The U.S. Intelligence Community [Book by National Security Archive Staff and Fellows]

Books by National Security Archive Staff and Fellows

The U.S. Intelligence Community

The United States spends over $25 billion a year assimilating and monitoring security-related information around the world. Every hour of every day reconnaissance satellites, radar bases, signals intelligence systems, aircraft, vessels, and clandestine agents are marshaled in a prodigious effort to read the pulse of global politics and foreign enterprises.

The U.S. Intelligence Community is the first comprehensive portrait of the labyrinth of U.S. intelligence-gathering organizations whose true dimensions remain shrouded in secrecy. Through the Freedom of Information Act, incisive interviews, and scrupulous research, Jeffrey Richelson has outlined the internal structure of the 30-odd organizations that comprise the U.S. Intelligence Community, and unveils a world known to most of us merely in terms of moles, spies, and spooks.

Richelson charts the evolution of the CIA, FBI, and military intelligence agencies and reveals the interrelationships between today's multifarious and awesomely sophisticated intelligence complexes. How are national security agendas born and carried out? What are the hierarchies and lines of power that shape and support U.S. intelligence network? Who manages the intelligence-collecting activities, and who hands down the orders for overt or overt involvement? More lucidly and more extensively than any single volume before, The U.S. Intelligence Community uncovers what intelligence is, who it is done by, and how it is perpetrated, interpreted, and used.