State Film and Cartography Bureau

The National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) is identified as one of several agencies in the postwar U.S. intelligence community, a system that grew more fragmented even though its members shared the broad purpose of protecting the country. The book uses that institutional landscape to distinguish decentralization from coordination: specialized agencies can contribute different kinds of knowledge, but their separate insights must also be connected if they are to inform collective judgment.

Place in the Intelligence Community

After the National Security Act created the Central Intelligence Agency in 1947, the intelligence community did not settle into the centralized structure its advocates had envisioned. Over time it became an “alphabet soup” of agencies with overlapping responsibilities and missions. NIMA belonged to this wider constellation alongside the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the intelligence arms of the major military services.

The formal arrangement suggested central oversight: the director of the Central Intelligence Agency was theoretically in charge of the intelligence community as a whole. In practice, that 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 evident relevance to foreign-intelligence agencies of information about foreign terrorists inside the United States. NIMA’s institutional setting was therefore one of nominal common purpose but dispersed authority.

Specialization and the Information Gap

The book does not treat this fragmentation as inherently misguided. Dividing intelligence work among agencies can support specialization, finer-grained analysis, and a diversity of perspectives. Information that appears irrelevant to one group of analysts may reveal a significant connection when another group examines it. In that sense, distinct agencies can contribute local knowledge that a single, centralized organization might overlook.

The critical weakness was the absence of a dependable means to aggregate both information and judgment. The intelligence community contained specialized bodies but lacked a mechanism for bringing their perspectives together into a collective assessment. Agencies produced localized snapshots rather than a coherent picture of threats. The problem, as the book frames it, was not decentralization alone but decentralization without aggregation: information could be gathered in one part of the system without reaching the people able to recognize its wider significance.

Proposed Remedies and Organizational Significance

After the September 11 attacks, congressional criticism focused on failures of information-sharing. Senator Richard Shelby argued that the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s decentralized structure had left information holdings divided among largely independent fiefdoms, and called for an agency above and independent of disputatious bureaucracies. That remedy revived the earlier aspiration for centralized command. The book cautions, however, that putting one agency at the center could make information easier to collect while sacrificing the diversity, independence, and local knowledge that specialization provides.

The alternative is not to leave agencies isolated, but to connect their work without eliminating their autonomy. Linking databases, for example, could improve the flow of information; the book notes that even two years after September 11 the government still lacked a single unified watch list drawing on all parts of the intelligence community. NIMA’s significance in this account is thus structural rather than biographical: as one specialized agency among many, it exemplifies both the potential value of distributed expertise and the need for institutions that make separate knowledge collectively useful.