Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976, Volume XXXVIII, Part 2, Organization and Management of Foreign Policy; Public Diplomacy, 1973–1976

61. Memorandum From the Director of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (Saunders) to Secretary of State Kissinger¹

Washington, December 9, 1975.

The Issues You Will Face in Reorganization of the Intelligence Community

The Congressional inquiries are reaching a point where they will be turning their attention to questions of how the intelligence community might be restructured. There are fundamental issues involved that will affect your interests as Secretary of State and the interests of your successors for the next decade or two. The purpose of this memorandum is to identify for your preliminary thought the main issues that you will face in the debate ahead and some of the considerations which will affect decisions on them.

Our purpose in coming to you now is to seek any early thoughts you may have so that we can go into the Executive Branch study which the President has ordered with a sense of the direction in which you would like to see any reorganization move. The study which the President has ordered will be producing a paper before Christmas, but that will be only the opening of the serious internal discussion of this subject. It is not at all clear how much we will be able to influence legislation on this subject, but it is essential that we know how we would like it to be shaped.

Your Choice

Let me note at the outset that you have the obvious choice between standing aloof from this debate and engaging in it.

On the one hand, you could take the position of letting the DCI and the Secretary of Defense work out the balance between them. You could judge that, whatever system they work out, enough significant intelligence will be produced to meet the Secretary of State’s needs. You could judge that the DCI will be looking out for most of the interests of concern to the President and to the Secretary of State, that he will be able to hold his own vis-à-vis the Secretary of Defense, and that it is not worth much effort to influence the remaining margin. The main disadvantage in this approach during a period when some sort of reorganization seems almost certain is that we would accept institutionalization of a secondary role for the State Department in a system that will probably prevail over the next 10–20 years. The primacy of the military in a period of rapid technological advances would be left for the DCI alone to challenge.

On the other hand, you could take the position that the Secretary of State cannot afford not to be involved in decisions in this area. Unless he insists on a voice in all of the important decisions of the intelligence community, there will be a risk that more and more of these decisions will be made with only the needs of the Defense Department, or perhaps CIA, being considered. This approach would require augmentation of the Department’s resources dedicated to intelligence. Such an increase could come about only through absorbing elements of CIA (with their budgets) and/or a net increase in total Department personnel and funding.

You also have, of course, a choice on how soon you want to engage yourself in these issues. The debate is beginning now in the Executive Branch and in the Congress. Whether you choose to engage yourself early or not, there is an argument for putting us in a position now to try to shape the studies that are already underway.

The Main Issue

The central issue in whatever reorganization takes place will be whether the military and/or intelligence specialists within our government will achieve a dominant role in setting priorities for the nation’s intelligence effort or whether the Secretary of State will have a strong enough institutional position within the community to assure that that effort will continue to serve the broad spectrum of national foreign policy interests for which the President and the Secretary of State have special responsibility.

While part of the concern which arises out of Congressional inquiries is a desire to prevent future abuses, the DCI and Secretary of Defense are both trying to use the occasion to strengthen their own roles. This is the most significant opportunity since 1947, and another one like this will probably not come again for 15–20 years.

The appointment on December 5 of Bob Ellsworth to the long-vacant second Deputy Secretaryship of Defense with special responsibility for Intelligence clearly signals Defense’s intention to further strengthen its hand.

This reflects the contest between the DCI, who, under the 1971 reorganization directive, was given staff responsibility for the intelligence budget, and the Secretary of Defense, who retains unimpaired his statutory authority over some 80% of the resources committed to these programs. Until recent years this was not a major problem. But resources for intelligence have dwindled, collection means have become increasingly technological, and the temptation to use “national” collection assets for tactical military purposes has become greater. Defense is therefore increasingly focusing the national technological intelligence resources under its control on military, and even tactical purposes. This tendency, if unchecked, could operate to the detriment of collection of intelligence across the broader spectrum of national interests which are the concern of the President, the Secretary of State and the DCI. State and CIA have a common interest in preventing this from happening.

A second matter of major concern is review and control over covert action. This is an area in which the Secretary of State ought always to have a major voice, indeed, probably the major voice excepting only the President. It would seem well to institutionalize such a role, perhaps by giving the Secretary a right of review of all covert action decisions before they go to the President.

State’s Present Role

As matters now stand, apart from the role which the Secretary plays personally as a member of the NSC and in direct relationship with the President, the Department’s participation in overall intelligence community activity has steadily declined. Insofar as the Secretary looks beyond his personal knowledge, he plays his role in policy councils on the basis of what the Department can provide him from its own analysis or from diplomatic reporting or from what is available to him from the intelligence community. The Department, however, has had a declining role in determining what will be available to him from the intelligence community.

The primary reason within the broader context is the increasing resources devoted to technological intelligence collection and processing in contrast to collection by human sources. The Department is relegated to a secondary role in the control and review of these technical programs. Thus the Secretary does not have a strong institutional role in shaping the intelligence effort in such a way as to meet his needs for intelligence or to assure that the overall effort is in consonance with his broad foreign policy objectives. Some of this can be corrected to a degree, but some is beyond our control.

The intricacies of setting priorities for intelligence collection systems may seem rather exotic. In the past our modest participation did not lose us much. But the problem looms in the future. I would rather see the Secretary’s interests represented when decisions on major systems and their uses are made. If these decisions are left to be made within Defense and CIA, there will be no guarantee that the President and the Secretary of State will have as much of the intelligence they need to prevent war as to wage it.

Thinking on Reorganization of the Intelligence Community

The debate over this fundamental issue will take the form of a debate over (a) whether the past and current fragmented approach to overall management of the intelligence community will increase or whether there will be greater centralization of authority and over (b) how to provide adequate checks on any central authority.

From the point of view of the Secretary of State, the greater the decentralization of management—that is, the greater the role of the Pentagon—the less influence he will have. The converse is that the greater the role of the DCI below Cabinet level, the stronger the State Department’s role can be because State and the DCI will share an interest in maintaining proportion in the role of the military. However, there are limits to this point.

Of the many options for reorganizing the US intelligence effort now under consideration, several could affect vitally the future role of the Secretary and the Department in the intelligence field. These include proposals to:

—Raise the DCI from senior advisor to full statutory membership on the NSC. This would strengthen the DCI’s hand vis-à-vis State no less than Defense and would be seen as elevating “intelligence” to the level of policy, and of identifying the government’s premier intelligence office with policy. It would require legislative sanction.

—Increase the DCI’s line authority over intelligence resources. This would arrest the drift toward increasing Defense control and would better assure that intelligence resources are deployed to satisfy the mainly convergent requirements of the DCI and the Secretary of State. It too would require major and controversial legislative change.

—Separate the DCI from Operating Headship of CIA. There are a number of variants of this proposal, some of which would seriously impair the DCI’s ability to function unless he were compensated by substantially increased line authority in other major areas, such as resources, and were given the staff necessary to exercise that authority.

If it is correct to assume that the Secretary of State shares a common interest with a strong DCI below Cabinet level, the question then becomes how to strengthen the DCI. You more than anyone will understand the advantages and the pitfalls of operating from the White House with only a small staff in the face of large bureaucracies whose natural tendencies are to cut outsiders off from access to program decisions. The only counter is the full backing of the President, which cannot be institutionalized from one Administration to the next.

The alternative is to strengthen the DCI’s authority but to leave him close to CIA which would continue to provide an institutional base. Congressional concern for checks on intelligence activities would then have to be met by closer coordination with the Congress and development of the inter-agency procedures for approving certain intelligence activities.

A Concluding Word

This memorandum is a first effort. The shape of the debate in a broader forum has only begun to clarify. At some point this month, after you have had time to reflect, you may want to discuss the question in a preliminary way with Joe Sisco, Larry Eagleburger and a few others. We will of course have then to consider what we should do with State’s own intelligence organization and resources.

1. Source: National Archives, RG 59, General Administrative Correspondence Files of the Deputy Under Secretary for Management, 1968–75: Lot 78 D 295, Box 3, M Chron, December 1975 (1). Secret; Sensitive. Sent through Sisco and Eagleburger. Harold H. Saunders was appointed Director of INR on December 1, replacing Hyland who became Deputy Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs.