Crafting an Intelligence Community: Papers of the First Four DCIs

Symposium Overview For nearly six decades, the director of central intelligence DCI headed the worlds most important intelligence agency and oversaw the largest, most sophisticated, and most productive set of intelligence services ever known. From 1946 to 2005, 19 DCIs served through 10 changes in president scores of major and minor wars, civil wars, military incursions, and other armed conflicts two energy crises a global recession the specter of nuclear holocaust and the pursuit of arms control the raising of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the Iron Curtain the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the arrival of international terrorism on the shores of America and the war against it overseas. During that time, the DCIs participated in or oversaw several vital contributions that intelligence made to US national security strategic warning, clandestine collection, independent analysis, overhead reconnaissance, support to warfighters and peacekeepers, arms control verification, encouragement of democracy, and counterterrorism.