The U.S. Intelligence Community

The Director of National Intelligence (DNI) heads the whole Intelligence Community. The job was created by the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, signed on December 17, 2004, after the 9/11 Commission concluded that no one was in charge of making the agencies share what they knew. The first DNI, John Negroponte, was sworn in in April 2005.

Before 2004, the Director of Central Intelligence ran the CIA and, on paper, coordinated everyone else too. The 2004 law split those jobs. The DNI is now the President's principal intelligence adviser, oversees the President's Daily Brief, and builds and manages the budget for the National Intelligence Program.

The ODNI is a fairly small headquarters staff in McLean, Virginia, rather than an agency that runs spies or satellites. It includes the National Counterterrorism Center, which pools terrorism information from every agency, the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, and the National Intelligence Council, which writes National Intelligence Estimates, the community's formal judgments on major questions.

The DNI and the principal deputy are nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate. In August 2025 the office announced a restructuring that cut its workforce by about 40 percent, from roughly 1,850 people, and closed several of its centers, including the Foreign Malign Influence Center.

The CIA is the government's main agency for human intelligence: recruiting people abroad who can provide secrets. It was created by the National Security Act of 1947 and formally began operating on September 18, 1947, as the successor to the wartime Office of Strategic Services. It is one of only two independent agencies in the Intelligence Community; the other is the ODNI.

The CIA is organized into directorates for analysis, operations, science and technology, digital innovation, and support. Its analysts write a large share of the President's Daily Brief. It is also the agency the President normally uses for covert action, secret operations meant to influence events abroad without the U.S. role being visible, under Executive Order 12333.

The 1947 law draws a hard line at home: the CIA has no police, subpoena, or law enforcement powers and no internal security functions inside the United States. That limit exists because Congress did not want an American secret police, and violations of it in the 1960s and 1970s became a central finding of the Church Committee.

The agency's headquarters, the George Bush Center for Intelligence, is in Langley, Virginia. Its Original Headquarters Building opened in 1961. The CIA Act of 1949 allows it to keep its budget, staff size, and organization secret, so the public does not know exactly how many people it employs or what it spends.

The NSA collects signals intelligence, the communications and electronic signals of foreign governments, militaries, and terrorist groups, and breaks the codes that protect them. Its second mission is cybersecurity: protecting the government's own classified networks and setting the encryption standards for national security systems.

President Harry Truman created the NSA by a classified memorandum on November 4, 1952, out of the earlier Armed Forces Security Agency. Its existence was so closely held that insiders joked the initials stood for "No Such Agency." It sits inside the Department of War (Defense), and since 1972 it has shared leadership with the Central Security Service, which coordinates the military's code breakers.

Its headquarters is at Fort George G. Meade in Maryland. Since U.S. Cyber Command was created in 2009 and 2010, one four-star military officer has led both organizations, an arrangement known as the "dual hat." Officials have debated for years whether to split the two jobs.

The NSA is the agency at the center of most modern surveillance debates. Its bulk collection of Americans' phone records, disclosed in 2013, and its collection under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act are covered in the History and Debates tabs of this page.

The FBI is the only member of the Intelligence Community that is also a full law enforcement agency. It is part of the Department of Justice, and it leads the government's work against foreign spies and terrorists inside the United States, while also investigating federal crimes.

It began on July 26, 1908, as a small corps of special agents created by Attorney General Charles Bonaparte, and took the name Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1935. J. Edgar Hoover led it for 48 years, from 1924 until his death in 1972, a tenure that later revealed both the bureau's skill and its abuses.

After Hoover, Congress required Senate confirmation of FBI directors and, in 1976, limited them to a single term of no more than 10 years, as the Cabinet page explains. The term is meant to keep the director from serving one President for too long, but a President can still fire a director at any time.

After the September 11 attacks, the FBI made preventing terrorism its top priority and in 2005 created a National Security Branch to house its counterterrorism, counterintelligence, and intelligence work. Because it can open investigations of Americans, the FBI's intelligence work is governed by Attorney General Guidelines, first issued in 1976 in response to the Church Committee's findings.

Nine of the 18 members sit inside the Department of War (Defense): the NSA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, and the intelligence elements of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, and Space Force. Together they serve both national leaders and commanders in the field.

The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), created on October 1, 1961, is the military's main source of analysis on foreign armed forces and weapons, and it runs the Defense attaché offices in U.S. embassies. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) analyzes satellite and aerial imagery and makes the maps and geographic data the military and other agencies use. It began in 1996 as the National Imagery and Mapping Agency and took its current name in 2003.

The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) builds, launches, and operates the nation's spy satellites. It was founded in 1961, but the government did not admit it existed until September 18, 1992. Its first program, CORONA, photographed the Soviet Union from orbit between 1960 and 1972 and was declassified in 1995.

The service elements are the oldest: the Navy's Office of Naval Intelligence dates to 1882. The newest member, Space Force intelligence, joined in January 2021 as the 18th. The armed forces page covers the services themselves. Spending for military intelligence is reported separately, as the Military Intelligence Program, which was $29.8 billion in fiscal 2024.

Six smaller members sit inside civilian departments besides the FBI. The State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), created in 1946 from the analysis branch of the wartime OSS, is one of the smallest, and it gives diplomats independent analysis. It became known for dissenting in 2002 from the community's judgment that Iraq was rebuilding nuclear weapons, a judgment that turned out to be wrong.

The Treasury Department's Office of Intelligence and Analysis, created in 2004, tracks the money behind terrorist groups, weapons programs, and sanctioned governments, and its work supports the sanctions Treasury imposes. The Drug Enforcement Administration's Office of National Security Intelligence joined the community in 2006 to share what drug investigations learn about foreign threats.

The Energy Department's Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence draws on the scientists at the national laboratories to assess foreign nuclear weapons programs and energy security, and it protects the labs from foreign spying.

The Department of Homeland Security's Office of Intelligence and Analysis shares threat information with state and local police and private companies, and Coast Guard Intelligence supports the Coast Guard's maritime security and law enforcement missions. Counting these six, the FBI, the nine defense elements, the CIA, and the ODNI gives the community's total of 18.

Congress oversees intelligence mainly through two committees created after the Church Committee: the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (1976) and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (1977). Their members hold security clearances and meet in secure rooms where classified material can be discussed.

Each year the committees write an Intelligence Authorization Act, which sets policy and spending levels for the agencies, much of it in a classified annex. They also question officials in closed hearings, review covert actions, and confirm, through the Senate committee, the nominees for top intelligence posts.

For the most sensitive covert actions, the law lets the President limit notice to eight members, known as the Gang of Eight: the leaders of both parties in the House and Senate and the chairs and ranking members of the two intelligence committees. Critics say this leaves most members unable to judge programs they fund.

Committee members generally cannot reveal classified information publicly. The Senate rule that created its committee does allow it to vote to release information over the executive branch's objection, the process the committee used in 2014 to publish the summary of its report on the CIA's detention and interrogation program.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has 11 federal district judges, appointed by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court for staggered seven-year terms. They come from at least seven of the judicial circuits, and three must live within 20 miles of Washington, D.C.

The court hears requests for surveillance orders under FISA, usually with only government lawyers present, because the targets cannot be told. It also reviews and approves the yearly certifications and procedures for Section 702, rather than individual targets.

Because the court rarely heard an opposing side, critics described it as a rubber stamp; the government answered that many applications are changed or withdrawn before a ruling. The USA FREEDOM Act of 2015 created a panel of outside experts, called amici curiae, whom the court must appoint in cases raising novel or significant legal questions, and it required declassification of major opinions where possible.

Appeals go to a three-judge Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, and from there the government can ask the Supreme Court to hear the case. Recent FISA Court opinions released to the public have found repeated FBI violations of the rules for searching Section 702 data, which shaped the 2024 reforms.

Federal law defines covert action as activity meant to influence political, economic, or military conditions abroad where the U.S. government's role is not meant to be apparent or acknowledged. Traditional spying, diplomacy, and normal military activity are not covered.

The Hughes-Ryan Amendment of 1974 first required the President to personally approve covert actions and tell Congress about them. After Iran-Contra, a 1991 law required that every covert action be authorized in a written presidential finding, normally before it begins, and reported to the intelligence committees.

A finding cannot authorize anything that breaks the Constitution or federal law, and no covert action may be aimed at influencing U.S. political processes, public opinion, policies, or media. Executive Order 12333 adds a ban on assassination, which has stood since 1976.

Congress cannot veto a covert action directly, but it controls the money. The committees can refuse funding, and Congress has done so before: the Boland Amendments of the 1980s cut off aid to the Contras, which is what made the Iran-Contra scheme illegal.

Each major intelligence agency has an inspector general, an internal watchdog who investigates waste, fraud, and misconduct. The CIA's became an independent office created by law in 1989, and Congress created an Inspector General of the Intelligence Community in 2010 to look across all 18 members.

Intelligence employees cannot legally take classified information to the press. Instead, the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act of 1998 gives them a lawful route: they can report an "urgent concern" to their inspector general, who passes a credible complaint to the DNI and then to the intelligence committees.

Later laws and a 2012 presidential directive protect intelligence employees from retaliation, such as losing a security clearance, for using these channels. A 2019 complaint filed through this route, about a phone call between President Donald Trump and the president of Ukraine, led to the House's first impeachment of Trump.

Inspectors general publish some findings, and their unclassified reports are a main source of public knowledge about how the agencies follow their rules. Several of their reports, including reviews of FBI surveillance applications, have been cited by both critics and defenders of the agencies.

For 50 years the total intelligence budget was secret, even though the Constitution requires a regular public account of federal spending. The government first released a total, $26.6 billion for fiscal 1997, in response to a lawsuit by the Federation of American Scientists.

Since a 2007 law that put the 9/11 Commission's recommendations into effect, the DNI has had to disclose the total for the National Intelligence Program after each fiscal year. For fiscal 2025 the total was $73.3 billion, down from $76.5 billion in fiscal 2024, according to ODNI.

The Defense Department separately discloses the Military Intelligence Program, which pays for intelligence that supports military operations: $29.8 billion in fiscal 2024. Both toplines pass through the regular federal budget process, but the money is spread across other accounts so that it is not visible line by line.

Everything below the topline, including how much each agency gets, stays classified. Supporters say releasing more would help foreign rivals; critics say it makes it impossible for the public, and most of Congress, to judge whether the money is well spent.

Much of the rulebook for intelligence comes from the President, not Congress. Executive Order 12333 requires each agency to follow procedures approved by the Attorney General before collecting, keeping, or sharing information about Americans, and agencies must report possible violations to oversight offices.

The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, an independent agency with five members, reviews counterterrorism programs for their effect on Americans' rights. It was proposed by the 9/11 Commission and became independent in 2007. Its 2014 report found that the NSA's bulk phone-records program had not made a concrete difference in any counterterrorism investigation it reviewed.

In January 2025 the President removed the board's three Democratic members, leaving it without enough members to act, and the removals were challenged in federal court. The dispute is part of a broader fight over how far presidential power extends over independent agencies.

Inside each agency, general counsels and civil liberties officers review programs, and the Justice Department's National Security Division reviews FISA applications. These checks are real but internal, which is why Congress and the courts remain the main outside checks.

From 1956 to 1971, the FBI ran COINTELPRO, a set of secret programs to watch and disrupt American groups it considered threats. Its targets ranged from the Communist Party and the Ku Klux Klan to the Black Panthers, antiwar groups, and mainstream civil rights organizations.

The bureau wiretapped Martin Luther King Jr., with approval from Attorney General Robert Kennedy in 1963, and in 1964 mailed him an anonymous letter that he read as urging him to kill himself. The civil rights history page tells more of that story.

The program came to light after activists broke into an FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania, on March 8, 1971, and mailed stolen files to newspapers. Hoover ended COINTELPRO the next month. At the same time, the CIA's Operation CHAOS, which ran from 1967 to 1974, compiled files on about 7,200 Americans, despite the ban on CIA domestic security work.

The Church Committee concluded that the agencies had targeted Americans for their political beliefs and lawful protest. The FBI's Attorney General Guidelines, first issued in 1976, were written to stop it from happening again, and they still govern when the FBI may open an investigation.

From 1953 to 1973, the CIA ran MKUltra, a program of research into mind control and interrogation that included giving LSD and other drugs to people who did not know they were being drugged. Army scientist Frank Olson died in 1953 after a fall from a New York hotel window, days after CIA officers secretly dosed him.

In 1973 CIA Director Richard Helms ordered most MKUltra records destroyed. About 20,000 surviving documents, found in a financial records center, became public through a Freedom of Information Act request in 1977 and led to Senate hearings that year.

Also in 1973, Director James Schlesinger asked employees to report any past activity that might have broken the CIA's charter. The result was a nearly 700-page compilation known as the "Family Jewels," covering domestic surveillance, wiretaps of journalists, and assassination plots. The CIA released it in 2007, after a FOIA request.

These records matter because they are the documentary basis for the rules that came after. The ban on assassination, the limits on testing on people without consent, and the requirement to report illegal activity to oversight bodies all trace back to what these files revealed.

Intelligence is judged by its failures because its successes are usually secret. The 9/11 Commission found that the agencies did not share or act on warning signs before the attacks, and the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded in 2004 that most of the key judgments in the October 2002 estimate on Iraq's weapons were overstated or not supported by the underlying intelligence.

The Iraq Survey Group, the U.S. team that searched Iraq after the 2003 invasion, reported in 2004 that it found no stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons and no active nuclear program. The failure led to new standards requiring analysts to state their confidence and identify weak sources.

The record also includes documented successes. Aerial photographs revealed Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962, and a years-long CIA effort traced Osama bin Laden through a courier to a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where U.S. Navy SEALs killed him on May 2, 2011, local time.

Both kinds of outcome feed the same debate: how much secrecy and power agencies need to find real threats, and how much oversight is needed to catch mistakes and abuses before they become disasters.

After the September 11 attacks, the CIA held terrorism suspects in secret overseas prisons, known as black sites, and used "enhanced interrogation techniques," including waterboarding, on some of them. Justice Department legal opinions written in 2002 said these methods were lawful; later administrations withdrew those opinions.

The Senate Intelligence Committee's study of the program found that the CIA held at least 119 detainees and waterboarded three of them. Its 525-page summary, released on December 9, 2014, concluded that the techniques were not an effective way to get accurate information. The CIA disputed several of those findings in its own published response.

President Barack Obama ordered the program closed on January 22, 2009, limiting interrogations to the methods in the Army Field Manual, and a 2015 law, the McCain-Feinstein amendment, wrote that limit into statute. The Geneva Conventions page explains the international rules on the treatment of prisoners.

The debate continues over what the program produced, who should have been held responsible, and how much of the full 6,700-page report should be made public. The full report remains classified.

Section 702 targets foreigners abroad, but it collects Americans' messages whenever they communicate with those targets. Agencies, including the FBI, may then search the collected data using an American's name, email address, or phone number. Critics call these "backdoor searches" because no warrant is required.

The numbers have changed sharply. ODNI's transparency reports estimated the FBI ran up to about 3.4 million searches for Americans' information in 2021, about 200,000 in 2022, and about 57,000 in 2023, after the FBI changed its procedures and Congress and the FISA Court pressed for limits.

In April 2024 a House amendment to require a warrant for most of these searches failed on a tied vote, 212 to 212. Supporters of the program, including officials of both parties, say a warrant requirement would slow urgent investigations and that 702 information appears in a large share of the President's Daily Brief.

Opponents across the political spectrum argue that searching for Americans' private messages should require the same warrant the Fourth Amendment requires everywhere else. One federal district court agreed in a January 2025 criminal case, though the ruling binds only that case. With the law lapsed in June 2026, that question is again before Congress.