Introduction

This issue of The SAIS Review appears at a moment when America's intelligence community is dealing with some of the toughest challenges in its history, while facing unprecedented public scrutiny of its activities. It is therefore the ideal time to present this issue, in which our contributors tackle topics such as the ethical questions involved in intelligence work, the relationship between intelligence officers and their policy counterparts, and the nature of intelligence success and failure.

The challenges facing intelligence today flow from the dramatically altered state of the world since the end of the Cod War and the attacks of September 11. These twin watersheds changed the world in ways that present intelligence with both secrets to discover and mysteries to unravel. The intelligence community must work to ascertain the capabilities and locations of terrorist cells, the plans of adversaries, and the status of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons proliferation around the globe. Furthermore, intelligence analysts must also look beyond this to unravel the mysteries that are inherently unknowable yet susceptible to predictive analysis. These include the future of rising powers and the downstream impact of global trends ranging from the population explosion in the developing world to the soaring demand for energy and revolutionary changes in technology. The intelligence plate is overflowing.

All of this comes at time when the Intelligence Community itself is in the midst of a dramatic transformation. After dramatic resource cuts during the 'peace dividend' era of the 1990s, money and people have begun flowing back into the community. Intelligence agencies have in the last two years been hiring at a record clip. While this has the decided benefit of bringing in fresh perspectives and vital new energy, it also means that many agencies now have staffs with a majority of people who have been in the business fewer than five years. Many intelligence professionals are thus climbing a very steep learning curve while wrestling with the above challenges.

Another part of this transformation involves the restructuring of the intelligence community under the Director of National Intelligence. The Director—whose position was created in December 2004—is now the nation's principal intelligence official charged with overseeing and coordinating the work of the community's 16 diverse agencies. As with most major reorganizations in their early years, all of this remains a 'work in progress.'

The new Director differs from his/her predecessor—the Director of Central Intelligence—in not having simultaneously to manage the CIA on a daily basis. In theory, this means that the new leader has the potential to devote more time and energy to integrating the work of the community's diverse agencies and achieving progress on long-standing issues, such as information sharing, common standards for hiring and training, and uniform practices for recruiting and vetting secret agents. A good start has been made on many of these issues, but it is widely believed that Congress did not give the new Director sufficient authority to achieve the stated goals. Various proposals are on the table for strengthening the new Director's authority, but important decisions have yet to be made.

In short, much is at stake for the United States as the Intelligence Community copes with the twin challenges of understanding a more complex world and transforming the way it does business. Although espionage is a secret business, American intelligence must function in a free and open society, operate in a way consistent with our values, and earn the public's trust. The challenges that our intelligence agencies now face—running the gamut from substantive to managerial—call for an unprecedented degree of public debate and understanding. With this issue of The SAIS Review, we hope to contribute substantially to that discussion.