National Intelligence Agency

The National Reconnaissance Office is named as one of the autonomous agencies in the U.S. intelligence community that developed after Congress created the Central Intelligence Agency in 1947. Its place in this system illustrates the book’s central distinction: specialization and decentralized knowledge can be valuable, but without effective information-sharing and aggregation, a collection of capable units may fail to perceive the larger significance of what it knows.

Place in the Intelligence Community

In the postwar period, the Central Intelligence Agency initially occupied a leading position, but the intelligence community became increasingly fragmented. The National Reconnaissance Office appeared alongside the National Security Agency, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the intelligence branches of the three principal military services. These agencies had overlapping responsibilities and missions, yet each operated with substantial autonomy.

The director of the Central Intelligence Agency was formally meant to lead the intelligence community as a whole. In practice, the director exercised little supervision over the other agencies, while most intelligence funding came from the Department of Defense. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, responsible for domestic law enforcement, operated almost entirely outside the community’s orbit, despite the relevance of information about foreign terrorists inside the United States. The National Reconnaissance Office thus belonged to a broad, dispersed system pursuing a shared goal—protecting the United States from attack—through separate organizations and methods.

Fragmentation and the September 11 Inquiry

The weaknesses of this arrangement were apparent in retrospect but were not treated as undeniable until the September 11 attacks. The intelligence community had failed to anticipate the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassy in Kenya, and the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen. The Congressional Joint Inquiry later concluded that agencies had failed to recognize the individual and collective significance of information relevant to the attacks, and had missed opportunities to disrupt the plot.

Congress focused particularly on the lack of information-sharing among agencies. Instead of combining their reports into a coherent picture of threats, they produced localized snapshots. Senator Richard Shelby criticized the FBI’s decentralized structure for leaving information in largely independent fiefdoms and argued that intelligence required an agency standing above the disputatious bureaucracies. His proposed remedy returned to the centralizing vision advanced by “Wild Bill” Donovan decades earlier.

Decentralization Without Aggregation

The book argues that the intelligence community’s failure did not establish that decentralization itself was the problem. Specialized agencies could bring distinct expertise and perspectives to scattered information; a clue judged irrelevant by one set of analysts might prove significant when examined by another. The missing capacity was a means of aggregating both information and judgment across the agencies. In this formulation, the system had decentralization without aggregation—and therefore lacked the organization needed to make its dispersed knowledge collectively useful.

A single central agency might have made it easier to place information under one authority, but it would also have risked sacrificing the independence, specialization, and local knowledge that made decentralized analysis valuable. The proposed alternative was to connect agencies’ databases and enable information to flow while preserving their autonomy. The book notes that, two years after September 11, the government still had no unified watch list drawing on data from across the intelligence community. The National Reconnaissance Office’s significance in this account is therefore institutional rather than biographical: it represents one specialized component whose knowledge could contribute to collective judgment only if the system provided ways to share and combine what its separate parts learned.