Spring 1995 Issue No. 3
The Center has several new members since the previous Newsletter, including a new Director and new Chief Historian. David Gries retired as Director of the Center last June and from CIA in September 1994. He remains in the Washington, DC, area and has started his own consulting firm.
Dr. Brian Latell assumed the directorship in September 1994. He is a career foreign intelligence officer with more than thirty years' experience with the Air Force, CIA, and the National Intelligence Council, mostly as a Latin America specialist. From 1980 to 1994 he served on the National Intelligence Council as a senior analyst, Director of the Council's Analytical Group, and from 1990-94 as National Intelligence Officer for Latin America. A graduate of Georgetown University, he has taught courses there since 1978 and is the author of Mexico at the Crossroads (1986) and articles and book chapters on Cuba and Mexico.
Readers are invited to learn about other CSI staffers in future issues of the CSI Newsletter.
The major event since the April 1994 Newsletter was the joint conference with Harvard University's Charles Warren Center on Estimating Soviet Military Power, 1950 to 1984. It was held 2-3 December 1994 at the John F. Kennedy School at Harvard. The conference included a number of distinguished commentators, panelists, and attendees from government, universities, and the media, including one Russian specialist in international arms control.
The unprecedented conference attracted substantial media attention and sparked spirited exchanges among the panelists. Discussion centered on the role of National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs) in helping US policymakers understand Soviet strategic programs and later monitor arms control agreements. Participants agreed that the major breakthrough reflected in the estimates was the role of overhead reconnaissance--first with the U-2, then with the first generation of satellites--in monitoring Soviet activities. For example, satellites made it possible to resolve the ``missile gap'' controversy of the early 1960s and debunk exaggerated Soviet claims of strategic superiority.
Some conferees agreed that, while the NIEs revealed what Moscow was doing, they were less successful at anticipating how many missiles the Soviets intended to build and how they intended to use them within the framework of their strategic doctrine. Former Director of Central Intelligence Stansfield Turner said that, while the estimates done when he was Director were accurate, they were also irrelevant. He added that the NIEs suggested to President Carter that the United States needed more, not fewer, nuclear weapons when ``what [they] should have said to him, in my view, was simply two words: too much. We and the Soviets both have too much firepower to need any more.''
Another former DCI, Robert Gates, took a different view. He claimed that the NIEs were vitally important for US-Soviet arms control negotiations, giving the White House and Congress the assurance they needed that the Intelligence Community could monitor Soviet compliance with the accords.
In sum, the conference was a milestone that generated interest and constructive controversy. Michael Krepon, arms control specialist and conference attendee, was quoted in the Boston Globe as saying, ``They're letting a lot hang out, both good and bad. It's very gutsy.''
On 22 February 1995, President Clinton signed an Executive Order declassifying imagery collected by the first US satellite reconnaissance systems from 1960 to 1972. The original photographic negatives recovered from space will be declassified and transferred to the National Archives, where they will be available to the public.
In conjunction with this presidential initiative, on 23-24 May 1995, the Center and George Washington University's Space Policy Institute will cohost a conference on Piercing the Curtain: CORONA and the Revolution in Intelligence. It will offer academic researchers, the media, and students of intelligence an opportunity to learn about the early US satellite reconnaissance programs and their role in national security policymaking. The program will include a film on the origins and progress of the CORONA program and panel discussions on ``Development of the First Satellite Reconnaissance System,'' ``Exploiting and Analyzing Satellite Imagery,'' ``The Impact of Satellite Imagery on Policy,'' ``A Revolution in Mapmaking,'' and ``How to Get Released Satellite Imagery.'' The conference will devote special attention to the role of imagery in the alleged ``missile gap'' of the early 1960s, the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, and the early US-Soviet arms control negotiations.
Participants will include: DCI Dr. John Deutch; Dr. Stephen Trachtenberg, president of George Washington University; Dr. Albert (Bud) Wheelon; Harvard professor Ernest May; Dr. Richard Garwin; General Andrew Goodpaster; Ambassador Richard Helms; the Honorable John McMahon; and Mr. Dino Brugioni.
At the conference the Center will display CORONA imagery and make available a volume of newly declassified documents, CORONA: America's First Satellite Program. For further information, please contact the Center at 703-351-2698.
Dr. J. Kenneth McDonald, after almost 14 years as Chief of the CIA History Staff, became a Senior Fellow of the Center in March and will retire at the end of the summer.
Placed in the Office of the DCI when Dr. McDonald became Chief Historian in 1981, the History Staff has expanded in size and publications during his tenure to attain new prominence both inside and outside of the CIA. In addition to producing classified and unclassified histories, the History Staff now selects records for the Center's Historical Review Group to declassify, publishes a volume of newly released documents for each Center conference, offers expert advice for Agency- wide record searches, and teaches a popular course on CIA history. Dr. McDonald's first project on retiring will be to complete a book on British naval policy in the origins of World War II.
Dr. Kay Oliver assumed the responsibilities as Chief of the History Staff and Chief Historian on 20 March 1995. She comes to the Center following a variety of assignments over more than 20 years as a CIA analyst and senior manager and after sabbaticals at George Washington University and the National War College. Her doctorate is from Indiana University in Russian history.
The History Staff has been involved in a number of outside activities:
CIA's OSS Records at the National Archives
One of the most important declassification projects of
the late 20th Century is drawing to a close. In the early
1970s a CIA team reviewed and declassified records of
CIA's predecessor organizations, the Coordinator of
Information (COI), the Office of Strategic Services
(OSS), the Strategic Services Unit (SSU), and the
Central Intelligence Group (CIG). Together these
records provide an official documentary record of US
intelligence and its operations during World War II and
the early postwar period. In the early 1980s the CIA
History Staff, at the request of DCI William Casey,
arranged for the transfer of these OSS and other records
to the National Archives and Records Administration.
To date, CIA has declassified and transferred some
3,800 cubic feet (over 8 million pages) of textual
records.
The National Archives has placed all of the OSS records, including those from COI, SSU, and CIG in Record Group 226. This same Record Group includes 1,700 cubic feet of material from the OSS Research and Analysis Branch that the State Department transferred to the Archives following OSS's disbandment in 1945. RG 226 is one of the most frequently used collections at the National Archives, and it was CIA's first grand-scale effort to declassify intelligence records for public use. A team of four former CIA and OSS officers is still working on this declassification project and hopes to finish soon. When they complete this project, NARA will hold 95 percent of the original records from the World War II period that CIA has had in its custody.
The Elusive ``Bruce-Lovett Report''
Judging by the number of presidential and congressional
commissions, panels, boards, and committees formed to
study CIA's mission and purpose, one could conclude
that the Agency is one of the most studied of all federal
agencies. The best known studies are closely identified
with their principal authors or sponsors. Hence we have
the ``Church Committee'' report (1976), the
``Schlesinger'' report (1971), and the ``Dulles-Jackson-
Correa'' report (1949). The final product of the ongoing
Presidential Commission to study the future of the
intelligence community will undoubtedly be remembered
as the ``Aspin Commission'' report.
These reports make fascinating reading as well as invaluable sources for the CIA History Staff. The Staff recently ran across a reference to another item, the so- called ``Bruce-Lovett'' report, that it would very much like to read--if we could find it! The report is mentioned in Peter Grose's recent biography Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles. According to Grose, two American elder statesmen, David Bruce and Robert Lovett, prepared a report for President Dwight Eisenhower in the fall of 1956 that criticized CIA's alleged fascination with ``kingmaking'' in the Third World and complained that a ``horde of CIA representatives'' was mounting foreign political intrigues at the expense of gathering hard intelligence on the Soviet Union.
The History Staff decided to get a copy of the report and see what the two former diplomats had really said. The first place to look was the CIA files on the President's Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities (PBCFIA). Bruce and Lovett had been charter members of this blue-ribbon panel. There was no reference to such a report. We then checked with the Eisenhower Library and National Archives, which holds the PBCFIA records, but came up emptyhanded. The Virginia Historical Society, the custodian of David Bruce's papers, did not have a copy either.
Having reached a dead end, we consulted the author of the Dulles biography, Peter Grose. Grose told us that he had not seen the report itself but had used notes made from it by historian Arthur M. Schlesinger for Robert F. Kennedy and His Times (1978). Professor Schlesinger informed us that that he had seen the report in Robert Kennedy's papers before they were deposited at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston. He had loaned Grose his notes and does not have a copy of these notes or of the report itself.
This raises an interesting question: how did a report on the CIA written for President Eisenhower in 1956 end up in the RFK papers? We think we have the answer. Robert Lovett was asked to testify before Gen. Maxwell Taylor's board of inquiry on the 1961 Bay of Pigs operation. Robert Kennedy was on that board and may have asked Lovett for a copy of the report. But we do not have the answer to another question: where is the ``Bruce-Lovett'' report? The JFK Presidential Library has searched the RFK papers without success. Surely the report will turn up some day, even if one government agency and four separate archives so far haven't been able to find it. But this episode helps to prove one of the few Iron Laws of History: the official who keeps the best records gets to tell the story.
CIA's Historical Intelligence Collection contains 23,000 volumes of books on intelligence ranging from the quite ordinary to the very rare. It also contains 350 books with 2,380 files of press clippings on intelligence subjects. Many of the press clippings are reviews of books on intelligence by some 380 authors. The Curator of the collection was integrated into the Center in 1991, but the collection itself remains part the CIA Library. The collection was started under DCI Allen Dulles's auspices in 1954. Dulles wanted the collection to be both a research resource and a collection of historically important publications on all aspects of intelligence.
Dulles's model was the law library, and it is no accident that the first curator, Walter L. Pforzheimer, was both a lawyer (he also was CIA's first legislative counsel) and a bibliophile. Pforzheimer was designated Special Assistant in 1956, but that title was changed to the more appropriate one of Curator. Under Pforzheimer's guidance the HIC expanded from 1,190 to 22,000 books by 1974, when he retired.
Pforzheimer's mandate from Dulles was to form a collection that had both breadth and depth. He accomplished his mission, and the HIC today reflects the original conception. The HIC includes books on strategic, military, and national intelligence as well as espionage, counterintelligence, and unconventional warfare, including guerrilla movements, terrorism, partisans, and special military and paramilitary forces. Authors range from Sun Tzu to William Colby and chronologically from ancient China through Elizabethan England to the Revolutionary and Civil Wars to the latest memoirs by KGB defectors and former intelligence officers.
The HIC has endured and prospered to become what is probably the finest collection of its type.
The following are CSI publications and videos and are available from the National Technical Information Service (NTIS) of the Department of Commerce. NTIS can be reached at:
NTIS also offers intelligence material on its new FEDWORLD, an electronic database that is accessible through INTERNET.
Selected Estimates on the Soviet Union, 1950-1959
NTIS Order Number: PB 93 928 112
Price: $28.50
The CIA under Harry Truman
NTIS Order Number: PB 94 928 005
Price: $28.50
The Origin and Development of the CIA in the Administration of Harry S. Truman: A Conference Report
Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 36, No. 5
NTIS Order Number: PB 94 928 013
Price: $27.00
Studies in Intelligence Index, 1955-1992
NTIS Order Number: PB 93 928 014
Price: $19.50
Molehunters: A Review of
Counterintelligence Literature,1977-1992
NTIS Order Number: PB 93 928 93 928 019
Price: $20.50
Symposium on the Cuban Missile Crisis (30-minute
video)
NTIS Order Number: PB 94 780 186
Price: $22.50
Symposium on Teaching Intelligence, A Report
NTIS Order Number: PB 94 928 008
Price: $15.50
Sherman Kent and the Board of National Estimates: Collected Essays