Author Description

This history by the CIA was issued in August 2019. It examines in more detail how CIA's growing capability to do independent analysis of the Soviet military threat led to major disagreements with the U.S. armed services over Soviet military capabilities and intentions, beginning in the Dulles era. Much has already been written about these controversies and how they played out. This history will focus primarily on the role that key CIA leaders and managers played in the development of the Agency's military analytic capabilities, rather than on the controversies themselves. It will also provide detailed information on how OSR was formed and on those individuals who contributed heavily to its success.This compilation includes a reproduction of the 2019 Worldwide Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community.The first chapter of this history of OSR examines the Dulles era and the key people involved in the growing capability of ORR to do independent Soviet military force assessments. This capability grew out of CIA's efforts to use a building-block approach to better define the Soviet defense budget, partially by attempting to more precisely estimate the cost of Soviet weapons production. Dulles initially believed strongly that the military services had been given the authority to produce military intelligence for policymakers and that CIA should not challenge the results of such efforts. He changed his view with the advent of the so-called bomber and missile-gap controversies in the late 1950s. The controversies were not fully resolved until the development of new satellite photographic collection capabilities in the early 1960s led to more accurate assessments of Soviet strategic forces. Chapter two focuses on the significant growth of CIA's capability to do strategic military analysis in the early 1960s during the tenure of DCI John McCone. President John F. Kennedy appointed McCone to replace Allen Dulles in November 1961 in the wake of the Bay of Pigs debacl