Sociology

The intelligent community of the United States is an alliance of sixteen independent agencies of the government that work jointly in gathering intelligence that is required in maintaining security and influencing international relations. The organization consists of members from the military, intelligent arms and civilian agencies of intelligence that are all under a director in charge of national intelligence who relays the intelligence directly to the president (Coll, 2004). Its major responsibilities include gathering domestic and international intelligence, spying and advising on military arrangements. Although the community was constituted in December fourth 1981 by the then president Ronald Reagan, its history dates back to early 17th century. This is when the first spy czars general Washington observed the need for intelligence in the revolution ally war (ONeal, 2004).

The intelligence process became more organized through the revolution ally war making it to evolve into the first organized intelligence group called the mole and by 1775, it had evolved into a committee of secret correspondence. This committee had the mandate of gathering views about the revolution war across Europe. After the revolution war, the years that followed were characterized by a dormant intelligent system due to obsession at the time by the Americans with nation building. During the civil war, the intelligence was divided between the north and south (Andrew, 1996). The intelligence become professional in the period between the civil war and the World War 1 and then become somehow unorganized between the two world wars. It was only in the Second World War that it was modernized by William Donovan who founded the office of the strategic studies (OSS) which greatly improved its defense capabilities (ONeal, 2004)

During the cold war, there was an increased need for better intelligence in the United States but there were conflilicting views about which agencies were to organize the process of gathering intelligence and which ones were to oversee and coordinate the process. The president at the time Harry Truman opted to separate tasks of the military from other civilian agencies by overhauling the OSS and assigning its responsibility to the department of war and state in October of 1945. This was contrary to the chief of staff Donovan, who proposed a more civilian based organization (Prados, 2006). The plan was rejected by the military and the FBI since they feared it would lessen their influence. The president then reached a comprise by founding the CIG an acronym for central intelligence group in  January of 1948 which was charged with the coordination of all the intelligent agencies.

This agency, CIG, was under the national intelligent authority, an umbrella organization that consisted of all the security departments making it the first true intelligent community. The body was then to be under civilian authorities when the congress formed the national Security Council that was under the CIA in 1947. In the period between 1950 and 1960, the CIA was central in taming the influence of the Soviet Union and its communist strategy. The CIA was credited with the discovery of soviet missiles in Cuba at the height of the cold war in 1962 (Henry, 2003). Other successes  included  the pigs operation against Cuban leader and operations in the Vietnam that somehow damaged its reputation at the time. Transfer of the intelligence to civilian agencies also helped the United States to improve its overall intelligence gathering capability that improved its success rate in the cold war and thereafter.