The most remarkable development in the management of America's relations with other countries during the quarter-century since the end of World War II has been the assumption of more and more control over military, financial and diplomatic operations at home and abroad by men whose activities are secret, whose budget is secret, whose very identities as often as not are secret – in short, by a Secret Team whose actions only those implicated in them are in a position to monitor and to understand. This all-powerful group has remained superior because it had learned the value of anonymity. For them, the Secret Team and its professionals operate.
The Secret Team is not a clandestine super-planning-board or super-general-staff. But even more damaging to the coherent conduct of foreign and military affairs, it is a bewildering collection of semi-permanent or temporarily assembled action committees and networks that respond pretty much ad hoc to specific troubles and to flash-intelligence data inputs from various parts of the world, sometimes in ways that duplicate the activities of regular American missions, sometimes in ways that undermine those activities, and very often in ways that interfere with and muddle them. At no time did the powerful and deft hand of the Secret Team evidence more catalytic influence than in the events of those final ninety days of 1963, which the "Pentagon Papers" were supposed to have exposed.
Less than 10.
The CIA was created by the NSA/47 and placed under the direction of the NSC, a committee. They do not serve or answer to the POTUS.
Clandestine operations.
William Putnam Bundy.
NSAM # 57.