Intelligence Agencies What Exactly Is Term Paper

Sometimes, it is even necessary to carry out certain clandestine operations like deceptions, clandestine collection of information, covert actions, and also the carrying out of the exercise of distributing disinformation or misleading information, which would mislead the suspected threat.

The United States Intelligence Community is, as stated earlier, made up a number of different agencies. The Central Intelligence Agency is one of these. Also known popularly as the CIA, this agency was created in the year 1947, when President Truman signed the National Security Act. The Act stated that the Director of Central Intelligence would be responsible for coordinating the intelligence activities of the entire nation, and that they would also correlate and evaluate as well as disseminate all the pertinent information that would probably be a threat to the national security of the United States of America. Today, the Director of Central Intelligence is Porter J. Goss, who serves as the head of the United States Intelligence Community, and also, more importantly, as the primary advisor to the president of the U.S.A. On matters of national security, and the threats that it is faced with, if any. He is also the head of the Central Intelligence Agency.

The CIA however, is an independent agency that is innately responsible to the President of the U.S.A. through the DCI, and can also be liable and accountable to the people of the United States of America through the agencies of the Congress that conduct oversights of intelligence and form a community of oversight of security threats to the nation and keep the average American well informed. The innate mission of the CIA is to provide such information that would help the President of the U.S.A. And the national Security Council and the various officials who are responsible for formulating and implementing the different policies of national security based on the intelligence that'd provided to them by the CIA.

Therefore, the CIA has the responsibility of providing accurate and exact and comprehensive and also timely information and intelligence on the topics that may affect the national security. The CIA also has the duty of conducting counterintelligence activities as it sees fit, and wherever necessary, based on its own judgment and under the direction and supervision of the president of the U.S.A. It also has the duty of conducting any other special security measures wherever necessary, and any other functions and activities that may be related to the national security and to foreign intelligence.

In order to be able to accomplish and carry out all the duties that have been assigned to it, the CIA will engage in activities that would promote the gaining of more knowledge, like for example, research and investigations. It can utilize high technological means for the purpose, and also carry out the deployment and the development of the technology for the purpose of intelligence. Being a separate and an independent agency also helps the CIA to conduct its own research and therefore, it often serves as an independent source of information and analysis and this is the reason that it is also able to work closely with several other organizations within the Intelligence Community so that all the various consumers of intelligence, whether they are policy makers who belong to the government, or whether they are military commanders who would use the intelligence for entirely different purposes. The goal of the Central Intelligence Agency is, therefore, to provide all those who need it and request it the very best intelligence that it is possible to assimilate and provide to those who need it.

In today's constantly changing world where intelligence needs to be as sophisticated if not more, than the suspected violators of the national security of the U.S.A., the CIA is inordinately faced with newer and newer challenges, and this in turn makes it necessary for the agency to meet these challenges in ways of its own. Some of these measures are: the CIA has to create certain special multi-disciplinary measures that would be able to tackle some high priority issues like for example, counter terrorism, counter intelligence, organized crimes of an international caliber, non-proliferation issues, drug trafficking, and arms and environmental intelligence. The CIA is expected to handle these issues with care and with the total dedication and sense of responsibility that goes with it. Another measure that the CIA has to take is that of forging stronger relationships and ties between all the other different intelligence agencies, and providing all-source analyses for all the issues that concerns the agency.In addition, the Central Intelligence Agency also has the responsibility of playing an important role in all the activities of the Intelligence Community and managing all the different services that are in common with all the different agencies, and also in talking part in all the partnerships that would quite naturally exist between the different intelligence agencies in such areas like research and development, technical advances and so on. As the main intention of intelligence gathering and collection undertaken by any agency is that of offering complete satisfaction to the various consumers of this type of intelligence, the CIA has, most importantly, laid emphasis on the fact that adaptability would be one of the main keywords on which to act. This would help the consumer to have his needs met by the CIA, especially in the terrorist threat and other security threat - prone world of today.

The CIA has several different branches under which it functions. They are: the Directorate of Intelligence, which is responsible for the collection and dissemination of intelligence on foreign issues, the Directorate of Science and Technology, which is responsible for the creation of and the application of modern technology for the purpose of the collection of information and intelligence. The Directorate of Operations is primarily responsible for the clandestine and undercover collection of foreign intelligence. The Center for the Study of Intelligence is responsible for taking care of the historical documents that would be in its charge, for the purpose of providing education for whoever so desires. Whenever legal advice is needed, the Office of General Counsel acts as the agent of advice for the CIA. The Office of Public Affairs handles all public affairs and publicity and media affairs and public policies. These, then, are the several different branches of working of the Central Intelligence Agency.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation or the FBI as it is more popularly known is another intelligence Agency that is a part of the Intelligence Community. According to the FBI, there are certain priorities that have been listed out by the Directors of the FBI down the ages, which have served the nation in god stead when it came right down to it. These are: to protect the United States of America from terrorist attacks, against any sort of intelligence and espionage operations being conducted by foreign countries against the U.S.A., to also protect against the cyber based and all types of high tech crimes that are so very popular today, to fight public corruption, and to endeavor to protect the civil rights and liberties of the citizens of the United States of America, to fight against international criminal rings and organizations that may become a threat to the national security, to combat both white collar crimes as well as certain violent crimes of significance, and to support international, federal, municipal, state, and county partners in these fights against crime, and finally, to attempt to use high technology of today to improve the chances of fighting against these crimes.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation serves primarily as the investigating section of the Justice System of the U.S.A., and although the fact is that the FBI is innately responsible for the fighting of those crimes that would affect the national security of the nation, at present, it is the issue of the fight against terrorism and terrorist related activities that has taken precedence over all the other activities of the agency. The very heart of the Federal Bureau of investigation and all its operations and activities lies in the investigations that it conducts, and the main purpose behind this is to defend the United States of America against any type of terrorist attacks or threats, and also to enforce the various criminal laws of the nation. The FBI has jurisdiction over more than 200 types of federal laws and regulations.

The Directorate of Intelligence has as one of its main duties the positioning and placing the FBI in such a manner that it would be in a position that would allow it to anticipate and deter any type of national security and terrorist threats by concentrating its core investigative capacities on maintaining enterprise wide intelligence policies, and by providing all the useful and pertinent information and intelligence that needs to be given to law enforcement agencies and national and….....