ABSTRACT
Excellent intelligence is of little consequence unless its most senior consumers take cognizance of it and believe in its accuracy. The customers want knowledge and complain about lack of quality and discrimination. Both Eisenhower and Allen Dulles believed in the importance of unbiased intelligence and its neutral role in policy making. Policy makers on the highest level maintain that, on the whole, intelligence has usually been of limited importance and almost never decisive. Compartmentalization affects both intelligence producers and policy makers, but the latter may be at a greater disadvantage. The assumption that a bureaucratic agency would share its information voluntarily with another was against all the rules of bureaucratic politics, and the idea that a military agency would do so with a civilian body was even more far-fetched. Of all the obstacles in the way of communication, political pressure exerted by the consumer is often thought to be the most important and the most dangerous.
