Thread by @DavidPriess

THREAD: On this birthday of the Defense Intelligence Agency, which began operations on this day in 1961, here’s a little-known tale about the effort to get a high-level DIA analytic product on President Ronald Reagan’s desk every day—and the CIA’s preemption of those plans.

1/9

In spring 1982, National Security Council staffers concluded that the president needed more intelligence on military issues. So they turned to the DIA.

Bob Gates, then CIA’s deputy director for intelligence, told me later about the bureaucratic back-and-forth that ensued.

2/9

Context: The CIA since 1961 has been exclusively producing and delivering to the White House the ultimate daily intelligence product, first called the President’s Intelligence Checklist and then, from December 1967 until today, known as the President’s Daily Brief.

3/9

Gates, years later, described it to me this way: “They were talking about having DIA do a separate PDB, allowing the NSC to do some picking and choosing, from both publications, what they wanted to send in to the president.”

4/9

“DIA was not set up to produce a daily report for the president like that,” Gates told me, “and I knew it.”

But leaders at the DIA wanted the opportunity and the prestige associated with delivering to the president their own analytic product.

Someone needed to budge.

5/9

Gates, who had worked not only with the CIA since the late 1960s but also on the National Security Council staff, endeavored to preempt the DIA’s effort to get a *daily* publication in Reagan’s hands—in order to, as he put it, “protect the preeminence of the PDB itself.”

6/9

Gates, who oversaw the PDB’s production, agreed to a *weekly* DIA supplement: a Saturday-only Defense Intelligence Supplement.

The DIA took what it could get.

The new product, starting in June 1982, typically ran 6-8 pages and focused overwhelmingly on the Soviet military.

7/9

But the Defense Intelligence Supplement seemed to interest Reagan less than the core PDB did.

A CIA historian decades later examined three years’ worth of the PDB packages given to Reagan—and failed to find presidential marks on any of the supplements, unlike on the PDBs.

8/9

This does not necessarily reflect negatively on the work of the DIA’s analysts; Reagan may have been dissuaded largely by the total package’s length on Saturdays. With the defense supplement added, the PDB would reach or even exceed 20 pages.

More PDB history in my book:

/end