Until the end of the cold war the priority of the intelligence agencies was to protect us from Soviet espionage and find out what they were up to.
Today terrorists learned what they already knew: that combating them is the top priority of the intelligence community, which has devoted a third of its budget and a quarter of its workforce to counterterrorism.
The highest priority of the intelligence community is to work within the constraints of law to collect, analyze and understand information related to potential threats to our national security".
The highest priority of the Intelligence Community is to work within the constraints of law to collect, analyze and understand information related to potential threats to our national security.
Washington assigned high priority to intelligence on the "transfer of strategic materials such as uranium", and "details of arms acquisitions and arms sales by government or insurgents, including negotiations, contracts, deliveries, terms of sale, quantity and quality of equipment, and price and payment terms".
Its main focus was on security challenges posed by the insurgency in Iraq, terrorism and the proliferation of illicit weapons, which Mr. Tenet described as the top priorities of the intelligence agencies.
"Securing these missiles should be a top priority of the U.S. intelligence community and their counterparts overseas".
For more than 50 years, providing the country with early warning of a nuclear missile attack from Russia has been the first priority of the American intelligence community.
Officials say the list of intelligence priorities spelled out in PDD 35, the Clinton-era directive, had not been kept updated, and so once obscure issues like Afghanistan had received little attention.
But the legislation does grant explicit authority to the director to "develop and determine" the government's intelligence budget, to exercise "exclusive direction" with the White House budget office over how that money is distributed, and to set priorities for what type of intelligence is to be collected by the nation's spies.
