A HISTORY OF THE CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE BULLETIN 1951-1967

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP79T01762A001000010001-6
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: T
• Document Page Count: 95
• Document Creation Date: December 15, 2016
• Document Release Date: December 29, 2003
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: May 1, 1967
• Content Type: REPORT

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':_ -I I I DDI Historical Paper 1bX
No. OCI-1
1
1 DIRECTORATE
~ OF
~ INTELLIGENCE
~ HISTORY
1
t
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(TITLE OF PAPER)
A History of the
Central Intelligence Bulletin
(PERIOD)
1951 - 1967
DO NOT DESTROY
Controlled by -%--
: May 1967
Date
prepared 25X1A
Written by
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Table of Contents
Page
I. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
II. Origin of the Current Intelligence
Bulletin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
III. The Bulletin Under Way. . . . . . . . . 18
Early Operations. . . . . . . . . . . 18
Coverage . . . . ..: . . . . . . . . . 24'
Reproduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
Dissemination . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
Miscellany . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
IV. The Central Intelligence Bulletin . . . 35
Challenge and Plans . . . . . . . . . . 35
Operation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
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V.. Problems and Reform Efforts, 1962-64 . . 57
VI. The Bulletin in Recent Years . . . . . . 74
VII. Conclusions and Recommendations. . . . . 83
VIII. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
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A History of the Central Intelligence Bulletin
I. Introduction
The purpose of the Central (originally Current)
Intelligence Bulletin (CIB) from its inception in
1951 has been simple and straightforward--to inform
the President of the United States and high-level
U.S. Government policy-makers each day of the most
noteworthy intelligence and to provide an evalua-
tion of it. The CIB's success lies in the fact
that in over 5,000 issues. in 16 years, in an in-
creasingly competent manner, it has presented this
intelligence in a manner found useful by many of-
ficials. The CIB's major problem has been to en-
sure that it commands the attention of all those to
whom it is addressed.
Since the time of President Truman, the pro-
ducers of the Bulletin have had to accept the fact
that the process of "informing the President"
does not necessarily involve his own reading of the
publication. Nonetheless, the chief policy advisers
on the White House staff in the administrations of
Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson have
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read it, and they have briefed the President
selectively on its contents. Since 1961, the Presi-
dent personally has read the President's Daily Brief,
which is based on the Bulletin. Apart from the
Daily Brief, the Bulletin has come closer to the
summit than any other current intelligence publica-
tion, and its circulation among influential policy-
makers has been wider than that of the Daily Brief.
Since 1958, the Bulletin has been the only national-
level daily publication whose contents have been
coordinated with, and approved by, the State and De-
fense Departments and CIA.
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II. Origin of the Current Intelligence Bulletin
"After all, what one wants to
know is not what people did,
but why they did it--or rather,
why they thought they did it."
The Central Intelligence Bulletin is the lineal
descendant of the first production requested by the
President from the Central Intelligence Agency. On
22 January 1946, President Truman created the Central
Intelligence Group (CIG), to be headed by a Director
of Central Intelligence. Within a few days he asked
the CIG to furnish him with a selected summary of all
important items of intelligence coming to Washington. 1/
Thus was born the Daily Summary, which was produced
for five years until 28 February 1951, when it was
replaced by the Current Intelligence Bulletin.
The transition from the Daily Summary to the
Bulletin was not a quick and easy one, however. It
came out of the reorganization of the Agency under-
taken by Lt. General Walter Bedell Smith and William
H. Jackson, who became respectively Director (DCI)
and Deputy Director (DDCI) of Central Intelligence
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early in October 1950. In the process of this re-
organization, the Office of Current Intelligence
(OCI) was created. Some knowledge of this reorganiza-
tion is necessary to appreciate the nature of the
Bulletin.
There are many facts about the background and
emergence of OCI that can be documented, but there is
also much that must be deduced, especially concerning
the intentions of Messrs. Smith and Jackson. Their
views were heavily influenced by the considerable dis-
satisfaction within the intelligence community, in-
cluding CIA, over the organization, procedures, and
products of the Agency in the two years (1947-49)
following its establishment. One of the chief com-
plaints was that CIA was going beyond its intended
boundaries.
National Security Council Intelligence Directive
No. 3 (NSCID-3) of 13 January 1948 defined current
intelligence as "that spot information or intelligence
of all types and forms of immediate interest and
value to operating or policy staffs, which is used
by them usually without the delays incident to complete
evaluation or interpretation." It went on to say
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that "The CIA and the several agencies shall produce
and disseminate such current intelligence as may be
necessary to meet their own internal requirements
or external responsibilities." Nonetheless, the
State Department held that CIA was encroaching on
its territory by engaging in political (and sociologi-
cal) reporting. Indeed, this had been the immediate
reaction of Secretary of State Byrnes to the first
issue of the Daily Summary. 2/
Among the investigations of CIA, the most im-
portant was conducted by a committee headed by Allen
Dulles and including Matthias Correa and William H.
Jackson. In July 1949, this committee made sweep-
ing recommendations concerning CIA's internal and ex-
ternal affairs. Regarding intelligence production,
the committee's report, known as the Dulles Report,
took the position that CIA should engage only in
making coordinated estimates, in producing reports
needed by the Agency itself, and in carrying on re-
search requested by the community as a "matter of
common concern." CIA should abandon any work that
was "superfluous or competitive with the proper
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activities of departmental intelligence." The re-
port recommended that the current intelligence pub-
lications be discontinued. It made no mention of
the reporting of hostilities indications.
The National Security Council adopted the
Dulles Report's recommendations, and in effect told
CIA to put them into practice. Still, nothing
was done for over a year. Jackson, however, made
his acceptance of the position of Deputy Director
of Central Intelligence contingent on General Smith's
acceptance of the report. Soon after he took office,
as'Director of Central Intelligence, Smith told
the National Security Council that he would implement
the report (with an exception regarding the Clandes-
tine Services). Smith and Jackson were eager "to
withdraw CIA from any debatable types of functions and
programs, especially in certain fields of intelligence
research and production." 3/ It is ironic that,
starting with a bias against current intelligence,
the new Agency heads came around in a matter of weeks
to setting up an office specifically to produce it.
As one writer commented a few years later, "It is
quite evident that this development had not been
foreseen." 4/
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More than one consideration impelled Smith
and Jackson toward the decisions that were ultimately
taken, but one of the most'important was the existence
of the Daily Summary and the fact that the White House
still wanted it. The difficulty was that the Office
of Reports and Estimates (ORE), which had produced
the Summary, had been dissolved. The Director's re-
course was to give responsibility for the daily to
the new Office of National Estimates (ONE). It
is not clear whether Smith intended this to be a
permanent assignment. Nonetheless, shortly after
its establishment on 13 November 1950, ONE began to
form a daily production staff under R. Jack Smith,
who had been responsible for the daily in ORE, and
was publishing before the end of the month.
Unrelated at this time to the Daily Summary were
the Agency's activities in the field of communications
intelligence (Comint). In the ORE era, the policy-
making body in the Comint field was the Advisory Council,
while ORE's General Division, headed by
a
exploited Comint for finished intelligence
production.
Since July 1950, General Division, at the Presi-
dent's request, had produced a weekly Situation Summary
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utilizing Comint and focused on military threats to
the United States. On 1 December 1950, General Smith
converted the Advisory Council into,the Office of
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Strategic Services (OSS) under
By 13
December it seemed fairly clear that General Division
and its hostilities indications function would be
brought into OSS. 5/ Thus OSS would provide the
Director with intelligence derived from Comint and
furnish him any indications of hostile action.
The OSS leadership almost immediately perceived
that it could not satisfactorily discharge its indi-
cations function cut off from the non-Comint base
that General Division had enjoyed as a part of ORE.
As Kingman Douglass wrote in December 1951, "it was
agreed by all concerned that under existing handicaps
in the field of Comint, Comint alone provided an in-
adequate base for quick and effective-briefing of
the Director and, through him, the President and the
National Security Council." 6/ But to exploit all
sources of information a much larger staff was re-
quired than the 40 or so contemplated for OSS.
Fortunately, there was a pool of around 150 intelli-
gence analysts in the now-defunct regional divisions.
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of ORE. On 21 December, Jackson apparently approved
their transfer to OSS to assist the functions of that
office. 7/
During the balance of the month, in which the
organization of the enlarged office was mainly accom-
plished, at least on paper, the concept of its func-
tion was almost imperceptibly changing from that of
supplying chiefly indications intelligence to that
of producing current intelligence in general. In
the discussions of the planning officials, there
was now talk of current intelligence of a broad re-
gional and functional character and of "spot infor-
mation and intelligence to guide immediate operation
and policy determinations." 8/
By the turn of the year, Jackson had decided
that the Daily Summary should be transferred from
ONE to OSS, a decision aided by the fact that the
Assistant Director for National Estimates, William
Langer, was anxious to free his office of this task.
The Daily Summary had been criticized by the Dulles
Committee for reporting almost exclusively from
State Department sources. Placing the Summary in
OSS would make it possible to produce an all-source
publication.
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On 4 January 1951 Lyman Kirkpatrick, executive
assistant to the DCI, told W. Park Armstrong, head
of the State Department's intelligence branch, of
"Mr. Jackson's intentions with regard to developing
a strong Daily Intelligence Summary for the President
in place of the existing Daily Summary, which is
judged to be inadequate. Mr. Kirkpatrick explained
the present plan for developing OSS and the inclusion
in that area of a current intelligence staff." 9/
Armstrong endorsed the plan, but saw hazards in
any attempt to summarize operations, policy, or
policy developments. He recognized, however, that
such material might occasionally have to be used
to make a report understandable. He stressed that
any sensitive State Department telegrams used by CIA
should be seen by a very limited number of people.
It was to be nearly two months before the new of-
fice took over the President's daily, the intervening
time being required to get on an operating basis and
to acquire some experience in producing the kind of
items desired for the new publication.
In a meeting on 11 January of top officials,
among them Jackson and Kingman Douglass (who had be-
come Assistant Director for Special Services on
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4 January), it was decided that the name OSS should
be changed to OCI--the Office of Current'-Intelligence--
to evidence the fact that CIA had set up a special of-
fice in that field. 10/
This change did not mean, however, that OCI was
authorized to plunge headlong into all kinds of cur-
rent intelligence activity and publications, as had
ORE. Except perhaps on the hostilities indications
side, OCI was expected to deal with world events less
profoundly, less voluminously, and with more intel-
lectual modesty than ORE had. For one thing, General
Smith wrote Secretary of State Acheson on 1 February
1951 that he was taking CIA out of intelligence re-
search in the political, sociological, and cultural
fields 11/, and Jackson wrote similarly to Park
Armstrong. 12/
There was also the necessity for OCI to avoid
encroaching on ONE's sphere. The boundary between
current and estimative intelligence had been a
troublesome subject in the high-level planning talks
of December 1950. Langer felt that ONE's jurisdic-
tion did not begin with estimating future developments,
but with estimating or evaluating the current situation,
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leaving OCI in the business only of supplying "the
facts." Buti Deputy Assistant Di-
rector of OSS, insisted to Kirkpatrick that the
functions of OSS went "beyond library facilities"
and into interpretations and appreciations. 13/
With no dissent from Kirkpatrick, OCI went into
operation on this basis.
The new element that OCI brought to intelli-
gence production was the all-source concept. Never
before had an office in the U.S. Government been
organized to produce intelligence on the basis of
the full range of extant information, Comint and
collateral, classified and public.
The all-source approach was particularly
valuable for reporting hostilities indications, a
function unusually prominent around the time of
OCI's birth. The Korean War was only about six
months old, the intelligence community had been
surprised by the entrance of the Chinese Communists,
watch committees had sprung up, and there was fear
that the Korean War might be the prelude to aggres-
sive Soviet moves elsewhere in the world, including
Europe. Undoubtedly, the first task of a current
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intelligence office was to put itself in the best
position to give as much warning as possible of
threats to U.S. security.
For these reasons, the specialists who had been
brought into OSS from the regional divisions of
ORE on 21 December 1950 were considered by OCI's
leaders to have as their main task the support of
the Indications Branch which had come from General
Division. They were in fact called the Support
Branch for the first six months of OCI's existence.
This relationship also showed in the fact that the
editorial staff for the office as a whole was a
part of the Indications Branch for the same six
months.
By mid-January 1951, the Director of Central
Intelligence had given OCI two principal production
assignments--to report on hostilities indications
and to produce a daily intelligence report. It
may seem curious that only one of these assignments
is mentioned in the first official statement of the
Mission and 'Functions of the Assistant Director,
Office of Current Intelligence (AD/OCI). Issued
as CIA Regulation
on 19 January 1951, this
statement charged the Assistant Director of OCI
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"with producing an evaluated Daily Summary of cur-
rent intelligence and with providing special in-
telligence services of an all-source character."
On production, the specification of functions went
no further than to say that the Daily Summary was
to be based on "all sources" and to include
"evaluated CIA comment." Probably the reason that
the Daily Summary was the only product mentioned
was the expectation that it would carry reports of
the most important indications of Soviet hostile
intentions.
Even though not all transfers of personnel from
ORE had been completed, the new current intelligence
office (formally still OSS until 15 January 1951) went
into operation on 4 January. On that day a memorandum
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Chief of the Support Branch in
Current Intelligence Division,
announced the first of the new publications of the
future OCI and gave directions for its production,
which was to commence the next day. The publication
was called the Daily Summary of Significant Traffic
and was to contain "highly selected items of intel-
ligence" in several categories. The categories
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were identified as Soviet/Communist intentions or
capabilities, important developments within a re-
gion, and other information reflecting trends,
indications, or developments. Following a para-
phrase of the field report, each item,-was to
carry an analyst's comment on its significance.
The first issue of the new Daily Summary contained
36 items.
Getting into production on the Summary gave
OCI's analysts a chance to warm up for the major
production--the presidential daily. It was antici-
pated that the Summary, which was written in the
morning, would be a direct step in the production of
the presidential daily, which would draw on the
most important Summary items. Things never worked
out that way, however. From the beginning, the
presidential daily was written without direct refer-
ence to the Summary.
Throughout February 1951, OCI engaged in pro-
ducing dry runs of the presidential publication.
The format was unaltered throughout this period and
carried over into the official publication. Items
were prepared in gist and comment style (as in the
Summary) and were grouped under descriptive geographic
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headings, such as "Far East," "Korea," or "Western
Europe." These headings were not standardized, but
were adapted to the material presented. Sources
were cited in a general way without the use of docu-
ment numbers. A summary page preceded the individual
items, which numbered from four to nine. While
there was obviously a strong effort to use Comint to
the fullest possible extent, the all-source concept
was reflected in the considerable use of State and
CIA cables, and even some use of the press. When
the "dry run" began, the publication was called the
CIA Daily, but on 15 February 1951 its name was
changed to the Current Intelligence Bulletin.
The Current Intelligence Bulletin (CIB) made
its first official appearance on 28 February 1951,
when the Daily Summary came to an end. The inaugural
issue of the CIB contained six items, four of them
based on Comint, one on a State cable, and one
0
Foreign Broadcast Information
Service (FBIS).report. The'items informed U.S.
policy-makers that
many of General Mac-
Arthur's ideas on the Far East were being adopted;
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was trying to re-
plenish domestic lead stocks by purchases from the
United States; that the North Koreans had completed
mine-laying operations in Wonsan Bay; that Philip-
pine Foreign Secretary Romulo favored a broad and
firm Pacific defense pact; that
would oppose the Schuman Plan; and that
a Titoist movement had been uncovered in the Czech
Communist Party.
The new daily was an immediate success. A
copy was flown to President Truman (then in Florida),
who wrote to General Smith, "You have hit the jack-
pot with this, Bedell!" 14/
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III. The Bulletin Under Way
Early Operations
In the beginning, guidance on the selection of
material for the Bulletin was not set down on paper.
Work proceeded(on the general understanding that
what was wanted was the cream of information of in-
terest to the U.S. Government. Matters bearing on
U.S. security were of course the most important, but
it was recognized that many other developments were
part of the necessary informational stock of policy-
makers. In general, the Bulletin was what its name
suggested--a succinct report and comment on a variety
of important new developments.
Originally, the Bulletin was given a very
limited dissemination outside the Agency. The in-
side cover of the first issue listed the addressees
as the President, the Secretary of State, the Secre-
tary of Defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, and the three service chiefs. Further dissem-
ination as it may have existed then is not known, but
in January 1952 additional copies were being sent to
General Eisenhower (then SACEUR), the National Secu-
rit'L-,v Council, Air Force Intelligence, Army Intelligence,
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State's Comint office, and the Armed Forces Secu-
rity Agency (two copies). Altogether, total out-
side dissemination at this time was to 13 addressees.15/
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When the Bulletin was two months old, General
Smith told Kingman Douglass that it seemed to be
"exactly what was required." 16/ A favorable verdict
was also rendered on 8 June 1951 by the Advisor for
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"Within the past three
months, the Office of Current Intelligence has achieved
remarkable results. It has maintained a continuity
in current intelligence reporting throughout the re-
organization and has produced an 'all-source' pro-
duct which has received favorable comment from the
President and other.-governmental policy-makers." 17/
In a report for the Director on 11 July 1951,
Douglass commented that "The time during which OCI
has been operating is scarcely long enough to enable
us to make a definitive judgment upon its detailed
operations. The time has been sufficient, however,
I believe, for me to be able to say that the con-
cept on which it is based is sound." Revealing again
the uncertainty which the U.S. Government felt about
the outlook for peace and the consequent stress on
timely warning of trouble, Douglass explained OCI's
concept in these terms: ...in order to avoid another
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Pearl Harbor, we should see to it that the men who
make the final decisions have all the information
that your Government is able to supply them--and
that without delay." 18/
On 24 July 1951, a new Table of Organization
and new Mission Statements were approved for OCI.
In contrast to the Mission Statement of 19 January
1951, the Comint responsibilities of the Assistant
Director, Current Intelligence (AD/CI) were
emphasized and his mission was broadened and general-
ized to include the production and dissemination of
all-source current intelligence. A detailed passage
under Functions called upon the AD/OCI to "produce
current intelligence based upon facts and indica-
tions marshalled from all sources and disseminate
the same by means of a daily bulletin and such other
publications, graphic presentations, and briefings
as may be necessary or desirable for its most efficient
utilization." 19/
In its first year of publication under the new
rules, the Bulletin ran into the kind of dispute
with ONE that was foreshadowed by the position taken
by Langer in the planning talks in December 1950.
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ONE for a time had a representative on OCI's Pub-
lications Board, and he took careful note of what
he regarded as OCI's invasions of estimative ter-
ritory. This activity resulted in a long memorandum
from Langer to Douglass, detailing OCI's sins.
Douglass made a very brief response, to the effect
that ONE personnel should have better things to do
than keeping such tabulations. 20/ Eventually this
antagonism died down, as both offices got more into
the substance of their basically distinct work, and
OCI learned to avoid the use of the word "estimate."
The reorganization of OCI in July 1951 did,
however, bring about the adoption of a new system of
CIB publication review. In place of substantive re-
view and editing by one member of the Editorial
Staff, the "community review" plan was instituted.
A Publications Board was created, consisting of
Chairman, and the three regional divi-
sion chiefs (though branch chiefs sometimes sat in
their place). The Board met each afternoon to con-
sider submissions for the next day's issue. 21/
Although all Board members participated in the dis-
cussion of each proposed item, the final determination
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to publish or not was made by the Chairman. On rare
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occasions, the decision was referred to
(then Chief of the Intelligence Staff) or
to the Assistant Director.
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Editorial Staff, which had
been part of the Indications Branch, was put under
the Publications Board, and one editor was as-
signed to work closely with each of the regional
divisions. This scheme foreshadowed the Production
Assistant plan instituted in 1962. Bulletin sub-
missions were normally initiated in the branches
and were reviewed by branch and division chiefs.
The assigned editor, however, was responsible for
seeing that the items were clear and in the pre-
ferred style when they went to the Publications
Board. During the night, the watch officers and
the intelligence duty officer kept a close eye on
all incoming material bearing on the Bulletin
items. Normally, upon the receipt of important
new information, these officers did not themselves
alter items or write new ones. Instead, they called
in the originating analysts to do the work. This
general system of Bulletin production continued
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from 1951 until the CIB was made an inter-agency
coordinated publication at the beginning of 1958.
Creation of the Publications Board reduced the
possibility of the mistakes which had occasionally
marred the first weeks of the Bulletin's produc-
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In March 1951, a
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translated the term "radio rockets" as indicating
that the North Koreans had missiles. A few days
later a separate item had to be run admitting on
retranslation that radar, not missiles, was meant.
In May, a CIB issue had not even been disseminated
before it had to be corrected, but mechanical prob-
lems prevented total elimination of the mistake.
The first item in the body of the CIB said the So-
viets had proposed a Big Five meeting to prepare a
Japanese peace treaty. It was topped, however, by
a correction sheet to the effect that the Soviets
had really proposed a Big Four meeting. In addi-
tion, the Publications Board probably would not
have passed an item published in May which was ex-
clusively an account of the State Department's
policy and possible moves in the case of William
s
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Oatis, a U.S. newspaperman imprisoned by the Czechs.
This item was exactly what Park Armstrong had
warned against in January 1951.
The installation of General Eisenhower in the
Presidency in January 1953 led to the introduction
of temporary new review procedures in regard to
the Bulletin. President Truman had been a faith-
ful reader of the CIB; President Eisenhower pre-
ferred to be briefed by members of his staff. Ac-
cordingly,it was arranged that each day the Pub-
lications Board would check the items it thought
Col. Carroll (later General Goodpaster) in the
White House should bring to the attention of the
President. Col. Carroll ordinarily briefed the
President twice a week, on Wednesdays and Fridays,
and this system prevailed throughout the eight
years of President Eisenhower's administration. 22/
In 1961, however, the practice of marking special
items was abandoned.
Coverage
The subject matter of interest to Bulletin
readers was soon established and has not markedly
changed in 15 years, as may be seen from these ex-
amples published in 1951 under the leadership of Kingman
Douglass:
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Possible military coup in Greece
Speed-up in Sovietization of Poland
Size of Communist strength in Austrian police
New air equipment arriving in Korea
Yugoslav will to resist Soviet attack low
Dutch consider Soviet attack in Balkans
this year unlikely
Increased Soviet interest in Latin America
Threatened split in Western position on Germany
French to aid India in atomic pile construction
Fighting between Israeli and Syrian troops
Junta ousts Bolivian President
Europeans increasingly concerned over defense
burden.
The same subjects continued to be of interest
when Huntington D. Sheldon succeeded Kingman Douglass
as Assistant Director in July 1952. Consequently, in
the following six years, the CIB, issued Monday
through Saturday, went about its task of reporting
on similar developments and situations everywhere in
the world. Over a period of a year, nearly every
country or region was dealt:. with at some time.
To begin with, any major foreign development known
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to the general public was usually treated from
some angle in the CIB, which has often been
called a "classified newspaper." Sometimes
there was classified information to supplement
or correct the public media. On other occasions
a situation called for interpretation by OCI's
area experts. The Bulletin's forte, however,
has always been the publication of classified
information completely unknown to the public.
Prominent in this category have been facts per-
taining to the military capabilities and inten-
tions of the Communist states.
Broadly, subject coverage in the Bulletin
in its earliest years as compared with the mid-
1960s was much heavier on Eastern and WeS.tern
Europe, lighter on Latin America, very much lighter
on Africa, and about the same on the Soviet Union,
Communist China, Southeast Asia, and the Middle
East. The number of items in each issue also was
higher, often running to 11 or 13.
The Cold War and the Communist threat have
always been the major preoccupations of the Bulletin,
as they have of U.S. foreign and security policy-makers.
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The strengths, weaknesses, and political orienta-
tion of important non-Communist countries, both
neutral and pro-West, have also generally been
of interest, although considerably more space was
allotted to reporting on them in the 1950s than
in the 1960s. Weaknesses and signs of deteriora-
tion have received much more persistent coverage
than strengths and improvements. One reason is
that OCI has consciously regarded itself as a fire
alarm, having Pearl.-Harbor in mind and the indica-
tions function in its makeup. Also, subconsciously
at work has been the journalistic tendency which
equates news with disasters.
In the mid-1950s the policy was adopted of
using the Bulletin to record the major conclusions
of task forces that were set up to deal with danger-
ous situations. This policy is still in force.
Task forces have sometimes been entirely staffed
with OCI personnel; sometimes they have been
joint OCI-ONE operations, and sometimes they have
been put on an inter-agency basis. The Taiwan Strait
situation in 1955 brought about the first example
of this last practice. A Current Intelligence Group
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was set up under the Intelligence Advisory Com-
mittee (IAC--the predecessor of USIB), and an
abbreviated version of its daily report was
run as the last item in the CIB for some time.
This later became a weekly report and was then
discontinued until the Strait situation heated
up again in 1957. Similar use has been made of
the work of the task forces on the Arab-Israeli
situation (1956), Berlin (1958-61), the Cuban
missile crisis (1962), the Dominican Republic
crisis and the Indo-Pakistani War (1965), and
Vietnam (1965 to the present).
Reproduction
The all-source nature of the Bulletin re-
quired that it be reproduced "behind the barrier,"
i.e., in OCI's restricted Comint area (in Q Bldg.
until the move to Langley in 1961). In the first
year, the production job was carried out by two
men, one of them OCI's security officer. In 1952,
reproduction was taken over by Printing Services
Division, although priority and quality control
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remained with OCI and was exercised by
The Bulletin has always been produced by the
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offset process, the best adapted to rapid repro-
duction of typewritten material. In 1951 and
for some years thereafter two Addressograph-Multi-
graph machines were used. Eventually more machines
were added, and by 1961 conversion had been made
to the A. B. Dick Offset Duplicator. In 1968 there
were nine of these, used not only for the Bulletin
but for all of OCI's productions.
In 1954 the acquisition of a Robertson studio
camera made possible a photo-offset capability and
the introduction of maps and illustrations into
the Bulletin. The desire to tell as graphic a
story of the Indochina conflict as possible resulted
in the technical success of registering several colors
accurately on maps, something the equipment was not
originally designed to do. This was first accom-
plished in the CIB for 22 February 1954. Early in
1961, the old Robertson camera was replaced by a
18x22-inch Monotype, which has a larger range of
magnification and reduction. 23/
Dissemination
By mid-1954, 33 copies of the CIB were going
outside the Agency as compared to the 14 in January 1952.
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The Defense Department was taking a dozen more, the
State Department two more, the National Security
Agency (NSA) five more, and the newly-created Na-
tional Indications Center was put on the list for
one copy. 24/
A further growth of readership occurred over the
next three years, i.e., during the remainder of the
period before the .-interagency-coordinated daily was
established. In July 1957 a copy was going to the
Vice President's Aide, and new subscribers (as com-
pared with 1954) were the U.S. Information Agency
(USIA), USCIB, the Operations Coordinating Board
(OCB), and the Office of Defense Mobilization (ODM).
Defense, State, and NSA had asked for a few more
copies, and one was addressed to the Staff Director
of the President's Board of Consultants on Foreign
Intelligence Activities, Brig. General John F.
Cassidy. Outside dissemination had now reached 48. 25/
In 1957-58 OCI began cabling the CIB overseas.
For some time before that, the Air Force had been
cabling the Bulletin to CINCPAC in Honolulu, but in
1957 this function was taken over by CIA. OCI's
representatives to CINCPAC-
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resemble the domestic product, but the maps could
not be reproduced. In this period, by request,
OCI began cabling the Bulletin to the Continental
Air Defense Command (CONAD) in Colorado Springs,
and to the DDI representative I Later,
more CIA field stations asked for the CIB. 26/
Even prior to the commencement; of cable
dissemination to CIA stations, the CIB had been
sent electrically for the use of U.S. personnel at
international conferences.
In recent years, the Secretary of State and
Secretary of Defense have usually asked to have the
CIB cabled to them whenever they are out of the
country. Automatically, the CIB is made available
to the President and Vice President when they are
on tour.
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Miscellany
The gist and comment style of early Bulletin
items had the advantage of clearly separating the
field report from the interpretations or prognoses
of the analyst. This was regarded by the manage-
ment as a necessary precaution when OCI. was a young
organization. After a few years, however, confi-
dence in the staff had increased to the point where
an integrated presentation of material, weaving
field reporting together with analysis, was per-
mitted. Such items, which became frequent by 1954,
were indicated by the caption, "Comment on." This
form was particularly useful for the prompt analysis
of Soviet developments announced by the press or
radio. Comment pieces were normally of customary
length, but one ran to seven pages! This appeared
in the issue of 4 July 1957 and dealt.... with Khrush-
chev's purge of the Presidium.
So far as anyone can recall, there has been
only one instance in which the DCI himself has written
a Bulletin item. This occurred sometime in 1957,
when Mr. Dulles turned out a piece on the difficul-
ties confronting Batista in Cuba. Mr. Dulles had
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just participated in a discussion with State Depart-
ment officers at which various new ideas had been
put forth. The DCI felt that these were interest-
ing enough to be shared with the President and other
policy-makers. The Dulles piece was not typical of
Bulletin items, running over two pages in length
and being uncharacteristically speculative. 28/
Another unusual writer for the Bulletin was
the Deputy Director for Plans. In 1954, the
Clandestine Services had an interest in the rebel-
lion of Carlos Castillo Armas against the leftist
regime of Jacobo Arbenz. In Bulletin-type situa-
tions in which CIA is involved, it has usually
been felt advisable to run a careful item rather
than to draw attention by omitting coverage. ob-
viously, such items have to be coordinated thoroughly
with the Clandestine Services. In June 1954, when
the forces of Armas invaded Guatemala, word was
received in Washington in the middle of the night.
0
called to "L" Building to consult with the DDP,
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Frank Wisner. Wisner decided to write his own
item, and dictated it to his secretary. When he
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explained that OCI would have
to treat the report as an incoming cable, and
process it in the usual editorial fashion. Wisner
was not happy about this, but the item was edited
and run, and there were no repercussions. 29/
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IV. The Central Intelligence Bulletin
Challenge and Plans
The fairly smooth sailing which the CIB en-
joyed from 1951 to 1957 was disturbed by the Presi-
dent's Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence
Activities. On 18 March 1957, Brig. General John
F. Cassidy, Staff Director of the Board, sent a
Memorandum 30/ to the DCI, advising him that "As
you are no doubt aware, the President's Board has
just completed a rather comprehensive study of the
Current Intelligence activities of the Intelligence
Community..." The Board found little evidence that
CIA's statutory responsibility for the correlation
and evaluation of national intelligence, insofar
as it applied to current intelligence, was being
authoritatively discharged. It observed that there
appeared to be no current intelligence periodic pub-
lication carrying the correlated judgments of the
several elements of the intelligence community. The
Board granted that CIA's daily and weekly publica-
tions came "closest to having the stature of Com-
munity documents," but said that they had a "limited
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Community usefulness" and that their contents were
not always endorsed by the other elements of the
Intelligence Advisory Committee (IAC). Clearly
the State and Defense Departments had registered
complaints.
The Board pointed out that each IAC agency was
producing its own current intelligence independently,
and arriving at its own political, economic, scien-
tific, and technical judgments. The Board felt that
in the interests of national security, a more closely
correlated community current intelligence effort
should be developed, and General Cassidy expressed,
confidence that the DCI was doubtless acting to
effect necessary corrections.
Huntington Sheldon recommended to Mr. Dulles on
11 April that consultation with the IAC agencies on
current intelligence be systematized and that the
CIB be established as a "national current intelli-
gence publication." 31/ He did not, however, want
to create a national current intelligence board, or
establish a formal IAC review process. He believed
the required consultation could be conducted by CIA
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officers who would maintain regular contacts with
the departments. In his view, systematized con-
sultation procedures should apply for the time be-
ing to the CIB. When it became clearer how the
process would work, "a study of other current in-
telligence publications could be undertaken."
After consultation with the IAC, Mr. Dulles
replied to General Cassidy on 1 May that the IAC
members were agreed that "the CIA daily and weekly
publications are appropriate vehicles for the dis-
charge of the responsibility of the Director of
Central Intelligence for the timely production and
dissemination of current intelligence relating to
the national security." 32/ He noted that these
publications were produced primarily to meet the
needs of the President and the National Security
Council. The IAC members concurred at the same time
in the necessity for departmental current intelli-
gence publications, "recognizing the importance of
avoiding unnecessary duplication of effort." Dulles
said it had been agreed that CIA would establish
systematic consultation with the other IAC members
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and he affirmed that CIA was instituting ways and
means of ensuring that CIA officers; "in their con-
tinuous consultations" with the other intelligence
organizations, "ascertain to the extent feasible
departmental views on the selection and treatment
of items contained in CIA publications." Evidently
both the daily and weekly were meant.
The IAC decided to postpone any decision re-
garding the exact nature of the new procedures pend-
ing further study. However, anticipating the change,
a draft revision of NSCID-3 on the Coordination of
Intelligence Production was made on 30 July 1957 to
formalize CIA's role in producing current intelli-
gence to meet external requirements. (This document
was not formally issued until 13 January 1958.) The
pertinent passage reads, "Normally, the current in-
telligence produced by the CIA is produced primar-
ily to meet the needs of the President and National
Security Council; in addition it serves the common
needs of the interested Departments and Agencies
of the Government for current intelligence which
they themselves do not produce. The Departments
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and Agencies will contribute to the CIA current in-
telligence publications as practicable." 33/
In the midst of CIA.'.s period of study as to how
to produce coordinated current intelligence, some-
thing of a bombshell was exploded by Lyman Kirk-
patrick, then Inspector General, who on 25 Septem-
ber made proposals which he admitted would "rouse
strong objections and opposition." 34/ His plan in
essence was to create an inter-agency current in-
telligence unit responsible to the IAC and sup-
planting OCI. The executive agent of the IAC for
this purpose would be the DCI, and the unit's chair-
man would be a CIA employee chosen by the DCI. The
chairman would have final authority over the unit's
work.
^
Confronted with Kirkpatrick's plan,, as well as
by the earlier commitment to devise a system of-
coordination, OCI did some stock-taking and pro-
posing of its own. There are two unsigned OCI
memoranda, dated 5 and 10 October 1957, both en-
titled "Resume of the Problem," which set OCI's
objective as "To plan a new or revised daily Bul-
letin which the policy maker cannot afford not to
read." 35/ They cite "criticism of the present
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daily Bulletin" and suggest ways of meeting it.
Among the findings are these: (1) Items are
based only on material received on each publica-
tion day, creating a weakness because important
situations may be ignored for lack of a cable
"peg." Remedy: Prepare items even if no "peg"
is available. (2) There is not sufficient con-
tinuity from day to day on important situations.
Remedy: Continuity items could be provided.
(3) "The present publication is not read by top
officials. It is not established as 'must' read-
ing. At best, portions of it may be conveyed to
these officials by briefing officers." Some of
the reasons for this appeared to be that the in-
formation was already known to the official through
his own department channels; that the item did not
seem of pressing importance or that the official
did not find treatment of the problems he did regard
as pressing; that items were too detailed and too com-
plex; and that the official felt the items were not
adequately premonitory.
The memoranda considered that the problems of
the policy-maker might be met by producing at the
greatest possible speed, raising the standard of
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selectivity, making a greater effort to report on
matters known to be under policy consideration,
being concise, and combining factual information
with evaluation, stressing short-term probabilities
and possibilities. "The policy-maker wants value
judgments, not simple facts. Emphasis should be
on the premonitory aspect." The memoranda also
observed that "Sufficient IAC coordination should
be achieved to give the publication status as a
community publication, produced under the direc-
tion of the DCI."
On 17 October, Sheldon made a proposal to the
Director that involved retaining current intelli-
gence production in OCI, but providing a direct
role for the other IAC agencies. 36/ Agency re-
presentatives would meet each day in panel session
with the Assistant Director for Current Intelligence
to review a Brief, an intelligence tour d'horizon
which would be the concisest part of the daily.
The over-all publication would be renamed the Central
Intelligence Bulletin. The Brief would be supported
by backup items "treating important situations in
some depth." Sheldon's objective was to produce
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a publication "which a responsible policy-maker will
be able to ignore only at his own peril."
Sheldon's memorandum indicated that new efforts
would be made to reach this objective. Full use
would be made of all source materials, preliminary
views of the other agencies would be obtained early
each day, CIA's Office of Scientific Intelligence and
Office of Research and Reports would have a more ac-
tive role, and ONE and the DDP would be represented
on the panel. The new Bulletin would attempt to
foreshadow coming events and emerging situations,
provide perspective and continuity by publishing
status reports, and furnish greater coverage of
scientific, economic, and indications intelligence.
There was general Agency concurrence in this
plan, and OCI proceeded to turn out sample issues
of the new daily for two weeks. 37/ Dulles, having
accepted the plan himself, presented a memorandum
on it to the IAC on 3 December 1957, saying that
since the subject had been raised at the IAC meet-
ings in the spring, CIA had continued to examine
the problem of "producing current intelligence re-
lating to the national security." 38/ He noted
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that in that period, "we have seen a growing de-
mand by senior government officials to be guarded
against surprise." He felt a workable formula
had been found in the proposed Central Intelligence
Bulletin, which he wanted to launch in the near fu-
ture.
In their meetings of 18 and 27 December, the
IAC representatives agreed that CIA would be the
primary producer of the new daily. The right to
register dissent was accepted, and provision was
made for noting late items on which consultation
had not been possible. 39/ Dulles said he would
inform the NSC that he had been assured of the co-
operation of the IAC agencies in the production of
the daily. 40/ He would, however, retain final
authority over its content. Since the new publica-
tion would be based on all-source materials, Dulles
told the IAC that it would be disseminated on a
strict need-to-know basis agreed to by the IAC. 41/
The system worked out for production of the
new Bulletin (every day except Sunday) called for
an early morning selection by OCI of the material
it wanted to use, preliminary consultation by phone
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with the other agencies to get their views, draft-
ing of briefs and backup items and their dissemina-
tion to the IAC agencies by early afternoon, and
the convening of the panel, under the AD/CI or an
alternate, in the later afternoon to consider the
Daily Brief. The backup items were not to be con-
sidered by the panel, but were to be edited by
OCI's own production staff.
A dry run of the new Bulletin was conducted
on an IAC-wide basis during the week beginning
6 January 1958, and on 14 January the Central Intel-
ligence Bulletin made its formal appearance. Two
days later it was adorned with a bold new cover.
In speaking to the NSC early in January, Mr.
Dulles set his explanation of the new daily against
the background of the critical problems the United
States faced all over the world as a result of the
expanding Sino-Soviet Communist menace. 42/ He
said he had undertaken the new publication to en-
sure the highest level of timeliness and accuracy
in intelligence reporting so that it would be of
the greatest value to the policy-making branches
of the government. CIA would take the clear 7-
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responsibility for seeing that the problems requir-
ing policy decisions were pinpointed and reported
on. But CIA could not guarantee that it would be
heard. It could not go beyond its responsibilities.
If intelligence reporting went unheeded, then the
responsibility must rest elsewhere. He urged the
NSC members to give the Bulletin their personal at-
tention and see that the right people in their de-
partments were aware of it and of its nature and
purposes.
Operation
The first issue of the new Bulletin was a for-
midable-looking document. Up front was the Daily
Brief--12 items of six to eight lines each. No
headlines were provided, but the items were. grouped
by geographic areas. On somewhat longer sheets be-
hind the Brief were backup articles for eight of
the items. The backups, for the first time in the
Bulletin, carried exact sourcing by document number.
The Daily Brief items of this first issue were titled
as follows:
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Chicoms have concluded trade and tech-
nical agreements with Yemen.
Chicoms have offered $20 million eco-
nomic aid to Indonesia.
$300 million of Soviet gold was sold
in the West last year.
Top Syrian military figures are pre-
paring to take control.
f
Ghana to establish diplomatic rela-
tions with the USSR.
Election of Okinawa mayor shows dis-
satisfaction with U.S.
Sihanouk's anti-Communist outburst
motivated by alarm over local Commu-
nist boldness.
El Al will resume Israel-Johannesburg
flights.
Macmillan has set up a committee to
study "disengagement in central
Europe."
Premier Gaillard plans constitutional
reform proposals.
Venezuelan President Perez has taken
charge of the Defense Ministry.
Taking account of President Eisenhower's fond-
ness for graphics, the new Bulletin soon included
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a map of the two hemispheres with red arrows to
locate the areas covered by the items appearing
in each issue.
Given the active participation of the other
agencies and the focus of interest on the CIB as
the main current intelligence organ for the White
House, it is not surprising that dissemination
jumped after the Current Intelligence Bulletin be-
came the Central Intelligence Bulletin. In fact,
dissemination almost doubled. Most of the in-
crease, which took the total to 90 copies sent
out of CIA, was attributable to the strong de-
mand from the Department of Defense, which raised
its subscription from 24 to 54 copies. But State
Department readership went from 5 to 14, and the
Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Atomic
Energy Commission were added. Under the heading
of White House distribution, the President still
received Copy No. 1 and General Cassidy had his
copy, but a new recipient was the Special Assistant
to the President for Economic Policy, Mr. Randall. 43/
This dissemination was determined in the wake of
the IAC's agreement that the new daily would be
distributed on a strict need-to-know basis.
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The coverage of foreign events did not
basically change in the interagency-coordinated
Bulletin, but the items now came under the criti-
cal gaze of representatives from three agencies.
(The Defense Department was represented by person-
nel from each of the three services until DIA was
set up in 1961, so that, from one point of view,
five agencies processed the CIB.) Since the co-
ordination mechanism had arisen out of the objec-
tions of the State and Defense Departments to the
previous unilateral system, the representatives
from these agencies approached the process of co-
ordination with some gusto, determined to make
their mark. Rigorous criticism caused some items
to fall that would otherwise have been printed,
and forced modifications in other items. Whether
material for the CIB now had to meet "higher stan-
dards" is a matter of opinion. The argument has
often been made that coordination waters down
pungent messages until they are inoffensive to any-
body--and much less useful. Certainly there have
been numerous cases of this kind, but probably a
general judgment would require a separate investigation.
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For some time, the panel meetings were chaired
by Sheldon himself, and the State and Defense De-
partments sent fairly high-level representatives.
Meetings tended to be long and difficult, and dis-
putes were carried on by phone for hours after the
panel broke up. Sheldon recalls that he adopted
a firm line with the other agencies, inviting them
to take dissenting footnotes, as provided by the
agreement. For a while, they did this, but they
sometimes "looked silly" in cold type. 44/ On one
occasion in 1958, involving a French item, Deane
Hinton, State's representative, wrote a dissent
that ran counter to a National Intelligence Estimate
on France that had just been issued, and which
had been approved by the State Department. 45/
Eventually the State and Defense Departments
adopted a somewhat more relaxed attitude and sent
somewhat lower-level representatives to panel meet-
ings. This by no means ended all arguments, but
it did make them less frequent. The representa-
tives still came instructed by their intelligence
organizations, which had often coordinated with the
policy desks, and points at issue were still
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cleaned up after the panel. There were always
repercussions when policy toes were stepped on.
Doctrine in respect to proper material for
the CIB was, as before, imprecise, and many ar-
gued that it could not be otherwise. The deci-
sions made each day reflected many factors: know-
ledge of what policy questions were occupying the
policy-makers, the adequacy of press reporting,
and the personal makeup of the panel (since sub-
stitutions occurred for each of the agencies). A
test often applied was whether the subject matter
was likely to call for a U.S. policy decision.
Many items were also run strictly on the ground
that they conveyed information which the policy-
maker ought not to miss. This was frequently the
case in regard to political developments in non-
crisis areas.
In the new Bulletin,. as in the old, the range
of coverage was wide, including many publicly-
known events and many clandestine matters. In its
semi-annual reports for the President's Board of
Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities
(later the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory
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Board), OCI for some time after the creation of the
new Bulletin stressed its success in forecasting
developments. 46/ Among the premonitory reports
it listed in 1958-59 were:
Anti-US demonstrations in Latin America
during Nixon's trip;
Revolt in Lebanon;
The Algerian crisis and de Gaulle's rise;
Renewed Taiwan Strait crisis;
UAR-backed plots against Qasim;
Changes of regime in Burma, Pakistan,
and Sudan.
The CIB did not anticipate the Iraqi coup of 14 July
1958 or the Tibetan revolt of 1959 nor did it predict
the time and manner of Batista's fall in Cuba, al-
though it gave "ample warning" of the dictator's grow-
ing difficulties and the rising capabilities of
Castro's rebels.
In 1959, and for a couple of years thereafter,
the Berlin crisis and its diplomatic consequences--
the Geneva conference and the abortive Summit meet-
ing--caused the CIB to concentrate on Soviet-U.S.
relations, though other strong themes were the
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development of Soviet weapons systems, Chinese prob-
lems, and Sino-Soviet differences. There was a
marked rise in the volume of African reporting,
as former colonial territories gained their in-
dependence.
OCI's semi-annual report of 3 October 1958 noted
that the sources of raw material for the CIB con-
tinued to follow an established pattern. More
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patches,
came from State cables and dis-
CIA Clandestine Services reports,
FBIS publications,
press reports, and
military services.
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In October 1958, a five-station broadcast net
linking OCI simultaneously with the current intelli-
gence components in State, Army, Navy, Air Force,
and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.was installed.
This facility permitted the rapid exchange of con-
sultative comments on the drafts of CIB items.
It was provided in the arrangements for the
new Bulletin that CIA would unilaterally amend
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items or insert new ones during the night, if fresh
information made this necessary. An asterisk
would be used to indicate such change. In the
years following 1958, this practice became more
frequent than contemplated because of the greater
flow of incoming traffic and the heavier pressure
for currency in the Bulletin. Moreover, in deal-
ing with a continuing crisis situation, CIA pre-
ferred to write at the last possible moment (as
late as 0300 or 0400 hours on the date of issue),
when coordination was impossible. Asterisked items,
however, often did not set well with the State and
Defense Departments.
Late items were unavoidable in those cases when
OCI did a World Roundup of reactions to some major
development:, usually a U.S. action, and had to wait
until the wee hours to get the necessary foreign
material.,, Such Roundups have not been frequent, but
have included the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 and
the resumption of U.S. bombing of North Vietnam in
February 1966. Usually on these occasions, a Task
Force of representatives from all the geographic
areas in OCI has been assembled and has worked around
the clock.
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There have been numerous cases over the years
of the personal interest of very high-level offi-
cials in particular CIB items. In July 1962, the
sudden appointment of a completely unknown indi-
vidual as Prime Minister of Brazil required the
preparation of a late Bulletin item to give some
idea of the man's probable outlook and policies.
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?
of OCI knew nothing about the man
previously, but with the help of
of 25X1A
Biographic Register was able to come up with enough
to indicate that the new leader was not apt to be
very friendly to U.S. interests. After publica-
tion of this item the next day, a cable from the
U.S. Mission in Brasilia gave a favorable estimate
of the Prime Minister, causing Secretary of State
Rusk to complain to then CIA Director John McCone
about the CIB story. A couple of days later Mr.
Rusk apologized, after receiving a cable from the
embassy in Rio that supported the Bulletin posi-
tion. 47/
For many years it was incumbent on OCI analysts
to call a control office in State for permission to
use Limited Distribution cables in the CIB. Sometimes
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these requests sparked interest up the line in State.
25X1A In March 1961, when
cable reporting certain remarkable ideas that West
German Ambassador Kroll had about policy toward the
U.S.S.R., Charles Bohlen, then special assistant to
25X1A Secretary Rusk, called
directly to make sure
that this material would not be used in such a way
as to suggest that Kroll's ideas were those of the
Bonn government. 48/
In April 1962, R. Jack Smith of ONE succeeded
Huntington Sheldon as Assistant Director for Cur-
rent Intelligence. Major changes made in the Bulletin's
production during Smith's tenure will be dealt with
in the next two sections. Here it may be noted
merely that an important change made by. Smith in 1962
was the appointment of a group of Production Assis-
tants (PA's), two for each of the three geographic
areas into which OCI was divided. The PAS were to
exercise broad substantive control over most of the
publication's production of their areas, especially
over the Bulletin. Smith felt that Bulletin items
were often not up to standard as they came to the
review panel; he also wanted to establish a single
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peg point in the process of editing and to eliminate
multiple editing by branch, division, and sometimes
area chiefs as had been the rule previously.
The PA system, which still exists, has gener-
ally improved the quality of CIB items. It has
also inhibited, but not entirely eliminated, editing
by administrative supervisors. No one questioned
the right and obligation of the supervisors to be
satisfied substantively with the product of their
units, but Smith believed that, with the existence
of the PAs, the supervisors could stay clear of
stylistic editing. That they have not entirely done
so is no doubt partly attributable to the difficulty
of separating substance from style.
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V. Problems and Reform Efforts, 1962-64
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The 1958 reconstitution of the Bulletin had made
it a stronger publication. By 1962, its special
status as a report designed particularly for the
White House and NSC had been generally recognized.
There was no other daily intelligence product pos-
sessing the character of national intelligence, car-
rying Comint as well as collateral, and having the
blessing of the chief components of the intelli-
gence community.
There was a shadow over the Bulletin nonethe-
less, and it took the form of the new security classi-
fications-for specially sensitive materials. The
existence and products of sophisticated new techno-
logical means of intelligence collection could be
revealed to only a few on a need-to-know basis.
Those with proper clearances were a much more re-
stricted group than the recipients of the Bulletin,
whose ranks had been constantly growing. The con-
sequence was that, increasingly in the years after
1958, the most sensitive intelligence--which was
often the most useful--was barred from the community's
top coordinated publication, and had to be conveyed
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to high-level officials by means of briefings and
occasional ad hoc reports.
In his first few months in the White House,
President John F. Kennedy was a reader of the Bul-
letin. In fact, he and McGeorge Bundy got on the
t
phone together one time to talk to
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Latin American Division Chief, about a Cuban item. 49/
Kennedy's interest, however, evaporated after the
Bay of Pigs fiasco in April 1961. In an effort to
re-establish communications with the President on
intelligence matters, Huntington Sheldon and Major
General Chester Clifton, the President's senior mil-
itary aide, agreed on a new publication to be tailored
specifically to Kennedy's requirements and to in-
corporate the ultra-sensitive intelligence which the
Bulletin could not use. With Richard Lehman of the
OCI staff as the first writer, Sheldon began produc-
ing the President's Intelligence Checklist in June
1961
The introduction of the Checklist, however, was
not a satisfactory solution to the classification
problem because, while the Bulletin had too broad a
dissemination, the Checklist did not go to the 15 to
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25 principal presidential advisors who had a need
to know. Moreover, these advisors presumably needed
more detail than the Checklist provided.
In July 1962, a few months after he succeeded
Huntington Sheldon as Assistant Director for Current
Intelligence, R. Jack Smith suggested to the DDI,
Ray S. Cline, that it was time to overhaul OCI's
publications to meet the problems of classification
limitation, over-dissemination, and diffused effort, 50/
He argued that by trying to carry out the secondary
mission assigned to the Agency by NSCID-3--that of
furnishing to the other IAC agencies current intelli-
gence they themselves did not produce--OCI was blunt-
ing its primary mission of serving the White House
and NSC. Smith proposed a new all-source Daily
Bulletin with dissemination restricted to 15 to 25
top officials outside CIA. He admitted that in many
ways it might duplicate the President's Checklist, but
he felt both products were needed.
The dissemination problem is indicated in the
fact that by 1963 the external distribution of the CIB
had soared to 187 hard copies. Nearly all of the in-
crement of 97 copies over 1958 was accounted: for by
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increased distribution in the Defense Department,
although the White House staff itself was taking 13
more copies than before, and the Treasury Department,
Director of the Budget, and the National Aeronautics
and Space Agency had been added as recipients. In
addition to the hard copies, the Agency was sending
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CIA stations abroad, while
DIA was cabling it to 35 overseas military commands,
which probably disseminated it further to, various sub-
commands. 51/
Another problem--outside competition--was also
rising. The Defense Intelligence Agency, created in
1961, had led off its effort to produce unified mili-
tary intelligence by launching a DIA Intelligence Sum-
mary. While the Summary ran under the banner of "de-
partmental" intelligence, it did not confine itself to
military intelligence. Its coverage was broad and very
similar to that of the CIB. Its dissemination was greater
than that of the CIB, and it took deliberate aim at
the highest level audience, including the White House
and NSC.
A request by CIA Director McCone that OCI review
the distribution of the CIB to see whether it,-could
be reduced gave Jack Smith an opportunity to deal with
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the whole spectrum of current intelligence problems,
52/ In a memorandum of 18 January 1963, Smith took
the position that a reduced distribution of the CIA
Bulletin would not confine readership to an inner-
circle because DIA "insists with some jealousy on its
right to publish any sensitive material in its Summary
which we publish in the Bulletin." DIA had an advantage
in the fact that CIA had to coordinate its Bulletin with
DIA, but DIA did not have to coordinate its Summary
with CIA. Smith proposed that CIA give up coordina-
tion and that it produce a range of current intelli-
gence publications, each intended for a definite
audience. For the President, there would continue to
be the Checklist; for around 20 to 40 policy advisors,
there would be a new all-source Brief, with no wire
dissemination; for the "common needs of the interested
departments and agencies of the Government" there
would be Comint and secret dailies. These last could
be sent by wire to any ambassador, chief of station, or
military commander. They could also supply economic
and political intelligence to DIA, which could then
cease duplicating CIA's efforts. Smith looked forward
to a decision by the Defense Department to confine
DIA to departmental intelligence, automatically making
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the Summary more specialized than it then was..
In the same memorandum, Smith went into more
detail about the difficulties with DIA: "DIA will
agree only with great reluctance to the publication,
of a military item before it is able to publish on
the same subject itself. This is especially true
of anything dealing with advanced weaponry." More-
over, DIA's insistence on the right to reproduce
anything appearing in the Bulletin threatened a cut-
off by State of certain sensitive information. DD/P
was also exhibiting an unwillingness to clear informa-
tion that would be used by DIA.
The Director outlined some of these difficulties
in a meeting with Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell
Gilpatric on 24 January 1963. 53/ He pointed out that
the Summary was duplicative, and that DIA's insistence
on equal publishing rights blocked CIA's plans to give
the President and his advisors privileged coverage of
sensitive matters. He made clear that the need for
CIA to coordinate its Bulletin items meant that sensi-
tive materials had to be circulated to the working
level in the USIB agencies. He expressed the view
that the best solution was to charge CIA explicitly
and exclusively with the production of current intelligence
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on sensitive matters of national importance, and to
charge DIA with the production of only such additional
military intelligence as it required.
Events took a different turn on 27 February 1963
when Director McCone suggested, and Mr. Gilpatric agreed,
that representatives of their agencies should explore
the possibility of wholly or partly combining the dailies
of CIA and DIA. Ray Cline, DDI, and Lyman Kirkpatrick,
Executive Director, were designated to represent CIA,
and Lt. General Joseph Carroll, Director of DIA, and
Solis Horwitz, Deputy Secretary of Defense, to represent
the Pentagon. 54/
The President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory
Board, informed of this examination, took a keen
interest "in view of the great importance which the
Board attaches to the continuing need for adequate and
timely reporting of current intelligence appraisals to
meet the requirements of the President, the Secretaries
of State and Defense, the members of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff, and other key civilian and military officials
having policy-recommending and command responsibilities." 55/
The four-man group made its report to the DCI and
the Deputy Secretary of Defense on 6 June 1963. 56/
It found that a merger of the CIB and the DIA Summary
would be impractical because of the different purposes
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of the publications and the different working methods
used in producing them. The two publications were
distinct, and each was needed. In the view of the
group, the CIB's role was that of a "national in-
telligence daily," serving the needs of the Presi-
dent and other senior policy-makers of the govern-
ment. It was adjudged to be "well suited to its
role" and it was noted that it represented "as much
as practicable" the coordinated views of the intel-
ligence community. The CIB should, in fact, be
renamed the National Intelligence Bulletin. "The
Defense Intelligence Summary, on the other hand,
is designed and produced as a departmental publica-
tion-primarily to satisfy the needs of the Defense
Department, the Joint Chiefs, and the unified and
specified commands." The report stated that "in
general the DIA will not cover an item outside the
military/defense area if it is being treated in the
CIB."
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The group found that though DIA was "quite will-
ing" to restrict dissemination of its daily to the
Defense Department, such a restriction should not--
and probably could not--be strictly enforced. The
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group, however, expressed the view that the present
broad electrical dissemination of the two dailies
in Washington and abroad had "evolved without
the benefit of coordinated planning or rationale.
As a result, intelligence designed for high level
consumers in Washington and derived from sensitive
sources appears to be being made available--counter
to the President's wishes--to lower level consumers
in Washington and abroad who have no absolute need-
to-know." The four suggested that this subject be
further examined by USIB, and that meanwhile CIA
and DIA work out a coordinated plan for electrical
dissemination to the field with the aim of reducing
duplication and of ensuring that all senior U.S.
representatives abroad were adequately served.
On 14 August Cline reported to USIB on this agree-
ment on the roles of CIA and DIA in daily current in-
telligence production. He spoke of the serious
problems resulting from the increasingly broad dis-
semination of sensitive intelligence, and suggested
that a CIA/State/DIA ad hoc committee study this ques-
tion. State felt such a committee should also study
the conceptual problems involved in producing current
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national intelligence as compared with current de-
partmental intelligence. USIB approved both sug-
gestions.
The ad hoc Committee, consisting of Jack Smith
for CIA, Thomas Hughes, head of State's Bureau of
I
Intelligence and Research (INR) , and
0
Director of DIA's Current Intelligence and In-
dications Center (CIIC), met on 5 September 1963 "and
discussed mutual problems relating to the Central
Intelligence Bulletin." 57/ State, having objected
to renaming the CIB the National Intelligence Bulletin,
had won DIA over to its side. Their argument was
that publication procedures did not permit "full co-
ordination" among the IAC agencies; therefore the
product was not "national intelligence" in the strict
sense of the word. Smith said CIA would not propose
a name change. It was agreed that a detailed ex-
amination ought to be made to ascertain whether the
distribution of the CIB and the DIA Summary was con-
sistent with the security required by sensitive in-
formation. Smith broached the suggestion of a new,
high-level Supplement to the CIB to enable the
Agency to furnish the White House with an all-source
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publication.
and Hughes were interested in
this idea, but saw problems in it. It was decided
to establish a working group to examine all the
questions discussed, and to present suggested solu-
tions to them.
The working group (Richard Lehman, CIA; Edward
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DIA) held a number of
meetings from 10 September to 20 November 1963. In
Lehman's view, CIA had three major objectives:
"a. To force general recognition that the CIB is
the proper vehicle for current intelligence at the
national level. b. To open the CIB to sensitive
materials not now usable in it in order to regular-
ize the briefing of NSC-level consumers on these
materials. C. To eliminate the present broadside
dissemination of certain other sensitive materials
both by CIA and DIA." 58/ CIA was only partially
successful in achieving its goals. It did gain
agreement on a new "legend" for the CIB (the legend
being the paragraphs inside the front cover that ex-
plain the publication's purpose). Instead of stating
simply that CIB was produced by the DCI in consulta-
tion with other USIB agencies, the legend would now
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read that the CIB was produced by the DCI "to meet
his responsibilities for providing current intelli-
gence bearing on issues of national security to the
President, the National Security Council, and other
senior government officials." DIA had already
changed the legend of its Summary to indicate its
departmental nature. Practically, however, nothing
would be changed by reworded legends. CIA wanted
the theory reflected in practice; it wanted a dis-
tinct differentiation between the material it sent
to the White House and the publication sent by DIA.
The main debate in the working group was over
CIA's plan for a new all-source Supplement to the
Bulletin to be sent to a very restricted reader-
ship. CIA proposed to use in this Supplement sensi-
tive material not allowed in the CIB. It also pro-
posed to use in the new publication--and to stop
using in the regular CIB and DIA Summary--sensitive
traffic from State (the Limit Distribution cables)
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certain diplomatic reports
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State fully supported CIA's plan, but DIA
adamantly opposed it, arguing that it would re-
sult in an "unacceptably large" loss of DIA
Summary content and that the present system did
not require change. 60/ Lehman commented that
"DIA is unable to state its real objection to CIA's
proposals, i.e., that they reduce its ability to
compete with CIA in the current intelligence field." 61/
In the end, rather than offer the USIB a split report,
CIA found a way to drop its plan for a CIB Supplement.
In respect to CIA's third objective in the
talks--that of curtailing dissemination of national
security intelligence--some progress was made. The
agreed version of the working group report, sub-
mitted on 14 February 1964, noted that both the CIB
and DIA Summary were designed for a high-level read-
ership, and, at the same time, were used as a daily
current intelligence service by officials at a lower
level, both in Washington and to a much greater ex-
tent in the field. The group recognized that the
foreign missions of the U.S. national security agencies
needed such a service, but believed that certain
materials "may be too sensitive for regular dissemination
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to all readers currently carried on CIB and DIS
dissemination lists." 62/
To remedy the situation, the working group
agreed that distribution of both the CIB and DIA
Summary should be limited to national security
policy-makers and other officials who had a regular
need-to-know. CIA and DIA would try to reduce hard
copy distribution of their dailies by 20% to 40%.
By March 1965, external dissemination of the CIB had
been cut 31% to a figure of 129, with most of the
reduction at the expense of recipients in the Penta-
gon. 63/ In respect to cable dissemination of the
dailies, it was agreed that
material would not ordi-
The working group conducted a full review of
the interagency procedures used in producing the
Bulletin, clarified some of them, and tried to im-
prove others. For circulation to all personnel of
the three agencies concerned with the Bulletin,
CIA prepared papers defining the criteria used by
the panel chairman in selecting CIB items, in de-
ciding whether to run a late item, and in handling
and
narily be used.
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dissents. Suggestions were made to speed up CIA's
dissemination of draft items to permit greater
consideration of them, and CIA agreed to re-examine
ways of reporting potentially dangerous situations
where a definite development was lacking.
The report of the working group, as transmitted
by its parent ad hoc committee, was "noted" by the
USIB on 10 March 1964.
What enabled CIA to give up its proposed CIB
Supplement was permissipn to expand distribution of
the President's Intelligence Checklist which was
renamed the President's Daily grief in 1964.64/
President Kennedy had wanted this very tightly held
to only three recipients. In January 1964, however,
the White House agreed that eight more recipients
could be added. This was an improvement over the
previous state of affairs, but it was not CIA's
preferred solution to the problem of furnishing all-
source intelligence to the top policy-makers.
For one thing, CIA would rather have restricted
the Checklist to the one person for whom it was de-
signed. For another, to the extent that the circle
of Checklist readers was enlarged, the status of the
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Bulletin as the high-level daily on national secu-
rity affairs was undermined. From its beginning
in 1961, the Checklist had had this effect; now it
was having more.
It is difficult to gauge accurately the impact
of the Checklist on the Bulletin because of insuf-
ficient knowledge of the reading habits of top
echelon officials. Certainly some of the damage to
the CIB was purely psychological, arising from the
knowledgey.thatthere was a publication meant especially
for the Chief Executive and carrying material which
the CIB, because of its wide distribution, could not
use. Ipso facto, the CIB was the No. 2 publication.
On the other hand, the utilization of the CIB
was not necessarily diminished. The President him-
self had not been a regular reader of the CIB since
the Truman days, a fact belatedly accepted as normal
in July 1965, when the No. 1 copy began to be sent
to the Vice President instead of the President. Never-
theless, the status of the Bulletin as a document im-
portant to the White House was embarrassingly under-
lined by a photograph in the New York Times Magazine
of 28 March 1965, showing President Johnson walking
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in the White House grounds with McGeorge Bundy, who
was holding a copy of the Bulletin with the codeword
easily legible. Normally, like President Eisenhower,
President Johnson has received selections from the
CIB chosen by his staff.
Whether the Secretary of Defense, two of his
principal aides, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff switched to reading the PDB in preference to
the Bulletin is not known,;' they have remained re-
cipients of both. Secretary of State Rusk continues
to have an assistant underline the CIB for him. A
large group of highly influential policy-makers have
continued to receive the Bulletin but not the PDB.
As one of them--Averell Harriman--remarked, "The
way I keep up on things is by reading the CIB every
day." 65/
Harriman returned to Washington from an official
tour of eight Latin American countries in the summer
of 1965 appalled at the lack of current information
on the part of U.S. Embassy personnel, and suggested
that they should be able to read the CIB. Accordingly,
CIA added these capitals to the Bulletin cable dissem-
ination list. 66/
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VI. The Bulletin in Recent Years
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While CIA was trying from 1962 to 1964 to break
through with a realignment of publications, a trans-
formation of the Bulletin was gradually taking'-place.
The brief and backup format of 1958 had become pro-
gressively less popular in the 1960s. Robert Amory,
DDI until 1962, had felt that the backups were not
read, although other agencies charged that CIA oc-
casionally used them to convey views which it had
not been able to get the panel to accept for the
Brief. 67/ Beyond these factors, there was the
judgment of the OCI leadership that a single, unified
presentation was best. From 1962 backup items became
rarer and rarer, until finally on 14 December 1964
the CIB was issued without the opening caption "Daily
Brief," meaning that the old format had been aban-
doned in practice as well as principle.
Other Bulletin changes brought about by Jack Smith
were the printing of only one item to a page and the
adoption of a short, one-sentence first paragraph
for each item to carry the central message of the
piece. Previously, the lead paragraph had often
only "set the stage," with the main intelligence
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story coming later. The use of maps and illustra-
tions also increased greatly after 1962.
In recent years, dissents have only rarely
appeared in the Bulletin. On two occasions in 1964,
the State Department took footnotes disagreeing
with CIA's assessment of the increasing Communist
influence in the Goulart government in Brazil. A
spectacular case arose in June 1965, following a
week's effort by the State Department to squash any
reporting suggesting that the U.S.-Canadian auto
agreement might be used by the Europeans as an ex-
cuse to conclude their own preferential arrange-
ments. A three-sentence warning note in the CIB
was followed by a seven-sentence State footnote
belittling the impact of the auto agreement. Policy
considerations were evidently governing State intel-
ligence. Since it was decreed that the note and foot-
note must fit onto one page, it was necessary to
put the footnote into ".script" type. A search of
some hours around town produced the man who knew
where the proper type-face was,kept! Such are the
practical difficulties that flow from interagency
disputes. 68/
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A major reason for the infrequency of dissents
is the extraordinary pains taken by OCI to bring
about agreement and, if necessary, to educate other
agencies to the facts. For example,
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Venezuelan analyst, was faced in April 1967 with
coordinating an item with his INR counterpart. The
INR man, young and inexperienced in Latin American
affairs, doubted that there had been increased guer-
rilla activity in Venezuela, or that it represented
much of a problem for the Caracas government. It
required three days of argument and explanation be-
fore INR could be brought around to agreeing to a
proposed text. 69/ Coordination problems such as
this materially hamper efforts to speed up the pro-
duction process and make Bulletin items more timely.
On 17 January 1966, E. Drexel Godfrey, formerly
chief of OCI's Western Area, succeeded Jack Smith
as Assistant Director, Current Intelligence. (In
conformity with new Agency practice, his title soon
afterwards was changed to Director, Current Intelli-
gence.) Shortly after Godfrey's accession, the high
speed facsimile system, known as Long Distance Xero-
graphy (LDX), went into operation, linking the CIA
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Operations Center with the White House Situation
Room, the National Military Command Center, and
the State Department Operations Center. Later
in the year the National Security Agency was added
to the network. This system permits the immediate
transmission of document images and their repro-
duction. Since 1966, all draft briefs for the
Bulletin have been sent to the State and Defense
Departments through this system.
The OCI contribution to the Annual Report to
the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board
in 1965 had stated that "The chief function of CIA's
Office of Current Intelligence (OCI) continued to be
the writing and publication of the Central Intelli-
gence Bulletin. The Bulletin continues to be the gov-
ernment's formal national-level current intelligence
publication." 70/ The corresponding report for 1966,
however, led off with facts about the PDB, which was
described as "the primary publication of the Office
of Current Intelligence." Comment on the CIB was
confined to this statement: "The national-level,
all-source, current intelligence daily, the Central
Intelligence Bulletin, continues to be produced under
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the chairmanship of an OCI senior officer." 71/
The impression conveyed by the 1966 report could
easily be that the OCI front office had suddenly
lost interest in the Bulletin. Such was not Mr.
Godfrey's attitude, however. He planned, in fact,
to elevate the Bulletin's status over a period of
time along the lines attempted by Smith in 1963.
On 14 November 1966 the Bulletin appeared with
a new cover, uniform in design with all issuances
of the Directorates of Intelligence and of Science
and Technology. One feature of the cover is a
colored stripe (red) in the upper right-hand corner
indicating that the publication contains Comint
material and that it must be held in Comint channels.
In the past few years, the range of subject
matter of the Bulletin has been typical of former
times, but the depth of coverage has decreased,
except on the subjects of the greatest official in-
terest: Crises of some length--like those in
Indonesia, Nigeria, the Dominican Republic, Rhodesia,
and in Communist China over the cultural revolution--
have received very close attention. The treatment
of the Soviet Union has been limited by the amount
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of worthwhile field reporting. Soviet coverage is
strongest on the side of military and space devel-
opments, where quite good source material is avail-
able. The main story for the :Bulletin, however,
has been Vietnam. Since January 1965, an abbreviated
version of the daily Vietnam Situation Report has
been carried with very few interruptions as the
first item in each Bulletin.
External distribution of the CIB has crawled
up again since the cutback of 1965, and in April
1967 it stood at 160 hard copies. Eight of!I...these
went to,Special Assistants to the President, 4 more
to special presidential advisors, 1 to the Vice
President, 18 to the State Department (the Secretary,
Undersecretaries, Assistant Secretaries, and other
top officials),.8 to the National Security Council,
and 91 to the Defense Department. Of the last,
about one-third went to policy and operational per-
sonnel, including the Secretary of Defense, the Deputy
Secretary and Assistant Secretaries, the Secretaries
of_the Air Force and Navy, the Joint Chiefs, and the
top generals and admirals. Other policy-making
recipients of at least one copy included the Treasury
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Department (the Secretary having a personal copy),
the Bureau of the Budget, and the Directors of USIA,
NASA, the AEC, and the FBI. 72/ In addition, CIA
cabled a sanitized version of the CIB
CIA station chiefs, while the Defense Department
cabled it to 47 military 'commands.
The picture of readership is not as encouraging
as the dissemination lists would suggest. In an
investigation of readership in the State Department
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Projects, OCI, found that the Country Directors were
apt not to read the Bulletin at all, and the Assistant
Secretaries were not "prime consumers," although-. they
Assistant for Special
were briefed from the Bulletin by INR.
then Deputy
D
ported that "the CIB is more useful at the Under-
secretary/Secretary level." 73/
The opinion has been expressed both by agency and
non-Agency personnel that one reason for reader-
ship difficulties is that the CIB provides too thin
an intelligence diet--i.e., that its coverage is
too limited. In one of several critiques of the
Bulletin undertaken by OCI,
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Assistant Director, OCI, noted in mid-1964 the ab-
sence of reporting on numerous subjects he thought
recipients would look for. 74/ The "must" items
are usually evident to all, and increasingly the
Bulletin has consisted mostly of them. What beyond
them should be reported, if anything, is a matter
of continuing debate and varying practice.
Richard Lehman, in his Criteria for Selection of
CIB Items, circulated in 1964 to all USIB personnel
involved with the Bulletin, noted that the yardstick
that items have a relation to "national security" in-
terests was so broad as to give "virtually no guid-
ance to the selector." And the criterion that items
"must be important enough to be worth the attention
of members of the National Security Council" was
"exceptionally difficult to define further because
of the large element of subjective judgment built
into it." 75/ What happens in practice is that some
supervisors in OCI operate on the theory that any
major event in a country under their jurisdiction should
be dealt with, while others take a far more selec-
tive approach. The tide has been with the latter
group.
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The question of content will certainly be
thoroughly reviewed in connection with OCI's plans
for the future. Mr. Godfrey intends to pick up
the cause of several years ago and try to get
the Bulletin upgraded to a truly all-source pub-
lication. It would then be possible to issue two
other versions of the Bulletin--Comint and Secret.
The contents of each of these versions, while
basically the same, could be tailored to each of
three important audiences, the President and his
closest advisors, other top-level policy-makers, and
the intelligence community at large.
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VII. Conclusions and Recommendations
The Central Intelligence Bulletin has been ap-
pearing each day, except Sundays and holidays, for
over 16 years. It has long since become a promi-
nent feature of the Washington intelligence.scene.
It has never lost sight of U.S. security interests
as its main concern, and, while not infallible, it
has usually given warning of crises and other im-
portant events. Still, it has not achieved a wholly
satisfactory relationship with some of its subscrib-
ers. The fault may be theirs, or it may lie in the
publication. If the latter, the defect is most
likely one of content.
The question of who should be the Bulletin's
main target is still a cardinal one. If the Presi-
dent's Daily Brief is to be continued regardless
of any upgrading of the Bulletin, it should not be
necessary to shape the CIB to fit the needs of the
President and a handful of his top advisors. The
Bulletin could then be aimed at all the other high-
level policy-makers, including the generalist, who
has to get into the nuts and bolts of almost any
problem from time to time and who has to keep up
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to a degree with everything, as well as the high-
level specialist, who not only has his particular
assignment, but wants to know the highlights of
developments outside his specialty.
Since the first objective of the Bulletin has
been to try to assist the high-level policy-maker;,
in dealing with his respective problems, OCI's
chief effort has not been to bring this policy-
maker the "news" as it is received from various
field sources. (The policy-maker will usually have
this news as soon as CIA through his own copy of
the pertinent report or cable.) Rather, the Bul-
letin has stressed the evaluation of the news.
Evaluation was made a key feature of Bulletin re-
porting from the start, since most reports from the
field raise questions that have to be answered be-
fore there is real guidance for policy-making. Are
the facts as alleged in the report? How signifi-
cant is the development? To what is it likely to
lead? One of the chief functions of CIA, and one
it is particularly well qualified to carry out, is
to make an independent judgment on such questions.
The record of the CIB in making an analytical con-
tribution is generally good. The fact that some
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Bulletin addressees are not as interested in the
publication as they might be, however, suggests
that OCI should lose no opportunity to exploit the
specialized knowledge and experience of its staff
and take even more care to identify and deal
forthrightly with the primary intelligence ques-
tions of interest to the policy-maker. More might
also be done with original analysis--putting pieces
together to get a new picture, instead of waiting
to comment on the picture as reported by foreign
posts.
Apart from assisting the policy-maker with
his special concerns, the CIB has had the second
function of briefing him on the rest of the world
scene. The generalist especially wants a broad
briefing; the specialist needs it to understand
the context of world developments within which his
own field of responsibility exists. The Bulletin
has attempted to present each item as a single re-
port, to be read in its entirety in a short time.
Even so, what OCI has regarded as the maximum
number of about twelve items in each Bulletin has
seldom been reached. As a world report, the CIB
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has tried to be responsive to the requirements
of its consumers, but it has been difficult for
its producers to learn these requirements. It
may also be that not enough attention has been
given to the matter. A not unreasonable assump-
tion is that the reader expects to find in the
Bulletin important intelligence of three kinds--
anything directly affecting U.S. security inter-
ests, things affecting other major U.S. interests,
and developments he should know about even if U.S.
interests are not directly involved. He may
wonder whether there are only five or six items a
day worth reporting under these categories.
As it comes to its subscribers, the CIB is a
highly refined product prepared by well-trained
professionals. The screening, writing, and re-
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OCI analysts,
numerous branch, division, and area chiefs, pro-
duction assistants, the panel chairman, and the
representatives of the State and Defense Depart-
ments, who are backed up by the analysts of their
own organizations. Other offices and units of
CIA--OER, OSR, and OSI--are also regular participants.
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Without an organization of this magnitude, a pub-
lication having the informed treatment of the
Bulletin would not be possible.
Granting that the recipient is getting a good
product as far as it goes, it may be questioned
whether the Bulletin goes far enough. Are the
readers' interests really as narrow as the Bul-
letin's on any given day of issue? Could it be
that the Bulletin, intent on being a high-level
publication, has been too selective? Could it do
something to correct this tendency by a more con-
scious referral to U.S. interests in the several
areas of the world? Perhaps succinct statements
of these interests could be set down as guides to
the selection of subject matter. Such statements
would also be. useful in determining what "status
report" items should be written--even in the ab-
sence of current development "pegs" on which to
hang them.
Naturally, the CIB should not duplicate other
material its readers have seen, but there is reason
to believe that the major stories in the New York
Times and the Washington Post constitute most of
the common reading of all the policy-makers. It
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is probable that the high-level specialist sees
little official traffic outside his area, while
the generalist is either plunged deep in a partic-
ular problem or is reading only the cream of the
take from all sources. Thus, prominent subjects
in the press need not be ruled out of court for
Bulletin treatment. OCI has undoubtedly been
correct in its willingness to deal with such sub-
jects when there is something important to add
from classified traffic, when erroneous press re-
ports need.to be corrected, or when the analyst can
throw additional valuable light on a matter.
Speed of processing Bulletin items has been
improving over the years and will remain a very
important consideration. If investigation should
prove that recipients of the CIB would like to get
preliminary draft items as soon as they can be
transmitted by ticker, it should be possible to
make such an arrangement. Some recipients, however,
presumably would prefer to see all proposed drafts
at the same time, and they, too, could be accom-
modated.
Style is a much less important consideration
than content, assuming that the CIB will always be
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written in good, clear English. The present terse,
business-like style causes unhappiness to various
individuals, and the CIB might make better read-
ing if it were more gracefully written. The com-
munity review procedure, however, seems inevitably
to make economy of language the highest stylistic
goal. Still, there is nothing to bar testing senti-
ment on this issue.
Overall, there is little doubt that the CIB
has played a useful role in the intelligence support
for policy-making, and present indications are that
it will continue to do.so. It must be borne in
mind, however, that the main object of OCI is get
the best possible current intelligence in the fast-
est way to the people who need it. The precise form
of the vehicle through which this is done is not
sacrosanct. There is no need to preserve any par-
ticular intelligence publication such as the Central
Intelligence Bulletin just because it has had a
long and honored life. New and better forms and
methods of intelligence dissemination will surely
be developed and should be sought actively.
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