Blinking Red: Crisis and Compromise in American Intelligence after 9/11

After the September 11 attacks, the 9/11 Commission argued that the United States needed a powerful leader, a spymaster, to forge the scattered intelligence bureaucracies into a singular enterprise to vanquish America's new enemies - stateless international terrorists. In the midst of the 2004 presidential election, Congress and the president remade the post-World War II national security infrastructure in less than five months, creating the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) and a National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) .