Intelligence

Last month, on a conference call with reporters, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair stated that the total budget for U.S. intelligence activities — an unsurprisingly murky total; and until recently a classified one — is $75 billion. As I later clarified, Blair meant the total for both military and non-military intelligence activities — as [...]

The White House just announced the leadership of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board: former Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), a big Obama supporter, and former Sen. David Boren (D-Okla.), a former intelligence committee chair and mentor of disastrous ex-CIA Director George Tenet. Their reactions, as per a White House release:
“I appreciate the privilege and opportunity that [...]

David C. Gompert, a former RAND Corporation vice president and longtime nonpartisan State and National Security Council official (Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush the Elder), has been nominated to be the principal deputy to Adm. Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence. He’s testifying before the Senate intelligence committee right now, and in pre-written answers to [...]

The Wall Street Journal has a wonderful story on the role of the CIA’s drones in harassing al-Qaeda in Pakistan, and it includes, at the bottom, this paragraph that explains why the efficacy of the drone strikes has reportedly increased:
At the same time, U.S. intelligence collection in Pakistan has vastly improved, officials say. Western intelligence [...]

I don’t have any more yet, but the early speculation on the cable networks is that Iran’s very belated disclosure of its nuclear facility under construction near Qom came after western intelligence services closed in on the structure. Less than five years ago, the Silberman-Robb commission on WMD intelligence castigated the U.S. intelligence community for [...]

To add some clarity and context to Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair’s disclosure this morning that the U.S. intelligence budget is $75 billion, it’s helpful to distinguish between two budget lines: the national intelligence program and the military intelligence program, with their inevitable NIP and MIP acronyms. Congress ordered recently that the NIP, but [...]

On a conference call with reporters to release an unclassified version of the new National Intelligence Strategy, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair revealed an intelligence community budget that goes far over recent disclosures of its total. You’re spending $75 billion on intelligence, America.
“We really believe the American people deserve to know about their intelligence [...]

As Daphne has written this week, the residents of Standish, Mich., are starting to turn against a proposal to send terrorism detainees from Guantanamo Bay to their town’s prison, a proposal floated by the legislature and seconded by Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) to alleviate Standish’s economic woes.  David Munson, the owner of a tavern in [...]

Blink and you’ll miss this, from National Security Adviser Jim Jones’ “Meet The Press” appearance yesterday:
MR. GREGORY:  Is it still your belief that Osama bin Laden is in Pakistan?
GEN.  JONES:  That one’s a little bit more elusive.  We are still very much on the hunt.  We think that he’s still in that general region.  But [...]

The Church and Pike committees of the 1970s exposed CIA lawlessness; created modern legal and congressional intelligence oversight structures; and cleaved the CIA’s history into before and after periods.