NOTE TO MR. CHAIRMAN: [RE: COMMITTEE'S EXPRESSED CONCERNS ABOUT WARNINGS.]

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP83B01027R000200050001-0
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: S
• Document Page Count: 7
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 3, 2005
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: September 20, 1978
• Content Type: NOTES

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20 September 1978
Mr. Chairman,
The DCI has asked me to represent him today and to respond for
him to the Committee's expressed concerns about warning. He has
also asked me to apologize for his delay in responding. This, as
yesterday's and today's hearings have shown, is an exceedingly com-
plex problem. It involves many elements of the Intelligence Community
and many knotty issues for which there never has been any fully
satisfactory solution.
He also wishes to express to the Committee his appreciation for
the perception and professionalism that went into its report. The
report identified for him a number of weaknesses in the warning
structure.
The Committee states that there should be a single focus for
the DCI's warning responsibilities. The DCI agrees, and what I have
to say this afternoon will be largely devoted to that topic. He has
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discussed his decision with the Director of DIA. I think it can be
taken as firm, with the reservation that experience and the writing
of the fine print may lead us to make some adjustments. He has dealt
so far only with the national organizational and management structure,
not with the harder questions of improving the warning product. What
we are doing is building the structure whereby real improvement may
who have a major interest in the warning problem will be represented
at a senior level. We are not, however, reinventing the old Watch
Committee. The mission of the new committee -- it does not yet have
a name -- will not, repeat not, be to reach substantive judgments.
be brought about.
This planned structure is as yet only bare bones, but I will
attempt to flesh it out a bit as I proceed.
In the first instance, we are returning to the traditional
role of the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence as the DCI's
overseer of warning. The DDCI will chair a committee under the
National Foreign Intelligence Board on which all the NFIB members
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In other words, it will not itself warn. Rather, it will be the
DCI's body for oversight and coordination of Community warning sys-
tems. In other words, it will deal at a senior level with what
Admiral Robertson refers to as the process. The committee will
probably concern itself on one end of the scale with large problems
such as the evaluation of overhead systems from a warning point of
view and on the other with a myriad of small fixes that serve to
make the system more efficient, such as procedures on the National
Operations and Intelligence Watch Officers Net.
At the next level down, the DCI will appoint a senior officer
of the National Foreign Assessment Center as his focal point for
warning. (He has tentatively decided that I should have this re-
sponsibility.) This officer -- he does not yet have a title, but
I will call him the DCI's senior warning officer -- will have warning
as his primary responsibility. On the management and coordination
side of warning, he will serve as Executive Secretary of the NFIB
committee previously mentioned. In addition, DIA, INR, and perhaps
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some other agencies will be asked to name senior representatives to
a working group, chaired by the senior warning officer, that will
support the DDCI's committee. The working group will also not be a
substantive committee and,will not issue warning, but it will pro-
vide a forum for the exchange of views and a means by which the sub-
stantive concerns of one agency can be communicated to the others
at a senior level.
Substantive responsibilities for producing warning at the national
level will center in the senior warning officer.. In this capacity
he will replace the Special Assistant for Warning arrangement which,
as the Committee has noted, is in disarray. I should add here that
this decision does not indicate any lack of confidence in either
General Faurer or Admiral Robertson, who have done the job most ef-
fectively. Rather, it is simply a recognition that with the re-
structuring of the Community and increased responsibilities of the
DCI, he needed not only to give more attention to warning problems
but also to have supporting him an officer whose organizational po-
sition would permit him to concentrate his efforts on the DCI's needs. .c
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The Strategic Warning Staff will remain in its present relation-
ship to the NMIC, but will now answer to the senior warning officer.
Once the new management structure is in place, we will review all
aspects of the SWS. We hope to link it more closely with the other
agencies of the Community as well in order to make it more effective
in its strategic warning role.
For the broader aspects of warning, the senior warning officer
will work through the National Intelligence Officers. Each of them
has an informal "sub-Community" or working group of the senior
officers in each agency working on his area of responsibility.
will be expected to convene his working group, probably monthly,
to address specifically the question of possible upcoming trouble-
some developments in his area and issue appropriate warning. Through
this system, the senior warning officer and the NIOs will endeavor
to keep the Community sensitized to its warning responsibilities, to
challenge conventional analysis and interpretation, and to ensure
the bringing forward of alternate hypotheses. These three things
are fundamental requirements of any warning system.
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As critical situations emerge -- to illustrate, as the possibility
of US-Soviet confrontation emerges from a relatively minor crisis in
the third world -- it will be the responsibility of the senior warning
officer to see that appropriate warning is issued and to ensure that
the Community is mobilized to meet the intelligence challenge. This
will mean among other things the triggering of the much more highly
structured systems for strategic warning, such as those discussed
by Admiral Robertson, and for which the SWS is the central node at
the national level.
I believe that these arrangements are workable. Admiral Robert-
son and I will meet next week to put some flesh on the bones.
Let me close by saying that the Director of Central Intelligence
and the Central Intelligence Agency were created to a very considerable
extent because of Pearl Harbor' The DCI views strategic warning --
and warning in its broader sense -- as his most important single re-
sponsibility. If the arrangements I have laid do not prove adequate,
we will change them or strengthen them, and we will, of course, welcome
the Committee's suggestions.
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NATIONAL ORGANIZATION FOR WARNING
~l-e-?- Flow of warning
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