Decision-Making Quote by Bobby R. Inman

There is a bureaucrat's kind of drama in Inman's phrasing: the mild, almost clinical "another factor" smuggles in a major pivot in American power. The sentence reads like minutes from a meeting, but it gestures at a post-Watergate bargain that still shapes how the U.S. sees threats and polices itself. "Sharply divide" is doing the heavy lifting. It's not just an organizational chart choice; it's a moral boundary pretending to be a procedural one.

The intent is defensive and explanatory. Inman is describing a decision as if it were self-evidently rational: domestic collection belongs to the FBI, foreign collection belongs abroad. The clean symmetry creates the comfort of order. It's also a tacit admission that the previous arrangement was dangerous enough to require surgery. The year matters: 1976 sits in the shadow of the Church Committee revelations and a public mood that wanted intelligence agencies leashed. The divide becomes a promise: we can have security without letting spies roam at home.

The subtext is that this promise is fragile. "Collect within" and "collect overseas" are deceptively simple verbs for a world where signals, money, people, and data cross borders without stopping for jurisdiction. Inman's formulation sanctifies geography as a safeguard, which works rhetorically because it sounds like common sense. It also foreshadows the predictable consequence: when threats blur foreign and domestic, the walls meant to prevent abuse can just as easily prevent coordination, then get blamed for failure.