Defense Intelligence Agency

By the late 1950s the intelligence branches of the United States Army, Navy and Air Force operated largely independently of one another, frequently producing overlapping or contradictory assessments that frustrated the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a fragmentation Cold War planners increasingly viewed as dangerous given the speed and stakes of nuclear era decision making.

Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, newly appointed under President John F. Kennedy, ordered the creation of a single Defense Intelligence Agency in August 1961 to absorb and coordinate the service intelligence staffs' analytical functions, and the Agency stood up formally on 1 October 1961 under Department of Defense Directive 5105.21.

The DIA was structured to serve the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and military commanders directly, producing centralized military intelligence assessments while the individual services retained their own tactical and operational intelligence units, a division of labor periodically renegotiated as the Agency's role expanded through the Cold War and after the September 11 attacks. Its founding placed it institutionally alongside, but organizationally separate from, the civilian Central Intelligence Agency, with which it would later share responsibility for one of the Cold War's more unusual joint research efforts.

The DIA's involvement in psychical research grew out of its broader Cold War mandate to track Soviet and Warsaw Pact military research, including reported Soviet interest in extrasensory perception for intelligence purposes. Where the CIA had initiated and funded the earliest remote viewing experiments at SRI International in 1972, the DIA progressively took on a larger administrative role during the 1980s, working alongside Army intelligence to manage the effort under the Fort Meade based unit that eventually became known publicly as the Stargate Project after its declassification. The DIA continued to sponsor sessions targeting foreign military installations and other intelligence problems through the program's final years, working with the same core group of remote viewers and researchers who had passed through SRI and its successor contractor, Science Applications International Corporation.

When the CIA commissioned the American Institutes for Research to conduct an outside evaluation in 1995, the DIA cooperated with the review and, after the report concluded the program had produced no clearly actionable intelligence, worked with the CIA to complete the declassification of Star Gate documents that made the program's history public in the years that followed, closing out one of the longest running instances of a government intelligence service directly funding parapsychological research.