Chu 1

Cloak and... Dagger or Shield?

The Evolution of the United State's Intelligence Assets
Martin Chu
Professor Malcolm Campbell
UWRT 1103

Chu 2

Imagine a typical morning for most, you get up to preform your morning routine and you're out the
door to start your day. You arrive at work going about your day, worrying about deadlines, being in the
right place at the right time. You are hoping nothing goes wrong today, and besides what's the worst
that can happen. However you hear a deafening sound followed by a scream as a sudden force throws
you against the wall as everything goes black. Eventually you start regaining your senses you're still on
the ground, your head feels like splitting in two, your ears are ringing but you can make out the
screams and muffled panic in people's voices. You open your eyes, as your vision begins to clear up,
you see a devastated scene unfold as the most primal of human instincts take hold. You see some
people running and others stopping to help the wounded. You see some people still laying on the
ground some screaming in agony and others unresponsive. However before to get a chance to formulate
any further thoughts you feel someone pull you to your feet and drag you towards the exit.
Hopefully this experience I described is something you will never have face, but this was the reality of
those affected on the 11th of September 2001. Before the 9/11 attacks the last time our nation was
attacked on such a scale in which thousands of lives were lost was on the 7 th of December in 1941 at
Pearl Harbor. As the world continues to become evermore interconnected and globalized, we can no
longer rely on the two ocean which once kept our enemies from our shores for over a hundred years.
The reality we must face is that our enemies have been and are among us now, within our borders. We
are at war within our own country; however unlike the wars remembered by history this war is not
waged in the open, but rather in the background of daily life, in the shadows. This war is not waged

Chu 3
with tanks and planes but rather with information; to be able to detect and eliminate our enemies before
they can carry out their attacks. At the forefront of this new war ever vigilante in the background of
society is the US's intelligence services and the Department of Homeland Security. In order to
determine how these organization will serve us in the future we need to examine their evolution
throughout the decades to understand the events that shaped them into their current incarnations.
In order to understand the current state of United State's intelligence capabilities, we need to
understand their traditional roles in the past. In the 1930s threats to the United States' national security
were rising; in German Adolf Hitler was coming to power and in the far Pacific in the Japanese Empire
was rising. Although the US was physically separated from these threat by two oceans, with the
prospect of war looming in the distance future the threat of foreign espionage and sabotage within the
US became a pressing reality. Following their work in dealing with organization crime during the
Prohibition Era the task of ensuring the US's national security fell upon the FBI. At the time the FBI
was perfect for the role of a domestic intelligence agency as they had jurisdiction throughout the
country. The agency had also built up a working relation with law enforcement throughout the country
during the Prohibition Era, who would go on to serve as the FBI's eyes and ears.
When the Second World War finally came to the US the FBI was quick to identify possible threats to
the homeland and act upon them. According to the FBI one of the first important task was to compile a
dossier of German, Italian, and Japanese alien nationals who posed a direct threat to the US. Once this
was completed, under an executive order signed by President Roosevelt the FBI proceeded to arrest
3800 individuals and turn them over to the immigration service for possible deportation. For the rest of
the war the FBI would play a key role in disrupting Axis espionage and sabotage activities. Using the
extensive network they built the FBI acted on ever shred of information that may hint towards a
possible attack or sabotage on key infrastructures within the US. According to the FBI throughout the

Chu 4
war they had received over 20000 reports on possible attack or acts of sabotage. By the end of the war
the FBI reported that not one act of sabotage was successfully carried out by the Axis on the US
homeland.
(Paragraph about the FBI involvement with the red scare of the 1950s and legislation that limited it
power addition research)

Following the Second World War the FBI found itself divided between disrupting communist activity
domestically and its traditional federal law enforcement duties. According to James Burch an Associate
Professor at the Colorado Technical University, following the 9/11 attack a congressional inquiry
revealed several shortcomings within the FBI: The FBIs decentralized structure and inadequate
information technology made the Bureau unable to correlate the knowledge possessed by its
components. The FBI did not gather intelligence from all its many cases nation-wide to produce an
overall assessment of al Qaedas presence in the United States. While the committee's findings did led
to several government initiative such as the Patriot act; which also expanded the power and reformed
the FBI's operational structures, the proposition of a dedicated domestic intelligence agency has come
up as an better alternative to the FBI.
As the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence's Report of the Joint Inquiry into the Terrorist
Attacks of September 11, 2001 recognized in their findings one of the reason the 9/11 attack occur
successfully was because of their decentralized system. The decentralized system allow for the
components of the FBI perform their law enforcement duties effectively in the individual states. The
decentralized system failed to coordinate all the information they had about the 9/11 attacks to paint a
clear threat on the national level. In addition the post-ww2 FBI had to divide its resources between
domestic intelligence issues and its traditional role as a federal law enforcement agency; effectively

Chu 5
reducing its effectiveness at one or the other. In the case of a dedicated domestic intelligence agency,
they can dedicate all of its resources towards dealing with threats to the US homeland.
So what is the current state of the US's intelligence services? Instead of creating a domestic intelligence
agency completely separate of the FBI; the FBI has been adapting itself to fill the role of a domestic
intelligence, just as it did during the Second World War.

Comments
I think there is too much information about the FBI during WW2. You may want to reduce it to one
paragraph at the most. Just give a brief overview of their activities.
I dont really know what direction this paper is heading. Try stating a clear, direct message near the
beginning of the paper.
I think you should center the paper more on present event such as the 9/11 attack. I suggest removing
the sentence at the beginning that mentions Pearl Harbor. It doesnt really add much and wont affect
much if it was gone.
The paper feels incomplete in its current state. It looks like you were trying to focus on the FBI so I
would stick to that and expand.