Shadow of the Condor Read Online Free Page B

Intelligence and the Treasury Department's small intelligence unit. In reality, the DCI's fiefdom consists of fiercely independent bureaucratic entities resisting outside supervision. As Admiral Rufus Taylor, former head of Naval Intelligence and a former CIA deputy director,, noted, America 's intelligence community resembles "a tribal federation."
    The organizational chart of the U.S. intelligence community shows a maze of crossing communication and control lines, with management and liaison committees scattered in what the official bureaucratic cartographer and chief planner claim is a representative picture of orderly decision-making process. Since the orderly decision-making process is usually an unadmitted operating myth, any validity the chart has is purely coincidental.
    On the subcommittee level alone, there are fifteen interagency groups whose job it is to coordinate the intelligence and security "product." On top of these small subcommittees sit eight important coordinating groups. Black lines on the organization chart connect all these groups to the various members of the intelligence community. All the black lines eventually lead to the President. A small box in the chart's upper left-hand corner encloses Congress. No black lines connect Congress to anything. The chart shows no place for the judiciary.
    The most visible and prominent of the coordinating groups is the National Security Council, a group whose composition varies with each change of Presidential administration. The NSC always includes the President and Vice President, and usually includes most of the major Cabinet members. The NSC is the legislated overseer of, and policymaker for, the intelligence community.
    But probably the most important group in the American intelligence community is the Forty Committee. Secret Order 54/12 created the Forty Committee early in the Eisenhower years. Its existence was virtually unknown to the outside world until reporters David Wise and Thomas Ross exposed it in their landmark book on the American intelligence community, The Invisible Government. Largely because of' that exposure, this committee, which was then known as the 54/12 Group, underwent a series of identity changes and at various times has been called the Special Group and the 303 Committee.
    The Forty Committee is very small. Its composition also varies with each administration, but its duties remain basically the same. It is to the Forty Committee that agencies go for approval of their operations and plans, and it is the Forty Committee which is the major guiding hand for the intelligence community. The Forty Committee was originally created to help keep the mushrooming community under control. The degree to which the committee succeeds at that task is largely influenced by the President. It is the President who ultimately decides who will serve on the Forty Committee and how they will serve.
    In the Kennedy and Johnson administrations the key man on the Forty Committee was George Bundy. The other members were McCone, McNamara, Roswell Gilpatric and U. Alexis Johnson. in the Nixon and Ford years by far the most important man in American intelligence was Henry Kissinger. Kissinger chaired the Forty Committee. Among others who served with Kissinger on Forty were CIA Director William Colby, Deputy Secretary of State Robert S. Ingersoll, Deputy Secretary of Defense William P. Clements, Jr., and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General George S. Brown.
    The Forty Committee most recently came into national prominence when the cover blew off its approval of massive CIA covert activities against Chile 's Marxist government, measures which contributed greatly to the 1973 coup which left Chilean President Allende dead and a tough military junta in power. The Forty Committee's major task, however, that of coordinating and governing the intelligence community, is still not understood by the majority of the American public.
    The overseeing functions of the Forty