Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)

The United States' primary gatherer and producer of foreign military intelligence. The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), established on October 1, 1961, by direction of the secretary of defense. It was envisioned that the DIA would fulfill a need for a central intelligence manager for the Department of Defense and also would support the requirements of the secretary of defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, policymakers, force planners, and ultimately the United States.

Headquartered in the Pentagon, the DIA has more than 7,000 military and civilian employees worldwide. The director of the agency is the main adviser to the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on matters related to military intelligence, such as the number of deployed forces, assessments, policy, and resources. The DIA plays a major role in providing intelligence on foreign weapons systems for weapons systems planners and for the entire defense community.

Following World War II, efforts for the collection, production, and distribution of military intelligence were scattered and uncoordinated. The three military departments—Army, Navy, and Air Force—managed their intelligence needs individually. This type of organizational structure resulted in duplication, unnecessary [Page 189]costs, and inefficiency, because each branch of the armed services provided its estimate to the secretary of defense or to other governmental agencies.

Therefore, in 1958, Congress passed the Defense Reorganization Act, which was intended to correct these problems. Yet, despite the legislation, intelligence responsibilities remained unclear and the coordination of intelligence was difficult. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, realizing the need for systemization of these intelligence operations, would later appoint a Joint Study Group in 1960 to find better ways for organizing the nation's military intelligence activities.

These efforts carried over into the administration of President John F. Kennedy. In February 1961, Robert S. McNamara, secretary of the Department of Defense, made formal his decision to establish a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). He gave the Joint Chiefs of Staff the job of developing a concept plan that would integrate all the military intelligence of the Department of Defense. The assignment was completed and published as DoD Directive 5101.21 (“Defense Intelligence Agency”) on August 1, 1961, and made effective on October 1 of the same year.

According to the plan, the new agency's mission was to focus on the continuous collection, processing, evaluation, integration, production, and distribution of military intelligence for the DoD. Under Directive 5101.21, the DIA united intelligence and counterintelligence activities and reported to the secretary of defense through the Joint Chiefs of Staff to avoid adding administrative layers within the defense intelligence community

Air force lieutenant general Joseph F. Carroll, the first director of the DIA, soon faced a major test during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Later, the Vietnam War would pose another test of the newly formed agency's ability to produce accurate, timely intelligence. The DIA's attempts to claim a place for itself as the DoD's central military intelligence organization was not without opposition. The military service branches continued to resist the agency's mandate during the early days of its existence.

The war in Vietnam increased the DIA's involvement in national security. China's detonation of an atomic bomb (October 16, 1964) and the launching of its cultural revolution (1966); increasing unrest in Africa; and fighting in Malaysia, Cyprus, and Kashmir during the 1960s severely challenged the resources of the entire intelligence community. Later that decade, the Six-Day War between Egypt and Israel in 1967, the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and North Korea's seizure of the USS Pueblo put pressure on U.S. intelligence offices to anticipate and respond to unfolding world events. In the mid-1970s, at the conclusion of the Vietnam War, the DIA took an active role in U.S. efforts to account for American service members missing or captured in the Vietnam conflict.

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