“In fact, though, the centralization of intelligence never happened. Although the CIA was initially the key player in the postwar period, as time passed the intelligence community became more fragmented than ever, divided into a kind of alphabet soup of agencies with overlapping responsibilities and missions, including not just the CIA but also the National Security Agency, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the intelligence arms of each of the three major military services. In theory, the director of the CIA was in charge of the U.S. intelligence community as a whole, but in practice he exercised very little supervision over these agencies, and most of the money for intelligence operations came from the Department of Defense.”
Excerpt From: James Surowiecki. “The Wisdom of Crowds.”