Lexicon

Intelligence community

The eighteen federal agencies and components that comprise the United States intelligence community under Executive Order 12333

Audio readout of this entry.

The Intelligence Community — IC — is the institutional collective of eighteen federal agencies and components that conduct intelligence activities for the United States. The Community operates under the framework of Executive Order 12333 (originally issued 1981 by President Reagan; substantially amended in 2008 by President George W. Bush) and the broader post-2004 statutory framework established by the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act. The Community is coordinated since 2005 by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), whose Director is the President's principal intelligence advisor and the institutional successor to the pre-2005 Director of Central Intelligence.

The eighteen IC components are: the Office of the Director of National Intelligence itself; the Central Intelligence Agency (the only IC component established as an independent agency rather than as a component of a larger department); the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, and the four military service intelligence components (Army Intelligence, Office of Naval Intelligence, Air Force Intelligence/Space Force Intelligence, Marine Corps Intelligence) — all under the Department of Defense; the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Intelligence Branch and the Drug Enforcement Administration's Office of National Security Intelligence — under the Department of Justice; the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) — under the Department of State; the Office of Intelligence and Analysis — under the Department of Homeland Security; the Coast Guard Intelligence — under DHS; the Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence — under the Department of Energy; and the Office of Intelligence and Analysis — under the Department of the Treasury.

The Community is institutionally heterogeneous in a way that the more concentrated foreign-intelligence services of comparable Western democracies are not. The British civilian intelligence framework comprises three services (MI5, MI6, and GCHQ); the German framework comprises three services (BfV, BND, and MAD); the French framework comprises four services (DGSE, DGSI, DRSD, and DRM). The US framework's eighteen components reflect a substantial post–World War II institutional choice to retain intelligence components within their parent operating departments rather than consolidating them into a smaller number of independent agencies — a choice whose institutional consequences include the substantial ongoing question of how the Community's product is integrated for top-of-government consumption.

The institutional history of the Community as a coherent institutional category dates substantially to the 1981 Executive Order 12333. The pre-1981 Community was an institutional collection rather than a substantively coordinated framework; the 1981 Order established the formal community-coordinating role of the DCI and the institutional positioning under which the Community operates in its contemporary form. The 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, passed in response to the 9/11 Commission's findings on pre-attack institutional integration failures, established the Director of National Intelligence as the community-coordinating officer (replacing the dual-hatted DCI/CIA-Director arrangement that had operated since 1947) and produced the contemporary institutional architecture.

The Community's institutional product is consumed at multiple levels of government: the President's Daily Brief and adjacent presidential-level products produced for the executive branch; the National Intelligence Estimates produced through the National Intelligence Council for broader executive-branch and Congressional consumption; the substantial volume of Departmental and Agency-specific products produced for the operational and policy consumers within each Department; and the broader institutional engagement with Congressional oversight committees (the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence; the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence; the substantially smaller intelligence-oversight roles on the Armed Services, Foreign Relations/Foreign Affairs, Judiciary, and Homeland Security committees). The institutional substance of the Community-Congressional oversight relationship has been the subject of sustained academic-and-policy attention across the post-1975 period (the post–Church Committee oversight framework, the post-1980 Intelligence Oversight Act, the post-2004 reform programme).

The principal institutional question the Community continues to face is the coordination problem the 2004 reform was intended to address. The published institutional record on Community integration across the post-2005 period has been mixed: the operational integration of post-2001 counter-terrorism activity has been substantial; the strategic-intelligence integration on adjacent priorities (Russia, China, the proliferation environment, the broader great-power-competition framework) has been substantively improved relative to the pre-2005 baseline but continues to surface periodic institutional friction. The institutional question of whether the eighteen-component framework is the right institutional design for the contemporary intelligence environment, or whether further institutional consolidation would be operationally productive, is a continuing thread in the academic-and-policy literature.

See also