U.S. INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES

U.S. Intelligence Agencies

U.S. Intelligence agencies

Even though the US had some of the finest intelligence services in the world, the disaster at Pearl Harbour on Sunday 7 December 1941 took the Americans completely by surprise even though they were listening to Japan's most secret radio traffic and there were many signs that such attack was possible. But the problem was that the US intelligence services did not read the signs as they should have and this amounted to a complete intelligence failure, and something had to be done urgently to prevent such disaster from happening again and embarrassing, arguably, the world's best intelligence services.

Although US intelligence capabilities were something to be truly proud of, it seems that there were problems with the intelligence structure that somehow by passed the minds of its creators and decision makers. The US intelligence services did not have central control, and there were many different intelligence agencies, the main ones were: Central Intelligence Agency (CIA); Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA); Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI); Joint Intelligence (J2) Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV); Combined Intelligence Center Vietnam (CICV); Combined Military Interrogation Center (CMIC); National Reconnaissance Office (NRO); Office of National Estimates (O/NE); National Security Agency (NSA); Combined Document Exploitation Center (CDEC); Combined Material Exploitation Center (CMEC). All these agencies were described by many critics as competing organisations, rather than working together towards the same objective. This meant that there was a serious command, control and communications problem. Another problem was that those agencies simply had too much intelligence with no centralised control over it. Also they were all involved in some 'bureaucratic battles' over the control of intelligence, and whose agency's intelligence was more accurate. It also seems that they had an experience and jurisdiction problems. It was not until July 1965 that an experienced intelligence officer took over MACV-J2, there were three officers before him, two were USAF officers and the third was a US Marine Corps, who had little interest in the intelligence business and with very little intelligence experience. Ford considered this as an 'incomprehensible failure'. The interesting thing about the Vietnam War is that the US never officially declared a war on anyone. In times of peace the head of intelligence in a foreign country would be the CIA Station Chief, and this command will pass on to the military if a war breaks. MACV was established in South Vietnam there was a major military build up, but nothing was officially handed over to the military, therefore there was a continuous jurisdictional problem that was never resolved. This, without doubt, affected the intelligence services capabilities of providing good intelligence. It seems that these were the seeds to the problems between intelligence services. According to Ford the CIA and military intelligence were meant to work together to expand their Vietnamese intelligence when it was decided to send troops into South Vietnam, however, in reality the gap that already existed between them grew bigger throughout the ...