President Harry Truman created the job of director of central intelligence (DCI) in 1946 so that he and other senior administration officials could turn to one person for foreign intelligence briefings. The DCI was the head of the Central Intelligence Group until 1947, when he became the director of the newly created Central Intelligence Agency.

This book profiles each DCI and explains how they performed in their community role, that of enhancing
cooperation among the many parts of the nation’s intelligence community and reporting foreign intelligence to the president. The book also discusses the evolving expectations that U.S. presidents through George W. Bush placed on their foreign intelligence chiefs.

Although head of the CIA, the DCI was never a true national intelligence chief with control over the government’s many arms that collect and analyze foreign intelligence. This limitation conformed to President Truman’s wishes because he was wary of creating a powerful and all-knowing intelligence chief in a democratic society. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Congress and President Bush decided to alter the position of DCI by creating a new director of national intelligence position with more oversight and coordination of the government’s myriad programs. Thus this book ends with Porter Goss in 2005, the last DCI.

Douglas Garthoff’s book is a unique and important study of the nation’s top intelligence official over a roughly fifty-year period. His work provides the detailed historical framework that is essential for all future studies of how the U.S. intelligence community has been and will be managed.

Download Directors of Central Intelligence as Leaders of the US Intelligence Community 1946-2005

PDF format, 2.9MB, 356Pages.

Dr. Douglas F. Garthoff
Includes bibliographic references.
ISBN 1-929667-14-0 (pbk.:alk paper)

Foreword:

In fact, for more than half a century, there have been numerous efforts to enhance cooperation among the many parts of the nation’s intelligence establishment under the leadership of a principal intelligence official, called the director of central intelligence. The story of this study is what the nation’s leaders expected of directors of central intelligence in accomplishing this task, and how those who held the responsibility attempted to carry it out. The hope is that lessons drawn from that experience can inform today’s ongoing debate about how best the new director of national intelligence can accomplish America’s national intelligence mission.

The study presents an unusual perspective. Examinations of past intelligence performance often focus on how intelligence has played a role in specific circumstances. Studies of directors of central intelligence have usually stressed how they led the Central Intelligence Agency, conducted their relationships with the president, or affected US policy. No study until this one has focused on how each director sought to fulfill his “community” role.

This book was prepared under the auspices of the Center for the Study of Intelligence by Dr. Douglas F. Garthoff, a former CIA analyst and senior manager. It reflects the author’s deep experience in Intelligence Community affairs as well as his extensive research and interviews. Dr. Garthoff’s study represents a valuable contribution to our professional literature and a rich source of insights at a moment when the responsibilities and authorities of the Intelligence Community’s senior leadership are again in the public spotlight.

Paul M. Johnson

Read Full Book Online: Directors of Central Intelligence as Leaders of the US Intelligence Community 1946-2005

About the Author:

Douglas F. Garthoff worked for the CIA from 1972 to 1999, starting out in the Office of National Estimates as an analyst of Soviet affairs. His career coincided with the tenure of eleven of the nineteen DCIs profiled in this book, and he worked closely with two, Robert Gates and R. James Woolsey.

Note on Sources:

This study makes extensive use of information drawn from internal, classified CIA files— from the records of the directors of central intelligence and of the staffs that assisted them in their role as leaders of the US Intelligence Community; from interviews conducted as part of CIA’s oral history program; from organizational histories and biographies of directors of central intelligence; and from Studies in Intelligence, a journal published by CIA since 1955. With some exceptions, these sources are not individually cited in the footnotes.

These internal, classified resources supplement openly available material, such as declassified official histories (Troy, Darling, Montague, and Jackson) covering William Donovan and the first five DCIs, as well as a number of memoirs, biographies, books, and commission studies devoted to intelligence, all of which are listed in the bibliography. The bibliography also lists the interviews conducted by the author for this study.

The author must confess to being a source, and necessarily one biased by his background. He worked at CIA from 1972 until 1999, starting out in the Office of National Estimates, spending most of the 1970s and 1980s as an analyst of Soviet affairs in the intelligence directorate, and serving in the 1990s as a senior manager in several offices and staffs in other directorates and in the Office of the Director of Central Intelligence, including the Community Management Staff. Although this career included service under 11 of the 19 DCIs who served from 1946 to 2005, he only briefly met Richard Helms and William Colby and—apart from interviews—knew personally only the DCIs of the 1990s, working most closely with Robert Gates and R. James Woolsey.

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