Defense Intelligence Agency: A Brief History

A BRIEF HISTORY
activities, and it did not add administrative layering within the Defense
intelligence community. The Agency's mission was the continuous
task of collecting, processing, evaluating, analyzing, integrating,
producing, and disseminating military intelligence for the DoD. Other
objectives included more efficiently allocating scarce intelligence
resources, more effectively managing all DoD intelligence activities,
and eliminating redundancies in facilities, organizations, and tasks.
During the summer of 1961, as Cold War tensions flared over the
Berlin Wall, Air Force Lieutenant General Joseph F. Carroll, soon
to become DIA's first director, planned and organized this new agency.
It began operations with 25 employees in borrowed office space on 1
October 1961.
Following DIA's establishment, the Services transferred intelligence
functions and resources to it on a time-phased basis to avoid rapidly
degrading the overall effectiveness of Defense intelligence. The
principal objectives in establishing DIA were to obtain unity of effort
among all DoD components in developing military intelligence, and
to strengthen DoD's overall capacity for collecting, producing, and
disseminating intelligence information.
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