STATUS OF PRM-11, TASK 2 REPORT ON DCI ROLES

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP79M00095A000200010008-4
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: S
• Document Page Count: 22
• Document Creation Date: December 19, 2016
• Document Release Date: October 27, 2005
• Sequence Number: 8
• Publication Date: April 7, 1977
• Content Type: MF

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ICS 77-2141
7 April 1977
Director of Performance Evaluation
and Improvement
SUBJECT Status of PRM-11, Task 2 Report on DCI Roles
1. The attached outline describes the "overview paper"
I am working on. Drafts of the first two sections are included
for comment. have put together 25X1
a reasonable irst draft of the basic paper on the DCI's roles,
which will become an annex and be summarized in Section III.
It has weak parts that still need attention.
2. I am proceeding on two assumptions:
a. Whatever happens to the DCI's proposed out-
line for a five-page paper, there will be a need
for the package described here. So the drafting
team will continue to slog through it.
b. There is no point in seeking Community
reaction to it until it is more or less complete
and the DCI has accepted this as part of his
"action" on Task 2.
3. In reading the two attached sections, be mindful that:
a. The intended audience needs to be "softened"
up with the statement of some basic principles.
b. Such statements may clarify some of our own
thinking (as it already has mine).
c. Concreteness will be added by imaginative
graphics, perhaps some footnotes, and, of course
Attachment:
As stated
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- D/DCI/IC
- AD/DCI/IC
- EO/ICS
- SA-D/DCI/IC
- DC/OPEI/HRD
D/OPEI PRM-11 Official File
- D/OPEI Chrono, w/o att
- EA-D/OPEI
- D/OPEI
D/OPEI:I (4/7/77)
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The Role of the DCI and U.S. Intelligence:
An Organizational Analysis
PRM-11, Task 2 Report
Executive Summary [forthcoming]
I Introduction [attached]
II Basic Criteria for Organizational Judgment [attached]
III The Roles of the DCI [forthcoming]
-- This section will be a summary of the longer
descriptive and analytical paper in process
since the beginning on the basis of the
18 March outline.
IV Assessment: Problem Areas and How They Relate
to Structure and Authority [forthcoming]
-- This section will answer the "what's right and
what's wrong" questions put to Task 2. It will
be a boiled down and structured set of issues,
like those presented on 1 April.
Annex: Roles of the DCI [the longer paper in process]
For inclusion in the above package as Section V
OR
Separate use by the DCI
OR
Submission as an input to Task 3
Annex: Community Structure -- Options, Implications, Pros & Cons
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The Role of the DCI and US Intelligence: An Organizational
Analysis [Parts I and III
I. Introduction
In PRM/NSC-11, the President directed a thorough review
of the missions and structure of US intelligence entities with
a view to identifying needed changes. As part of this review,
the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) was directed to
analyze his own role, responsibilities, and authorities. This
report responds to that task.
In order to understand fully the present role of the DCI
it is necessary briefly to examine the total context of US
intelligence activities in which that role is performed, a
context that embraces intelligence organizations collectively
known as the Intelligence Community (IC) and many other
elements of government.
US intelligence is a kaleidoscopic foreign information
activity that encompasses many organizations, a wide diversity
of information sources and handling techniques, the total
spectrum of topical problems presented by the outside world,
and a broad and varied array of users for whom intelligence
is developed. (Several Figures displaying the IC structure
will be included.) A formal activity of government,
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intelligence is distinguished from other forms of foreign
information development by three main characteristics:
a. It involves systematic collection, by human
agents and technical means, of information other govern-
ments attempt to keep secret.
b. It involves systematic correlation and analysis
of all pertinent information, including both data
collected by secret means and publicly available
information.
c. It involves systematic dissemination of result-
ing data and judgments to those who need them to make
decisions or to conduct policy actions.
These three characteristics of intelligence are the vital
steps in a complex intelligence process. That process involves
many identifiable but overlapping steps (a Figure will display
steps, organizations, disciplines):
a. identification of user needs for information;
b. specification of intelligence requirements
and priorities for collection entities;
c. tasking and operating collection entities
in accordance with these requirements and priorities;
d. processing collected data into usable information;
e. correlation and analysis of reported information
to produce factual comment or understanding of an intelli-
gence problem;
f. production and dissemination of a final product.
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This process may take place in minutes or it may take years,
depending on the intelligence problem involved and the resources
at hand for solving it..
Wherever it takes place, this process compels complex
interactions among individuals, organizations, and machines.
This process must be managed in two senses: Existing resources
must be focused on and interconnected for the solution of
existing intelligence problems, which include the task of
keeping a watchful eye on the "unknown problem" or warning.
At the same time, plans, programs, and budgets must be pre-
pared and decided on that will assure the availability of
resources in the future to solve anticipated intelligence
problems; here the lead-times involved in assembling some
technical and human tools may reach out as far as ten years
or more.
Despite its being a relatively discrete and identifiable
activity, US intelligence is distributed among a large number
of government organizations. Thus, the words "Community"
and "federation" are commonly used in discussing it.
Bureaucratic history explains the present distribution of
US intelligence activities to some extent. But more funda-
mentally this distributed condition of US intelligence arises
from the very nature of the business. All the diverse entities
of government involved in foreign and national security
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affairs need intelligence. Those entities all, in varying
degrees, produce intelligence or generate information directly
useful to intelligence. And the intelligence process itself
is highly diversified, either requiring or accepting a diver-
sity of organizational contexts for doing different parts of
the business. Although it passed several major organizational
milestones since World War II, US intelligence has, in the
main, evolved organically to accommodate this need for or
fact of diversity.
Intelligence can be thought of as a service industry in
government, serving a great variety of customers with greatly
varying needs. Yet it is an identifiable and distinguishable
activity. Moreover, at the very origins of post-war US
intelligence, Congress and the President responded to a
strongly perceived need to create unity amid this diversity
to some degree and with respect to some problems of intelligence.
The Office of the DCI and under him the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA) were created to afford a degree of unity -- as
well as some independence from the policy process -- with
respect to information and judgment on vital intelligence
questions of national importance. In the intervening years,
the size and diversity of US intelligence has grown. But so
also have the pressures for unity amid diversity. As the
nation's senior, full-time intelligence functionary, the DCI
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has been the focus of these pressures. He is the President's
principal advisor on foreign intelligence; and national
intelligence of preeminently Presidential concern is produced
under his authority. He has come to preside over Community
mechanisms that decide how to use major technical collection
capabilities on a day-to-day basis. Since the November 1971
directive of President Nixon, he has been increasingly
expected by the President and the Congress to be the steward
and manager of the fiscal resources allocated to US intel-
ligence entities specified as national.
The purpose of this report is essentially to describe and
assess these unifying roles of the DCI, along with other, in
some respects conflicting, roles he has. Such an assessment
of the roles of the DCI is essential to deciding anew the
more basic questions:
a. What degree, extent, and kind of unity should
be sought in the inherent diversity of US intelligence?
b. Who should be responsible for it and with what
powers?
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The role of the DCI is anchored in a direct line of
authority from the President and his advisory body, the National
Security Council (NSC), to the DCI to the CIA. This line orig-
inated with the office of the DCI and is unambiguous.
Surrounding this direct line, however, are a host of vital
relationships with other entities of the Executive Branch
who generate and receive intelligence. These other relation
ships do as much to shape the role of today's DCI as does his
line command of CIA. For many years CIA has been highly
dependent itself on them. In recent years, they have even
strained the DCI's relationship with CIA.
Of these other relationships, that with the Department of
Defense (DOD) is the most involved. Indeed, characterizing this
relationship goes a long way toward defining the role of
today's DCI. It shall be treated further in following sections.
Here it should be noted that:
a. The DOD is the most voracious consumer of
intelligence, by volume, from the Community of agencies
over which the DCI has responsibility. Its needs for
intelligence approach those of the entire government in
scope and variety. And, of course, many of its needs
arising from force planning and operational action
responsibilities are large and unique.
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b. Much of the raw intelligence on which the
performance of CIA and the DCI as intelligence
producers depends is collected and processed by
intelligence elements within the DOD.
c. Defense intelligence production entities, in
addition to supporting DOD consumers, play a major
role in the development of national intelligence
judgments through the National Foreign Intelligence
Board (NFIB) and national estimates. In many areas
of analysis, their contributions are unique.
d. Because some 80 percent of the National
Foreign Intelligence Program (NFIP) is located in the
DOD;. it is with the intelligence authorities of this
department that the DCI and his Community staff must
interact most intensely to develop the consolidated
NFIP and budget for which he is responsible.
e. It is in the relationship with DOD that the
interwoven complex of national, departmental, and
tactical intelligence needs and capabilities arises
most sharply to complicate the definition of the DCI's
role. The DOD possesses the largest assortment of
entities that could be described by each or all of
these adjectives.
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f. In the event of war, the DCI's role could conflict
with that of the Secretary of Defense.
Although not as ramified, the DCI's relationship with
the Department of State is also vital. Foreign Service
reporting -- a form of collection not identified as intelli-
gence -- makes a major contribution to political and economic
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I State is also
a heavy consumer of foreign intelligence, and its Bureau of
Intelligence and Research both contributes to national
intelligence judgments and produces unique political analyses.
Small in size and specialized in interest, the intelligence
elements of the Treasury Department, Energy Research and
Development Agency (ERDA), and Federal Bureau of Investigation
(FBI) flesh out the formal intelligence relationships of the
DCI's Community. They and the departments they serve have
increased in importance as intelligence has had to diversify
into new areas of international economics, nuclear prolifera-
tion, terrorism, and drug control.
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II. Basic Criteria for Organizational Judgment
In understanding or structuring any management system, a
first task is to establish the functioning spheres of responsi-
bility and authority, and their limits -- essentially how the
cloth is divided. The second task is to establish how and to
what extent that cloth is sewed back together in order to
overcome the negative aspects of necessary divisions of
responsibility and to make the parts function as a whole.
This challenge is very large in US intelligence because of
institutional and functional diversity and the countervailing
necessity that the parts interact as a whole.
One approach frequently used to rationalize Community
structure is to argue distinctions between national, depart-
mental, and tactical intelligence. This tripartite formula
arises largely from the relationship of the DCI and the DOD,
but has pale reflections in the intelligence-related functions
of other departments, e.g., in the reporting of Foreign Service
Officers or Treasury attaches. This formula has serious
weaknesses and frequently confuses more than it clarifies.
Defining the terms usually obliges use of other terms left
undefined. For example, it is said that national intelligence
is that intelligence needed by the President, the NSC, and
senior US officials to make national policy decisions. But
what are national policy decisions? They are decisions those
officials want and are able to make at the time.
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The essence of the organizational problem in intelligence
is that-these concepts overlap extensively in meaning at least
some of the time. The needs of consumers overlap. The
President is always interested in broad assessments of Soviet
foreign and military policy. In a crisis at sea, he is likely
to be interested in the exact location of specific naval
combatants. By the same token, a field commander or foreign
mission chief needs broad strategic assessments. The uses
to which a given intelligence fact or judgment can be put
also overlap in the tripartite formula. An assessment of
the hardness of Soviet missile silos can be of direct value
to the operational planner of strategic strikes, to the force
planner, to strategy and national policy planners, and to the
arms controller. The President is likely to be interested
in all these applications. The organizations and systems
that collect intelligence data also overlap the categories
of national, departmental, and tactical. This is particularly
true with emergent space-based reconnaissance systems when
a given system may monitor arms control agreements, collect
order of battle data, supply warning, and support tactical
military operations.
Thus, the key organizations and systems of US intelli-
gence can or do play extensively overlapping roles at
different times. Although only imprecisely, one can
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b. establishing sound oversight or policing
mechanisms within and outside intelligence organizations.
c. cultivating appropriate professional values
and organizational habits within intelligence entities.
Establishing the demands of propriety on intelligence and
assuring that they are met is a matter demanding careful
thought and high-level decision. But because few organiza-
tional issues are raised, this subject will not be treated
further in this report.
The concept of effectiveness in intelligence management
has many dimensions. It is output or product oriented. It
is therefore preoccupied with consumers, who they are, what
they need, when they need it, and why they need it. As
indicated above, US intelligence serves a great variety of
consumers with a great diversity of needs. Within the
Executive Branch they can be arrayed in terms of the following
rough hierarchy:
a. the President, the NSC, and Cabinet-level
decisionmakers; those who decide the policies of
the Administration on foreign, military, and
foreign economic matters, and on crisis management.
b. policy and strategy planners, option
developers; force posture, major program and budget
developers; those who present the Presidential level
with structured choices on broad policy issues and
crisis options.
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c. central implementers of policy and opera-
tional planners in foreign, military, and foreign
economic areas.
d. field and tactical decisionmakers; policy
or plan implementers, e.g., diplomats and military
commanders.
These kinds of intelligence consumers are found, of
course, in the main departments of the US national security
establishment, the Executive Office of the President and
the NSC Staff, State, Defense, the Arms Control and Disarmament
Agency (ACDA), but also in most other departments and several
regulatory agencies to a lesser degree. One must also count
Congress as a substantial consumer of intelligence, and, to
a degree the public which, through fair means or foul, receives
a substantial amount of its information about the world
indirectly from US intelligence. Finally, because it must
store up information and analysis to meet future or unexpected
needs, intelligence is itself a major consumer of intelli-
gence end products. But service to the policymaking entities
of the Executive Branch is the measure of effectiveness in
intelligence. Their needs for intelligence are without limit
in principle and constantly growing in practice. They touch
upon all areas of the globe and embrace most fields of human
knowledge.
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Effective service or output to intelligence consumers
dictates a number of organizational principles:
a. The service or output end of intelligence
must be highly diversified and relatively specialized
to meet the diverse special needs of consumers. This
means a need for specialized intelligence production
support to departments, agencies, subcomponents,
commands, etc. -- size, scope, and level depending
on the case. DIA, INR,.FTD, and ERDA's intelligence
element are examples. at the level of support to departments.
b. The President, the NSC, and, for that matter,
all other major consumers need some source of intelli-
gence that is independent of policy institutions and
broadly competent. This principle justifies CIA's
role as a producer of finished intelligence.
c. To the extent practicable and consistent with
security, the system must fully share information within
itself. To the maximum extent possible, all output
entities should share the same data and analysis.
d. This diverse output Community must have means
to come together to render a collective judgment or
disciplined disagreement on vital intelligence issues.
This is essentially what national estimates and like
interagency products have been intended to do.
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Of course, effective intelligence support to consumers depends
on a great many considerations other than organizational
structure. But the output structure of US intelligence must
reflect the above principles to be effective at all.
The criterion of efficiency in US intelligence is
concerned with resource inputs, the processes whereby they
are employed, and their impact on output. After several
decades of "organic growth" during the Cold War, concern for
efficiency in intelligence resource management on the Community
scale is a comparatively recent phenomenon, accompanying a
general skepticism about national security spending and a
downturn over the last half-dozen years in real outlays on
intelligence. Critical scrutiny of intelligence behavior
by government and public has intensified the concern with
efficiency in the last three years. In the 1970s, two
Presidential initiatives relating to Community authority
structure, in 1971 and 1976, were both wholely or largely
directed at improving the efficiency of Community resource
management.
Efficient management of intelligence resources proceeds
in two connected dimensions. Existing resources must be
optimally deployed and operated to meet existing intelligence
needs according to a priority scheme that managers can base
predictions on but is still flexible. At the same time and
largely by the same set of managers, decisions must?.be made as to
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what magnitude and mix of resources should be mobilized for
the future. How these two kinds of decisions are reached in
the Intelligence Community will be discussed in the next
section. Again, however, some attempt to state first principles
can help to understand and judge present arrangements.
At the outset, it should be
recognized that, whatever
the deficiencies of intelligence analysis and its management
may be, intelligence resource management is largely a matter
of managing collection and processing resources because that
is where most of the money and manpower are. Duplication or
gaps in the development and use. of these resources are more
costly in fiscal terms than in analysis and production.
Another significant point -- common place to involved
professionals but not always appreciated by others -- is
that many collection assets are developed to gain broad
access (e.g., a broad area imaging system) or potential access
(e.g., an agent with a promising future or a regional
clandestine posture). Broad access systems require exten-
sive selection and processing for useful data. The ratio
of useful data to all data collected is almost always low;
and the ratio of useful data collected to useful data
identified and exploited can hardly ever be one. Potential
access capabilities may or may not yield as anticipated.
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Moreover, intelligence is a subtle, usually.non-violent,
but nevertheless direct form of human conflict. Those managing
intelligence resources are in reality doing battle with other,
frequently skillful, human beings whose main aim in life is to
frustrate the formers' efforts. These conditions challenge
the quest for efficiency, but should induce a certain modesty
in one's goals.
In terms of structure, efficient management of current
resources against current needs means giving control to the
party with the incentive to seek and the capability to
approximate the optimal allocation. To the extent intelligence
collection and processing resources are expensive and scarce,
relative to perceived needs, there is a legitimate tendency
to centralize control. But equally legitimate factors limit
such centralization of control. Control may need to be
contingent on changing conditions in the case of capabilities
with varied application. Thus arises the question of shift-
ing control of certain collection assets from the DCI in
peace to military authorities in war. Some collection capa-
bilities, such as tactical reconnaissance organic to combat
forces, are justified solely for the contingency of war
support to those forces and must be controlled and subordinated
accordingly. Some degree of decentralization is reasonable
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in intelligence processing, e.g., photo interpretation, signals
analysis, document translation, to achieve focus and promptness
in the service of analytic users.
Assigning responsibility for programming future intelli-
gence resources for efficient satisfaction of future needs is
essentially a matter of deciding what should be traded off
against what to maximize what value. What should a given
program element compete against in order to justify itself?
And against what primary value? Desirable multipurpose capa-
bilities may have to compete simultaneously in several
trade-off and value markets. This logic would insist that
the DCI and the main departmental custodian of intelligence
assets, DOD, should be running materially different resource
trade-off markets. The DCI should be expected, in the main,
to trade off intelligence resources against other intelligence
resources. The DOD should, by and large, be expected to
trade off intelligence resources against military forces
and support programs.
Here it should also be noted that the care and incentives
applied to the trade-off of interest may vary with the size of
the intelligence package relative to the market place in which
it competes. The DCI market place is 100 percent intelligence.
The DOD market place is 5 percent intelligence.
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The quest for efficient intelligence resource management
involves a built-in tension between what might be called
"autocratic" and "democratic" necessities. Of course, some
technical collection systems must receive a single set of
unambiguous instructions by their physical nature. Imaging
satellites are the most striking example. To that extent,
they oblige an "autocratic" control regime.
There is a temptation to argue that a single authority
could maximize resource management efficiency by overriding
bureaucratic conflicts. But one must remember that the
essence of intelligence management at the Community level
is tying together a diversity of "outlets" serving diverse
customers and a diversity of primary suppliers or collectors.
If one could construct a model that perfectly captured and
forecast the entire scope, all the details, and all the inter-
connections of this environment then there would be no resource
management problem to be resolved and any bureaucratic structure
would do. The model would manage it. But such a model does not
exist. Rigorous systems and operations analysis can be applied
to help resolve some subsets of the larger decision set. But
it is dominated by areas where judgment, experience, intuition,
and conflict among reasonable but different interests reign.
Because no single authority, be it individual or group, can
capture the reason inherent in this diversity, the Community
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must afford a "democratic forum" in which this reason can
suitably inform current allocations and future programs. It
is the role of central authority to assure that the forum
exists, to extract reasoned judgment rather than simple
majority will from it, and to resolve persistent disputes.
This need to balance between "autocracy" and "democracy" in
intelligence resource management inheres in the nature of the
intelligence function, no matter what the organizational or
authority structure of the Community.
Finally, the mechanism for intelligence resource manage-
ment must encourage innovation and experimentation. Too
fanatic a search for efficiency can lead to a tight manage-
ment culture that suppresses the innovations on which improved
performance depends.
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