REQUIREMENTS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP83M00914R002700080001-8
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: S
• Document Page Count: 7
• Document Creation Date: December 20, 2016
• Document Release Date: February 21, 2007
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: March 30, 1982
• Content Type: MEMO

Approved For Release 2007/02/21: CIA-RDP83MOO914R002700080
,CUTNE, SECRETARIAT
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ACTION INFO
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Central Intelligence Agency
Washington, D.C. 20505
Executive Director
NOTE FOR:
After I pick myself up from jumping
out a seventh floor window, I will review
this 1966 report and touch base with you
on where we go from here. The game plan
will be to orchestrate a briefing for the
DCI, along the lines
about yesterday, emphasizing the
"informal" collection mechanism.
please continue pulling
together what you had planned to do yesterday,
and we'll figure out how to factor in this
"new" information from the 1966 report.
We should aim for a briefing sometime the
week of 14 April. I'll be in touch in a
couple of days and would welcome any ideas
from any of you.
P-,20Y
:.L,a.O'~l4
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25X1
25X1
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MEMORANDUM FOR: Deputy Director of Central Intelligence
Executive Director
Deputy Director for Intelligence
Deputy Director for Operations
Associate Deputy Director for Intelligence
Director of Soviet Analysis, DDI
Chief, Collection Requirements and Evaluation Staff, DDI
Chief, Domestic Collection Division, DDO
Chief, Evaluation and Program Design Staff, DDO
FROM: Director of Central Intelligence
SUBJECT: Requirements
1. I looked through the Inspector General's survey
I
25X1
on foreign intelligence collection requirements issued in 25X1
can write. Witness the guidelines he laid out for action on requirements
for collection of information attached and marked Tab A.
2. He did an exhausting review and a lot of what he recommended makes
sense on the face of it. I imagine many of his recommendations have been
implemented and that the system has changed over the years. I would like
to be brought up to date on the current requirements system, how it is
structured, how it functions, and how effective it is now judged to be.
In Tab B is laid out the udgment on the requirements then extant.
I need to know current-day counterparts of the IPC List, the PNIOs, and the
Current Intelligence Reporting List. Is the recommendation that the Collection
Guidance Staff be directed to act on requests of DDS&T as well as DDI of any
relevance today?
3. What has been done to identify and make stand out the most important
needs on the long list of requirements? recommended that DDI and
DDS&T be directed to prepare a preface identifying the most important needs
in each issue of the CIRL. I was particularly interested in this recommendation
on guidance of the (See Tab C.) He
also asked whether there were any requirements whic could fulfill but
which are going instead to clandestine or technical co ectors. The same
question could be asked with respect to =and FBIS. Other suggestions are:
-- In the field of political intelligence there is a special kind
of relationship between the field case officer of the Clandestine
Services and the OCI analyst. Each is an expert in his own right, but
they see the game from different seats in the ball park. The analyst
views Clandestine Services reporting in the context of the spectrum of
reporting from the State Department, the military attaches, FBIS, 0
NSA, and The case officer on the scene
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 Approved For Release 2007/0211CR~TA-R DP83M00914R002700080001-8
may not see many of these reports, but he is immersed in the culture
and can form his own valid opinions. Continuous communication between
these two experts of different viewpoints is more effective than the
sterile transmission of formal requirements.
-- The respect earned by the opinions of field officers as distinct
from hard intelligence reporting, is exemplified by the 25X1
institution which provides for periodic situation reports from the field.
We believe that a reverse system, in which OCI would elucidate 25X1
the Washington community point of view for the benefit of individual
field stations, would guide some current collectin efforts better than
formal requirements. We also believe that field stations would welcome
such guidance, especially in rapidly developing or changing situations
in which the chief of station must make quick choices in using his assets.
4. I want a look at the present state of our collection requirements and
how we can improve both targeting and focusing of our HUMINT collection assets.
I suggest that John McMahon involve the addressees of this memorandum in this
process and I would like to participate in a meeting in which I can be briefed
on where all this stands and where the potential is at the earliest opportunity
which can usefully be arranged.
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 Approved For Release 2007/O EdR IA-RDP83MOO914ROO2700080001-8 Tab A
Define what we, as an Agency, believe the Government
needs from the intelligence community.
Challenge the community's and our own past assumptions
as to what is needed.
Identify the most important gaps that can be realistically
stated in terms of collection requirements and production goals.
Arrange these gaps in terms of collection and production
priorities.
Reduce the volume of requirements in order to gain more
effective collection and production action.
Train the analysts to write fewer and better requirements.
Discriminate between the important and the trivial.
Adjust requirements on the several collection systems
so that they complement and support each other.
Record requirements that are levied orally.
Do not allow collection requirements to exceed the
capabilities of the processors and the analysts.
Make validation and coordination of requirements
systematic.
Review outstanding requirements periodically.
Improve feedback from collectors to analysts and
vice versa.
Systematize operational support.
Analyze the problem thoroughly--in terms of needs,
priorities, and capabilities 'for processing and analysis--
before committing the Agency to a new collection effort.
Improve guidance by evaluating what has already been
collected.
Stop trying to cover the whole world comprehensively
and superficially.
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Tab B
1. CIA is collecting too much information- -more than it can use
properly, probably far more than the Government needs. Like the rest
of the intelligence community it makes up for not collecting enough of the
right kind of information on the most important targets by flooding the
system with secondary matter.
2. The quantity of information is degrading the quality of our
finished intelligence.
4. We find that these excesses are a direct consequence of our several
independent requirements systems, whose defects have these principal
causes:
a. No one has ever defined what the Government truly needs
from the intelligence community, either as to fundamental require-
ments for U. S. policy or as to what can be put to best use by the
producers and readers of finished intelligence. The closest thing
to a definition has been the Priority National Intelligence Objectives,
a lamentably defective document which amounts to a ritual justifi-
cation of every kind of activity anybody believes to be desirable.
The community and CIA make their own assumptions as to what is
needed, and then do not challenge these assumptions sufficiently.
b. CIA's requirements for collection of information are a
catalogue of all the subjects individual consumers all over the
community have said they would like to know about. They are an
undiscriminated mixture of crucial and trivial, appropriate and
irrelevant, and are altogether too numerous for effective action,
either of collection or of production.
c. Management at all levels has allowed this proliferation
of requirements to go almost wholly unchecked.
d. Resources for collection, especially technical collection,
greatly outweigh resources for production.
e. There is too little useful communication between originators
of requirements and those whose function it is to satisfy them.
f. The community has just begun to rationalize requirements,
collection, and production as between various systems.
SECRET
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