A bomb just went off at an overseas U.S. Embassy. A South Asian country has begun to stockpile nuclear weapons. Known terrorists have entered the United States as students. A U.S. company is caught up in an international money-laundering scheme. A hacker is attempting to access military information. An assassination attempt has been uncovered in the Middle East.
These are all possible scenarios that would be investigated by one or more agencies in the U.S. intelligence community, of which the largest and best known are the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the National Security Agency (NSA), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
All four of these agencies conjure images of sophisticated gadgetry and high-tech nerve centers, where Top Secret information is exchanged as if it were ordinary paperwork. That’s all true to some extent, but the reality of life in the intelligence world is often more mundane and filled with more uncertainty than how it is portrayed on TV.
At the core, the U.S. intelligence agencies share a mission to protect the United States, and on good days they work together toward this cause. But as individual entities, with long bureaucratic histories of their own, each of the major intel agencies also has a specific mission and culture.
Many Americans aren’t familiar with the nature of each agency’s work beyond a general understanding that they “protect our borders” or “keep America safe.” Spy buffs aside, most people living outside the Beltway have not even heard of the NSA or DIA – which is fine as far as those agencies are concerned.
The super-secret and sometimes not-so-secret work that the intel agencies perform involves gathering and analyzing information (aka “intelligence”) for national security and defense matters. The duties break down roughly as follows: The CIA conducts foreign covert operations, counterintelligence operations, and collects and analyzes foreign intelligence for the president and his staff to aid in national security decisions. The DIA concentrates on foreign military intelligence information, including battlefield intelligence. NSA handles the making and breaking of codes, and intercepts communications from abroad. Last but not least, the FBI conducts domestic counterintelligence and counterterrorism operations in addition to its role as the lead law enforcement agency in the country.
Though the CIA, DIA, NSA and FBI have separate responsibilities, their goals are the same: to keep America and its citizenry safe from harm and danger, whether the threat is foreign or domestic.
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
The Central Intelligence Agency, based in the Washington suburb of Langley, Va., is still arguably the grand daddy of the U.S. intelligence community. Its work running covert overseas operations has been both lionized and demonized in hundreds of books and movies over the years.
The primary function of the 20,000 person strong CIA is to provide foreign intelligence information to assist the president and senior U.S. government policymakers in making decisions relating to national security.
Some of the CIA’s covert work has become very public knowledge such as their unsuccessful attempt to invade Cuba to overthrow Fidel Castro (aka the Bay of Pigs), the agency’s arming of Nicaraguan contra rebels, and attempting to poison the Republic of Congo's Prime Minister. Since the September 11th attacks the agency has focused on terrorism. Accordingly, they have formed joint operation centers in more than twenty countries where U.S. and foreign intelligence officers work together to track and capture suspected terrorists and to destroy or penetrate their networks. The agency played a major role in dethroning the Taliban government in Afghanistan after 9/11 via covert operations that supported the U.S. military operations.
The impetus for the creation of the CIA, like the NSA, came about during the Truman Administration. During World War II, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a precursor to the CIA, provided strategic information to aid in the war effort. Though the OSS was eliminated after the war, Truman felt that there was still a need for a focused, central intelligence organization. He signed the National Security Act of 1947, which charged the CIA with “coordinating the nation’s intelligence activities and correlating, evaluation and disseminating intelligence affecting the national security.”
The CIA has gone through some major changes since its creation in response to scandals and to the shifting geopolitical landscape that has seen the end of the Cold War and the rise of Islamic fundamentalist terror groups. From the 1970s to the early 1990s, the CIA had been caught assassinating or attempting to assassinate foreign leaders, conducting domestic spying operations on thousands of Americans, impeding the FBI’s Watergate break-in investigation and smuggling arms as part of the Iran Contra Affair. These incidents led to initial structural changes in the CIA, such as the installation of stronger chains of commands when authorizing covert operations.
In 2004, with the creation of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the CIA was no longer ‘the’ source for central intelligence for the U.S. government. The CIA is still an independent agency that collects and analyzes intelligence information, conducts covert actions. However, it has been supplanted by the National Intelligence Office when it comes to directly providing the president with information on foreign intelligence communications and operations.
Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)
The Defense Intelligence Agency is a combat support agency within the Defense Department that produces, analyses and disseminates military intelligence information. DIA provides information to policymakers and military combatant commanders about foreign military intelligence, which includes everything from troop movements, weapons distribution and the military capabilities of foreign countries to political assessments and diplomatic changes.
Recent global incidents like the Mumbai attacks and the police shooting rioters in Greece would be analyzed by the DIA for any future political and/or military ramifications that might impact the security of the United States and its allies. Over the years, the DIA has provided intelligence data on a host of issues and incidents such as the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, the taking of American hostages in Iran, the overthrow of Idi Amin in Uganda, and North Korea’s nuclear proliferation.
Based in Arlington, Va., the DIA has five main functions of operations: 1) gather human source intelligence; 2) analyze technical intelligence (computer crunching of info); 3) distribute intelligence/reports to the Intelligence agencies; 4) provide advice and support to the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and 5) provide military intelligence to combatant commands. Its directors are normally three-star military generals. DIA's worldwide staff of military and civilians numbers 16,500.
Before DIA, defense intelligence gathering was collected, analyzed and distributed separately by the Department of Defense, the Joint Chiefs, and the Military Intelligence Board, which consisted of military and civilian intelligence officers who helped decide defense intelligence policy.
The concept of the DIA started in 1958 with the Reorganization Act, which revised the organizational structure of the Department of Defense and U.S. foreign intelligence as a whole. In 1961 then Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara decided to proceed with the idea of having a centralized, one-stop-shop for defense intelligence information which became the DIA. There has been some dispute over why the DIA was created—whether it was remorse over the Pearl Harbor attacks, the U.S.-Russian missile gap of the 1950s, or simply to correct managerial loopholes that led to inefficient distribution of information, no one can definitively say.
DIA has expanded its military intelligence work to include collecting of data on counterterrorism and nuclear proliferation. At times the DIA has found itself in conflict with the CIA, recently over the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Other instances have involved the usual Intel rivalry between the Department of Defense and the CIA. Nevertheless, the DIA has strived to adhere to its mission statement as being the central provider of “military, defense and national intelligence.”
National Security Agency (NSA)
The National Security Agency, better known as the NSA, is another DoD agency that deals with foreign intelligence gathering. The NSA has a higher profile than the DIA, but its work is equally as cryptic, earning it the occasional moniker No Such Agency.
The NSA describes itself as “America’s cryptologic organization” that “coordinates, directs and performs highly specialized activities to protect U.S. government information systems and produce foreign signals intelligence information.”
The NSA employs over 40,000 people and has two primary functions: converting cryptic foreign intelligence communication into comprehensive text (codebreaking) and protecting U.S. government information systems by using cryptography (codemaking).
NSA operates listening posts in the United States and around the world. These posts collect information from spy satellites and sort through data signals that may have been sent via phone call, fax, or computer to get leads on potential threats. NSA also creates and releases computer viruses to disrupt enemy systems. Its powerful global monitoring capability gained greater public attention by the 2005 discovery that the agency had been keeping records on communications where one party was in the U.S.
The origins of the NSA date to December 1951 when the then CIA director sent a memo to the National Security Council declaring that “control over, and coordination of, the collection and processing of communications intelligence had proved ineffective.” The Council then completed a study on the matter that confirmed the CIA’s conclusions. In June 1952 President Truman authorized the creation of the NSA to coordinate communications intelligence.
The main difference between the NSA and the CIA, FBI and DIA revolves around how each agency gathers its intelligence information. The NSA does not have field agents who do in-person intelligence gathering who travel the globe like 24’s Jack Bauer. Instead, employees work primarily in Fort Meade, Md., a few miles northeast of Washington, with a smaller work site in San Antonio.
The NSA likes to keep a low profile, even though its name has popped up in the news over its wiretapping work. Though the NSA’s mission and bylaws state that it is only to conduct “foreign” intelligence or counterintelligence, the NSA has been able to conduct some domestic surveillance that sparked a vigorous national debate over privacy and eavesdropping.
After the Nixon Administration, it was discovered that the NSA had wiretaps on targeted Americans. In 2005, the New York Times reported that the NSA, in an “attempt to thwart terrorism,” had wiretapped the phones of Americans who called persons outside the country, without obtaining warrants.
Over the years, the NSA has expanded its work to include more non-military communications intelligence gathering to protect other federal agency computer networks from cryptologic attacks.
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
Unlike the CIA, DIA and NSA, the FBI is not exclusively an intelligence agency. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, as its name suggests, conducts criminal investigations in its conventional law enforcement role, and carries out specific operations related to counterintelligence, counterterrorism and international criminal investigations. As part of the Department of Justice, the FBI does not directly involve itself foreign intelligence gathering.
The FBI states its mission is to “protect and defend the United States against terrorist and foreign intelligence threats, to uphold and enforce the criminal laws of the United States, and to provide leadership and criminal justice services to federal, state, municipal, and international agencies and partners.”
Headquartered at the J. Edgar Hoover building in downtown Washington, D.C., the FBI also maintains over 50 field offices across the country and has diplomats stationed in U.S. embassies and consulates worldwide. Over 30,000 people work for the Bureau.
The FBI is viewed as the lead law enforcement agency in the U.S. because of its sizeable jurisdiction which allows its agents to investigate over 200 categories of federal crimes—everything from government fraud and civil rights violations to organized crime and violent gangs. It’s frequently involved in identity theft and kidnapping cases, as well as domestic terrorism investigations.
The Bureau’s intelligence and investigative work has covered such incidents as the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, the Patty Hearst kidnapping, the Enron bankruptcy case and the pursuit of mob boss John Gotti.
The idea of an FBI came about through the passage of the 1887 Interstate Commerce Act, which created a “federal responsibility for interstate law enforcement.” It wasn’t until 1908 that the Bureau of Investigation was organized with its own staff of agents. The BOI became the United States Bureau of Investigations in 1932, the Division of Investigation in 1932 and finally renamed the FBI in 1935.
The FBI has a well-known history of being involved in high profile incidents. Between the 1920s and 1950 the FBI was involved in shoot-outs with gangsters like John Dillinger, breaking up anti-Prohibition groups, locating Nazi agents, finding communist sympathizers and taking on organized crime. There have been numerous high-profile missteps by the FBI, such as domestic surveillance operations of 1960s civil rights groups, the bungling of the 1993 Waco siege in Texas, and the embarrassing and damaging espionage of Special Agent Robert Hanssen, who sold countless national security secrets to the Russians.
Though the FBI continues to investigate federal crimes, it has increased its involvement in national security since the September 11th attacks, especially in the areas of counterterrorism, counterintelligence and cyber crime. The USA Patriot Act has allowed the FBI to conduct some domestic surveillance with limited or no warrants in the interest of national security.
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