staff which will sup-
port the above functions and which
will continue the issuance of the
Daily Summary.
7. Provide for oral briefings and pre-
sentation service for the Agency.
B. Coordinative Functions
1. Recommend to the Assistant
Director for Intelligence Coordina-
tion on coordination matters re-
lating to the production of national
estimates.
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SECRET
OFFICE OF NATIONAL ESTIMATES
ASSISTANT DIRECTOR FOR
NATIONAL ESTIMATES
NATIONAL ESTIMATES
BOARD
NATIONAL
ESTIMATES
STAFF
INTELLIGENCE
SUPPORT
STAFF
SECRET
Approved for Release: 2018/07/24 C06046432
Approved for Release: 2018/07/24 C06046432'
1��������111,
SECRET
CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY
DIRECTOR
OF
CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE
�1
INTELLIGENCE
ADVISORY
COMMITTEE
J
Deputy Director
OPERATIONS
OFFICE
IAL
.:ERATIONS
OFFICE OF
POLICY
COORDINATION
OFFICE OP
OPERATIONS
DEPUTY DIRECTOR
OF ' �
CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE
Deputy Director
ADMINISTRATION
SECCRITY
()Fyn's
ADMINISTRATION
OFFICE
COMMUNICATIONS
OFFICE
OFFICE OF
OFFICE OP
OFFICE OF
OFFICE OF
OFFICE OF
OFFICE OF
COLLECTION &
RESEARCH
NATIONAL
INTELLIGENCE
SPECIAL
SCIENTIFIC
DISSEMINATION
& REPORTS
ESTIMATES
COORDINATION
SERVICES
INTELLIGENCE
SECRET
Approved for Release: 2018/07/24 C06046432
Approved for Release: 2018/07/24 C06046432
SECRET
APPENDIX C
The Office of National Estimates
Membership of the Board of National Estimates
ft
SECRET
Approved for Release: 2018/07/24 C06046432
Approved for Release: 2018/07/24 C06046432
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
Approved for Release: 2018/07/24 C06046432