ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a thematic and historical introduction to the intelligence community (IC) leadership. An analysis of how the political leadership used intelligence is critical to understanding how this impacted on the development of the ICs that served them. The first common theme arising out of multiple historical literature sources is intelligence failure. Several historians and intelligence studies scholars have provided cases of intelligence failure and their impact on intelligence capability. The combined effect from the ‘intelligence failures’ of 9/11, Iraq, and the Snowden leaks have resulted in the need for intelligence leaders to play a greater public role via media appearances and responding to inquiries. In summary, the effective intelligence framework provides a ‘theoretical scaffold’ by bringing together multi-disciplinary leadership perspectives discussed above and assessing their significance to theory building in an IC leadership context.
