This book presents a brief history of the creation and development of the intelligence services in the United States. It centres on the conflict between the development of ways of gathering, processing, analysing, and using intelligence, and the concern for the impact of secret activities on democratic government. Resolving the ever-growing need for informed decision making continues to put pressure on the U.S.A.'s ability to manage and provide oversight of intelligence. The author assesses how those forces have resulted in ongoing changes to the intelligence apparatus in the United States. He supplements his narrative with key documents and brief biographies of influential personalities within the intelligence community to further illustrate his conclusions. The book describes the U.S. intelligence community prior to WWII, demonstrating that intelligence-gathering and espionage have played a key role in national security and warfare since the inception of the Republic. The author establishes them as a necessary function of government and governmental decision making. Today, the intelligence apparatus encompasses numerous activities and organisations. They are all responsible for different parts of the practice of collecting, processing, analyzing, disseminating, and using intelligence. With the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, significant stresses began to appear in the U.S. approach to the intelligence process; the author concludes by chronicling those stresses and the attendant drive for change.