Adjusting to the Post-Cold War Era
The unexpected and rapid end of the Cold War in 1991 created trauma in the
foreign policy and national security community both in and out of government.
While some criticized the intelligence community for failing to forecast the
collapse of the Soviet Union (and used this argument to propose drastic cuts in
intelligence agencies), most recognized that the good news of being relieved of
the substantial burden of maintaining a security structure to meet the Soviet
challenge was accompanied by the bad news of increased insecurity. In many
directions, the community faced threats and intelligence challenges that it was
largely unprepared to meet.
So did the intelligence oversight committees. New digitized technologies, and
the demand for imagery and continued capability against older systems, meant the
need to spend more on satellite systems at the expense of human efforts. In
addition, denial and deception became more effective as targets learned from
public sources what our intelligence agencies were doing. There were
comprehensive reform proposals of the intelligence community, such as those
offered by Senators Boren and McCurdy. That said, Congress still took too little
action to address institutional weaknesses.106
With the Cold War over, and the intelligence community roiled by the Ames spy
scandal, a presidential commission chaired first by former secretary of defense
Les Aspin and later by former secretary of defense Harold Brown examined the
intelligence community's future. After it issued recommendations addressing the
DCI's lack of personnel and budget authority over the intelligence community,
the Intelligence committees in 1996 introduced implementing legislation to
remedy these problems.
The Department of Defense and its congressional authorizing committees rose
in opposition to the proposed changes. The President and DCI did not actively
support these changes. Relatively small changes made in 1996 gave the DCI
consultative authority and created a new deputy for management and assistant
DCIs for collection and analysis. These reforms occurred only after the Senate
Select Committee on Intelligence took the unprecedented step of threatening to
bring down the defense authorization bill. Indeed, rather than increasing the
DCI's authorities over national intelligence, the 1990s witnessed movement in
the opposite direction through, for example, the transfer of the CIA's imaging
analysis capability to the new imagery and mapping agency created within the
Department of Defense.
