ABSTRACT
Intelligence accounts for approximately 10 percent of America’s security effort. Approximately is the correct modifier because intelligence is, of course, mostly a secret enterprise. The government started releasing an official budget for the “Intelligence Community” only in 2007, and it still does not release many details about the allocations to particular programs or activities within this total. Managing the information flow within the Intelligence Community is only one of the great challenges of intelligence. The Intelligence Community is often accused of bias toward technical means of information gathering. The Intelligence Community faces other trade-offs, including the classic dilemma of how to handle the relationship with political leaders. Politicization, which is the distortion of intelligence to fit a political agenda, is one of the most vexing problems in intelligence. Intelligence has been central to the war against terrorism, and so have been the controversies caused by intelligence-gathering operations.
